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“There was this fence where we pressed our faces and felt the wind turn warm and held to the fence and forgot who we were or where we came from but dreamed of who we might be and where we might go...” -- Opening lines of “R is for Rocket” by Ray Bradbury I spent 20 years building this G language of ours. It’s time for me to go enjoy the fruits of that labor as a user! I will still be employed by NI, but I will be working full time for Blue Origin. As part of the NI “Engineer in Residence” program, I will be on loan to Blue Origin to revise their engine and support test systems. They wanted a Certified LabVIEW Architect with deep knowledge of LVOOP, multiple years of experience with Actor Framework, and deep knowledge of cRIO and PXI. I asked, “Can we negotiate on that last part?” They said, “Yes, yes we can.” Turns out, based on the interview, I know more than I thought – apparently some hardware knowledge does rub off just by sitting near it for a couple decades. This new job runs for six months, but it is extensible through the end of 2021 at the discretion of myself and Blue Origin. When I come back, I do not know if I will be returning to LabVIEW. Spaceflight has long been a passion of mine. Over my 20 years with LabVIEW R&D, I have had the chance to help out with various Mars rovers, large telescopes, and rocket launches. It has been awesome, and I’m proud of the language advances I brought to LabVIEW that helped so many users along the way. Now, I am going to focus on just one customer for a while... a customer with very large rocket engines! My last day will be Friday, October 23. I will not have the same availability to respond to posts as I have in the past, but Aristos Queue will still be around on the forums. “And, walking, I went beyond the fence.” -- ending of “R is for Rocket”

The first time you mentioned this I thought it was a nice gesture, now I think you are just desperate for friends...or an alcoholic. I'm down.

There are some (including me) who believe that more people in LabVIEW R&D (both CurrentGen and NXG) should better understand how LabVIEW is used in the real world. Regardless, there is a lot of truthiness to your comment, and the reality is way more complicated to explain until I've had at least a couple of beers in me. I've thought a lot about this, but I just don't think it would be a successful open source project. It's not like it's a small library that's easy for someone to understand, much less modify. You need guides with really strong flashlights to show you the way. I speak from experience. When I led the team that created 64-bit LabVIEW 10+ years ago, I had to visit every nook and cranny in the source code, and find the right people with the right flashlights. I think a more viable alternative (if NI didn't want to own LabVIEW any more) would be to spin it out as a subsidiary (or maybe non-profit?) along with the people who know the source code. It wouldn't be super profitable, but might be strong enough to independently support its development. The main impediment to this happening is that LabVIEW FPGA (and to a lesser extent, LabVIEW Real-Time) are really valuable to NI and probably too intertwined with the rest of LabVIEW for NI to keep FPGA and spin out the rest.

The new branding is not my cup of tea so hopefully that does not tell too much about the new management. Reducing (the need for) administrative positions could be a good thing. As for raising the quality and speed of the LabVIEW development I hope they use their savings to keep and build a highly skilled, tight nit, centralized team. The developers should all worship Graphical programming🧚‍♂️🧚‍♀️, even though many of themselves have to be proficient with many an awful text based tool. If they have seen the light from the many lessons about the uniqueness of graphical vs textual programming embedded in current LabVIEW, they might not stray to the dark path of NXG 😀 Steal the best (the graphics) of the textual worlds, keep the spirit and innovations of G. The first letter graphic in the next LabVIEW should be G.👼