I am taking a sabbatical from LabVIEW and NI R&D

[Aristos Queue]

“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”

 

[ShaunR]

Congratulations. It will go great and it's a fantastic area to grow into. You won't regret it  but i very much doubt you will be back at NI - it'd be a step backwards. 

[Neil Pate]

That sounds like a fantastic opportunity, I am sure you will smash it out the park. To infinity and beyond!

[0_o]

And here goes our rock(et)star.

With the global warming upon us, with leaders that can't even handle the little covid, I wish you good luck in your space mission.

We will LabU forever. 

[Yair]

Well, that creates a mixed reaction.

On the one hand, obviously, congratulations, good luck, enjoy, etc.

On the other, we're losing our resident Greg McKascle and we'll have to see if someone else with the same level of knowledge steps up to offer such access to internal information. I can think of some and hopefully one or more of them will provide.

Good flying...

[Jordan Kuehn]

Congratulations on this new adventure!

[crossrulz]

It'll be amazing crossing 2 time zones (Central to Western US time zones) just by going to the other side of the couch.  Our sincerest hope is you learn more of our perspective as developers and take it back to R&D.

[hooovahh]

Awesome and congrats.  I look forward to any kind of revelation or perspective changes you have as a result.

[Ansible]

Can't wait to have you on the team. 

[X___]

A word of caution (seriously): before you send people in space on a device simulated/tested with LabVIEW, keep in mind that a non-negligible fraction (I am not saying a large fraction, but one bug can be enough) of its algorithms/numerical codes are buggy and since they are closed source (for the most part), the only way to figure out is to run into inconsistencies or unexpected results. This takes a OCD scientific mind to discover, the hard way. Especially in the "uncommon" regimes, those which Dr Murphy likes to invoke at the worst time...

As users, we've done our best to let NI know, but at best it has taken years for actual bugs to be fixed, when they have been fixed... Maybe time to check those X_Bug_Report tagged posts on forums.ni.com...

Have fun.

[orko]

Oh, and here I am jumping back into the forums one month later to see the backside of a great contributor leaving it! Congratulations, AQ! This sounds like one of those "couldn't say no" opportunities, I'm truly excited for you, go forth and dequeue 🤣

I recently got my own boost of adrenaline, started work with the Facebook Reality Labs crew who are turning out to be a great team. Time to knock off that VI rust and get back in the game 👍

[Antoine Chalons]

I'm sorry for asking - you might not want to answer - before taking on this new job, did you know that NI was going to "drop" NXG?

And what's your view on this?

[Aristos Queue]

19 hours ago, Antoine Chalons said:

I'm sorry for asking - you might not want to answer - before taking on this new job, did you know that NI was going to "drop" NXG?

I did not know. That possibility was not even on my radar. Even though the drumbeat of bad news had been going for a while, most corporations refuse to change direction on a bad decision. NI showed more sentience than I usually expect from massed humans: the sunk cost fallacy is a trap that is very hard to get out of. I figured the very good engineers on NXG would either surge through it and make it fly or we would bankrupt the company trying. That's the pattern established by plenty of other companies.

Quote

And what's your view on this?

Mixed. I spent 4.5 years directly working on NXG (2011 to 2016) and countless hours in later years working with the NXG team to design a future G. I really wanted it to fly. There is so much good in that IDE, including some amazing things that I just don't see how we ever do in the LabVIEW codebase without just shattering compatibility.

But at the same time, I was watching good friends toil on something that the market just wasn't adopting. The software had some problems that were going to take a long time to solve. The issues were all solvable, but the time needed to fix them... that was harder and harder to justify.

NXG gave us a GREAT platform for other software: Veristand, FlexLogger, etc. That code is extremely modular and can be repurposed for all sorts of tools. We also learned a heck of a lot by building NXG -- some things that I thought we could never do in LabVIEW now seem possible. NXG gave us a sandbox to learn a whole lot about modern software engineering without putting the delivery schedule for mature software at risk, and those practices [have been|are being] brought back and applied to LabVIEW -- that will decrease cost of maintaining older code. All in all, NXG was valuable -- the expenditure was not a complete loss.

I am very sorry to the few customers who did migrate to NXG. We don't have a reverse migration tool, and building one would be absurdly expensive. Leaving those folks stranded is going to hurt -- I hate letting our customers down and just saying, "We have no solution to help you." There aren't many of those folks (that's essentially the problem), but they do exist, and they are basically stuck having to rewrite their NXG apps in some other tool. I can only hope that they pick LabVIEW.

I don't know if this will help us or hurt us with customers in the future... on one hand, people may say, "Well, you let us down on NXG, why should we trust you will be there for us on any new products?" On the other hand, this decision was clearly made listening to customer feedback, and it takes a lot of humility to swallow a loss that big, which may make customers trust our judgement more in the future. And, really, there's nothing to compare with the scale of NXG -- an entire computing platform -- so this does seem like something that needs to be judged in isolation.

I really like programming in G. I like being able to expand G to make it more powerful. I wanted NXG to succeed because it had the potential to be a better G. It failed. Its failure means more resources for the existing LabVIEW platform, which will directly help our customers in the short run. It leaves open some big questions for the long run.

So, in summary: I think it was a decision that had to be made, and I'm happy to work for a company that can learn from new data, then admit a mistake, and then figure out how to correct it.

Edited December 5, 2020 by Aristos Queue

[Antoine Chalons]

Thanks a lot for your answer.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

Congratulations on your new endeavour. Working for a space program is one of those dreams every technically inclined boy probably has at some point.

It actually even tops the dream of working for Lego. 😄

[Ronin7]

Good luck Sir- you are one of the shining lights of LabVIEW and your willingness to share deep insights on this and the NI forums was of immeasurable value.  I hope that there are others at NI with a comparable understanding and skillset but that is probably unlikely.

 

[Aristos Queue]

Update to this post: My sabbatical has ended. I went from Blue Origin to Microsoft, but as of a couple weeks ago, I have now returned to LabVIEW development. At some point, I may put together a public summary of my experiences as a full-time G dev. For now, be assured that I am feeding that experience back into the feature backlog priority list!

[ShaunR]

I think this is a very positive thing that more should be encouraged to take part in.

For Application engineers and R&D Devs to do sabbaticals, on loan, to companies would build good relationships in the industry and ensure tight cohesion and understanding between the developers of LabVIEW and the customers' that use LabVIEW. There is nothing like a dose of ones own medicine to encourage improving the taste.

[bjustice]

It was a pleasure having you on the team

Shameless plug, we are still hiring:

 

 

[Cloedu72]

Welcome back! I'm glad you're back on board. I'm really looking forward to your summary. If I could make a priority list, I'd have a few exciting items as well.... 😉 

Have a great restart at NI!

[jacobson]

On 1/21/2022 at 8:22 PM, ShaunR said:

I think this is a very positive thing that more should be encouraged to take part in.

For Application engineers and R&D Devs to do sabbaticals, on loan, to companies would build good relationships in the industry and ensure tight cohesion and understanding between the developers of LabVIEW and the customers' that use LabVIEW. There is nothing like a dose of ones own medicine to encourage improving the taste.

The two times we had people in our AE team do this we never got them back 🙃

[hooovahh]

59 minutes ago, jacobson said:

The two times we had people in our AE team do this we never got them back 🙃

Sounds like there is a common denominator here.

[Aristos Queue]

9 hours ago, jacobson said:

The two times we had people in our AE team do this we never got them back 🙃

I don't know if it's the same people, Matt, but I've encouraged a couple folks to jump over to the companies they were temping for because it was better for NI. NI's position with those customers was stronger for having an "insider" on their teams. There is only gain for NI when one of our G developers goes off to be a full-time G programmer for another company! I only worry when our top G developers leave NI *and* they leave G. 🙂

[X___]

On 1/24/2022 at 9:26 PM, Aristos Queue said:

 I only worry when our top G developers leave NI *and* they leave G. 🙂

Interesting perspective... But on the other hand, it is probably too late to worry about external G developers leaving G. 😒

[Aristos Queue]

7 hours ago, X___ said:

Interesting perspective... But on the other hand, it is probably too late to worry about external G developers leaving G. 😒

LV's user base continues to grow. Not as fast as it has at some years in the past, but it still grows at a reasonable clip.