The Würzburg LabVIEW User Group (WUELUG) has officially been recognized (again) at NI Connect 2026 with the Community Catalyst Award — an award honoring “exceptional inclusivity, engagement, and community-building.”
For us at Hampel Software Engineering, this recognition means a great deal.
WUELUG started as a local idea: bring together engineers, architects, developers, system integrators, consultants, and LabVIEW enthusiasts from the region to exchange ideas openly and honestly. Over the years, it evolved into something much larger — a resilient and highly collaborative technical community spanning companies, industries, and experience levels.
Back in 2019, WUELUG had already been awarded the NI User Group Innovation Award at NIWeek in Austin, TX.
Today, WUELUG has become one of the most active LabVIEW communities in the German-speaking world.
A Community Built Around Real Engineering
What makes WUELUG special is that it was never designed as a marketing event or vendor showcase. Instead, the focus has always been on:
- practical engineering experience
- open technical discussion
- peer learning
- architecture and maintainability
- tooling and workflows
- long-term software quality
- networking across company boundaries
Recent WUELUG meetings covered topics ranging from AI-assisted LabVIEW development and cybersecurity to software architectures, testing, CI workflows, and scalable engineering processes.
Over nearly eight years and more than 25 meetings, the community has continuously grown while maintaining the collaborative and approachable atmosphere that made it successful in the first place.
Why This Award Matters
Technical communities are easy to underestimate.
But strong engineering ecosystems do not emerge automatically. They require people willing to organize events, share knowledge publicly, mentor others, connect companies, and create spaces where engineers can discuss challenges openly.
The NI ecosystem has historically been powered by exactly these kinds of communities:
- user groups
- open-source initiatives
- conference presentations
- peer support networks
The Community Catalyst Award recognizes groups that actively strengthen that ecosystem.
For WUELUG, this award validates something we have believed for a long time:
Engineering communities create leverage far beyond individual companies.
When developers exchange ideas openly, everyone benefits:
- software quality improves
- maintainability improves
- teams avoid repeating mistakes
- younger engineers grow faster
- innovation spreads more quickly through the ecosystem
NI Connect 2026 and the State of the Community
NI Connect continues to highlight the importance of the broader LabVIEW and test engineering ecosystem, especially as the industry evolves toward:
- AI-assisted workflows
- modernized software architectures
- cybersecurity requirements
- open-source collaboration
- scalable engineering practices
These themes have also increasingly shaped WUELUG discussions in recent years.
One particularly encouraging aspect of this year’s recognition is that it demonstrates NI’s continued investment not only in tooling and platforms, but also in the surrounding engineering communities that help those technologies succeed in practice.
This Was Never a One-Person Effort
While Hampel Software Engineering helped initiate and organize WUELUG, the community exists because of its members.
This award belongs to:
- everyone who gave presentations
- everyone who asked difficult questions
- everyone who shared failures and lessons learned
- everyone who traveled long distances to attend
- everyone who stayed after the talks for discussions
- everyone who helped create an atmosphere of openness and collaboration
Thank you to both NI (National Instruments) and dataTec AG – and specifically the people there – going out of their way supporting us with each and every meeting.
In recent months, we have also started transitioning WUELUG toward a broader organizational base to ensure its long-term sustainability beyond any single company or organizer.
That evolution is important — and healthy. Strong communities outlive their founders.
Looking Ahead
The challenges facing engineering teams are becoming more complex:
- increasing cybersecurity demands
- distributed systems
- AI-assisted development
- maintainability of large software systems
- interoperability across toolchains
- onboarding and retaining skilled engineers
Communities like WUELUG help teams navigate these challenges collectively rather than in isolation. Winning the Community Catalyst Award is therefore less of a finish line and more of a signal that this work matters. We are deeply grateful to NI, to the entire WUELUG community, and to everyone who contributed to making this possible.
And of course:
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