CLA Summit 2019 in Krakow

This year the European Certified LabVIEW Architects Summit (CLA Summit) took place in the heart of Central Europe in Krakow, Poland. National Instruments’ annual event enables LabVIEW Architects to give and listen to presentations, to learn about new products and to mingle with like-minded people.

The Location

This year’s event was hosted at the AGH University of Science and Technology. Our catering was phenomenal at the event! In particular, the most memorable dinner took place in an old salt-mine just outside of Krakow. We were seated 130 metres underground and had a lot of fun discussing the various occurrences of the first day. In addition, our very first dinner was also noteworthy, we had a fantastic five course meal at a cosy restaurant, which was the perfect place to meet new LabVIEW friends and reunite with old friends.

On Day 2 the organisers invited us on a sightseeing tour, we had the opportunity to get to know the city and its attractions. The Old Centre was especially astonishing, due to it surviving WW2 intact.

The Presentations

We had the fortune to be able to listen to many interesting presentations over the three days of the conference. Some examples are:

• Tom McQuillan: A documentation tool that Tom created, and that allows to pull all sorts of information from your VIs – and even lets you write back to them!
• Stephen Loftus-Mercer: Very inspiring talk about memories and buffers in LabVIEW and what to look for when debugging for performance.
• Jeff Kodoski: It’s a pleasure overtime to listen to Jeff K talk about ideas, goals and perspectives for and with LabVIEW. Especially a feature called semantic zoom (Steve Watts even blogged about it) was very intriguing and sparked discussions afterwards.
• Cosmin Neagu: SystemLink Explanation and demonstration of SystemLink. Very interesting for managing a pool of test systems (> 3 systems). Monitor, maintenance, update, pull measurement-data, analyse, … all from one place in the cloud or in the local network.
• Rita Prather: Using Web-VIs. Very impressive presentation on the uses of Web-VIs, especially considering that we use them on a daily basis.
  Live demo: https://www.webvi.io/, more examples: https://ni.github.io/webvi-examples/.
• Maciej Kolosko: Developing Distributed Systems with LabVIEW & ZeroMQ. Impressive demo how ZeroMQ manages all the low level network stuff in a complex network system. Sadly not available for Real-Time systems.

Our Contributions

Fortunately, we had a lot of opportunities to present at the summit. Our focus this year was on our Release Automation Tools for LabVIEW.

Networking and the Future

Having obtained his Architect certification in record time, Manu was able to attend the conference alongside Joerg to their great delight. This was the first ever time that Hampel Soft was represented by the two LabVIEW Architects, and naturally there will be many more to come.

Thankfully, we were able to meet many of our friends in the LabVIEW community. Joerg had the chance to talk with his fellow LabVIEW Champions and even have a special dinner with them.

To our surprise and great pleasure GDevCon was mentioned in many various presentations. We are so happy that the first conference had such a large impact and hope this year’s event will have a similar one too! We hope to meet our friends there again!

Acknowledgements

We want to thank National Instruments for the wonderful organisation yet again! Lorenz, Martina, Kristen, and everybody else – great job! Darren Mather did a fantastic job organising the the unofficial CLA Summit Dinner Kick-off! Also, lots of thanks go to our host Piotr Maj! In addition, we would also like to thank the NI Product Owners for their insightful talks!