GDevCon North America 2023/An Open Source Journey

An Open Source Journey by Enrique Noé Arias and Dan Press

Enrique and Dan come together to give the ultimate open-source presentation!

Enrique's abstract: Have you ever wondered how open-source projects can help you learn and improve your LabVIEW skills? In this talk, I will share my experience of developing Panther Dashboard, a development tool for DQMH Projects. I will show you how I used various LabVIEW community resources, such as blogs, videos, forums and other open source projects, to get inspiration, guidance and feedback.

I will also explain how sharing your ideas and code with the LabVIEW community can benefit you and others. You can get valuable input from other LabVIEW experts, discover new ways of solving problems, and create something that meets the needs of your end users. You can also contribute to the growth and development of the LabVIEW ecosystem by giving back to the community.

Dan's abstract: Using open-source packages and tools is common in LabVIEW development. The presentation will encourage developers to explore the actual source code of the open-source resources they use or discover. It is a great way to learn techniques, style, and best practices. I will show examples of open-source tools and resources used in some of our projects, and I will demonstrate ways that exploring the code itself revealed new ways of solving problems to the team. As a bonus, by encouraging developers to examine the open-source code repositories, we hope to promote more contribution to those projects. The intermediate user might appreciate learning about some open-source projects, and the advanced user should notice how things like Test-Driven Development (TDD), unit tests, scripting, and calling other programming language libraries appear in the open-source world.