In the sixth episode of the Quick Drop Podcast, Jonathan Hobson invites Joerg for an interview, to discuss his background, the main tasks of Hampel Soft and the upcoming conferences.
The Interview
Jonathan started off by asking how Hampel Soft came to be. Joerg explained his road to finding and utilising LabVIEW and then founding his own company in the field, to be able to work freely on his own projects.
Two years ago, Manu joined our team, and so development could finally be done in a team, which was a big leap forward.
Joerg then went on to explain the basic workings and motivations of HSE: We help with making teams function harmoniously at the customer’s companies. In order to achieve this it is vital to develop meaningful relationships, usually by working on-site as much as possible, and thus we are able to build mutual trust with our long-time customers. This is quintessential to our philosophy.
Joerg explained our tools and methods for efficient development and how we teach these to our customer base. We strive to use Continuous Integration and unit tests, to build as early and often as possible, to perfect our code.
We also develop our own tools to make LabVIEW better and more straightforward for customers. In order to achieve this, we document these as much as possible. One of our recent additions are the Release Automation Tools for LabVIEW.
Joerg and Jonathan then went on to discuss the two upcoming conferences, NIWeek and GDevCon.
NIWeek 2019
One of the most important events (after GDevCon of course 🙂 ) in the LabVIEW community is taking place next week! NIWeek, an annual conference in Austin, Texas is filled with presentations, discussions, workshops, demonstrations and of course our LabVIEW friends from all around the world. Like last year at GDevCon, Joerg will be presenting his presentation: “How to Blow your LabVIEW Project in Surprisingly Few Steps” (Wednesday, May 21, 1:15 PM – 2:15 PM, Ballroom F). Packed with information about software engineering best practices. Don’t miss it! Another fun addition to the agenda is the Challenge of Champions (Tuesday, May 21, 6:30–7:00 p.m., Exhibit Hall Stage). Here, Joerg and his fellow champions Fabiola De La Cueva, Matthias Baudot and James McNally will be pitted against veteran NI Devs. Who will win? We are excited to find out! 🙂
In addition, our LabVIEW User Group, the WUELUG has been nominated for an Excellence Award. This is an awesome achievement in itself after only one year, and we very much hope that all our invested effort merits this award. We’ll find about this next week too!
GDevCon
This August, we will be active at GDevCon, just like last year. But even more so!
The GDevCon Alliance wants to provide the opportunity for actual, hands-on learning. That’s why they are tipping their toes into the workshop waters: In addition to the two days of presentations, Delacor (Fabiola De La Cueva), SSDC (Steve Watts) and HSE (Joerg) will be hosting a workshop together on the day before the conference! To cater to the practical way of GDevCon, it will impart hands-on knowledge about Software Engineering principles. The attendees will have the opportunity to implement a solution to an actual problem.
We are excited to try this out for the first time in this new setup. Hopefully this will pave the way for many more workshops from many other LabVIEW friends in the years to come! Feel free to contact Fab, Steve or Joerg if you need any info about the workshop or GDevCon in general!
Conclusion
Finally, Jonathan and Joerg talked about personal attitudes and the literature they used for inspiration. Joerg mentioned his favourite biographies and Steve Jobs, Richard Branson and Ricardo Semler which heavily influenced his business and management style.
This was all that was possible for this episode, but maybe later there will be a chance to demo our Continuous Integration practices further.
Thanks again Jonathan for the wonderful opportunity! Be sure to listen to the podcast:
Quick Drop Podcast
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