In order to better connect regions, NI decided to consolidate the various NIDays events into one Europe-wide conference this year. For us, this means not only meeting our customers, but also our #LabVIEWfriends from all over Europe!
The Conference
The venue this year was the spacious International Congress Center in Munich. Luckily for us, we didn’t have to travel far this time for an NI conference, it was right at our doorstep.
NIDays Europe intends to emulate the large and extremely popular American NIWeek. This lead to a change in philosophy and mindset, compared to the previous NI VIP events. NIDays was less like a meeting between friends and more like your usual industrial conferences. However, we definitely had the pleasure of meeting our #LabVIEWFriends from all over Europe. And even better, we made some new ones too!
It was obvious, that the conference is a fresh thing, some points might need a little fixing, but NIDays Europe is off to a promising start! The conference was sorted into various rooms, depending on the topic. This, however, lead to an uneven distribution of the participants. The Software track filled up quickly, and there was no opportunity for late-comers to join in. As Software was the most community-orientated track, this could have been anticipated better.
The event lasted just two days, but it was packed full with captivating and entertaining presentations. In particular, perhaps the most interesting was a keynote by Mark Gallagher. As a former F1 executive, he offered a unique insight into the world of automotive racing. He had many informative stories about leadership, teamwork and a data-driven approach to business.
Our Presentation on Open-Source and Inner-Source
As luck would have it, the cold and wet Autumn weather took its toll on Joerg and he completely lost his voice during day 1. As a result, he had to spend most of the second day trying not to engage in conversations to save his voice for his presentation (and everybody who knows him will understand how hard that must have been). Luckily, his cold decided to offer him some brief reprieve and he was able to present eventually.
Together with James McNally from Wiresmith Technologies, they showed life on stage how easy it actually is to contribute to an open-source project by forking a repo, making changes, and creating a merge request.
James and Joerg continued to explain how LabVIEW devs can benefit from and utilise tools and processes from the open-source world in their business-oriented corporate environments. In particular, they discussed governance and communication methods.
For more details, you can check out the presentation at the official site or download the slides here:
Open-Source Projects in LabVIEW
LabVIEW Community Booth
The first ever LabVIEW Community booth at an NI event, brought to life by Oli Wachno – with a tiny bit of help from our side – was probably the most successful booth of the whole event! There was an abundance of visitors at all times, playing a quick game of Pascal Heinen’s Snake on FPGA or looking at Media Mongrel’s robots programmed with LabVIEW Community Edition.
This whole thing came into being as a result of a discussion between LabVIEW Champions about community involvement at NIDays Europe 2019. National Instruments was kind enough to provide us (the community) with a booth on the expo floor. And things started moving…
Since we needed a website for registering, we set this one as a landing page from where to access several community resources.
Photo (c) National Instruments
DSH Workshops
Along with Steve Watts and Fabiola De la Cueva, Joerg was able to talk with NI executives and discuss their DSH Workshops. There will be workshops again at and around NIWeek in May in Austin, that much is sure. More news is coming soon, so stay up-to-date on their site.
The Future of NIDays Europe
The European conference is expected to stay for a while in Munich, but later on, it might move about Europe. We are enthusiastic about this new approach and curious to see what the future holds. And, of course, we will continue to be an active part of it!
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