NI’s annual user convention, the VIP Congress in Fürstenfeldbruck near München, is the place to be for any ambitioned LabVIEW user when it comes to networking.
The VIP is the german pendant to the NI Week in Austin, Texas. While it may be a litte bit smaller, the presentations are of very high quality. And even if there’s not as much content for very advanced developers as there is at the CLA Summits, it’s still really nice to meet old friends, chat up NI staff or talk to potential new customers in a relaxed, informal atmosphere.
Business
I watched some quite interesting presentations that covered topics I’m currently involved with like Profinet (Jens Holtkötter), Software Quality (Holger Brand, Georg Mock, Oliver Wachno, Norbert Brand) and Continuous Integration (Ulf-Hendrik Hansen). Also very interesting, though not directly affecting my daily work, was Oli Wachnos take on State Actors (state machines in actor framework).
In terms of acquisition, the visit turned out to be very successful. Even though we’re fully booked far into 2017, we could add to our list of prospective projects for next year, increasing not only our budget planning reliability but also the need for LabVIEW developers in our team.
Fun
As Mr. Dams showed on one of his slides during the keynote presentation, it’s ok to have fun. We took him up on that, and there’s plenty of proof here:
So what’s the upshot? The investment paid off, and I had a lot of fun. What more could I ask for?