Blog of Blogs: A guide to LabVIEW reading for the holidays

[David_L]

The holiday season is the time of the year when people are traveling, spending time with family, and using up last minute accrued vacation hours before they expire in the new year.  Because of this, you may have a lot of down time in which you are hankering for some juicy LabVIEW nuggets to keep your expertise fresh and continuously growing.  The good news is that TONS of developers out there love LabVIEW so much that they spend time each week writing their thoughts down about their favorite graphical programming language.  In the spirit of holiday sharing, I wanted to let you all in on some of the blogs I personally follow so you can all be as informed as can be.  Here's a few of my favorites:

LabVIEW News

https://decibel.ni.com/content/blogs/labview-news-english

As the official LabVIEW News blog, Laura Arnold and her team gather LabVIEW content from around the web in all topic areas (as long as it's about LabVIEW).  This is the same news feed that shows up in your LabVIEW Gettering Started Window each day.

Eyes on VIs

http://blog.eyesonvis.com/

Christina Rogers is a developer in LabVIEW R&D and active member of the LabVIEW community.  Her blog tends to focus on hidden LabVIEW tips and tricks and new features of LabVIEW that she is excited about.

VIShots

http://vishots.com/

VI Shots is a podcast by LabVIEW Champion Michael Aivaliotis.  Each post, Michael will interview someone from the LabVIEW community and talk about advanced LabVIEW development as well as new and exciting LabVIEW tools.

Software Engineering for LabVIEW

http://ekerry.wordpress.com/

Eli Kerry is the Senior Product Manager for LabVIEW at National Instruments as well as a CLA and LabVIEW enthusiast.  His blog focuses on Large application development tips and best practices using LVOOP, Actor Framework, and many other advanced frameworks and technologies.

Random Ramblings on LabVIEW Design

https://decibel.ni.com/content/blogs/labviewramblings

Steve Watts is a LabVIEW developer from the UK who quite literally wrote the book on LabVIEW.  In his blog, he writes about anything from UI design to software development best practices and how they can be applied to LabVIEW.

LabVIEW Field Journal

http://labviewjournal.com/

The National Instruments Field Architects are a small, elite group of LabVIEW experts.  In their blog, Nancy Hollenback, Charlie Knapp and Brian Powell cover advanced topics to help guide software architecture and encourage good software engineering practices in LabVIEW. 

ExpressionFlow

http://expressionflow.com/

Returning to the blog scene after a multiple year hiatus, LabVIEW champion Tomi Maila writes his blog about flow-based programming.  While LabVIEW is one of the two main languages he discusses (the other being NoFlo), the blog discusses broader concepts and provides a different perspective on programming in a graphical world.

LabVIEW Tools Network Developer Center Blog

https://decibel.ni.com/content/groups/labview-add-on-dev-center?view=blog

Yes, yes, I know.  I'm promoting our own blog on the blog of blogs, but I want to make sure that whose who stumble across this article by accident know who we are.  The LabVIEW Tools Network Developer Center blog is a collaborative blog by the LabVIEW Tools Network team (currently Matthew Friedman, Will Schoettler, Robert Des Rosier,Patrick Simmons and Penny Wright).  Here we discuss technical and marketing topics aimed at helping developer create quality toolkits, applications and add-ons for LabVIEW.

Others

There are TONS of other LabVIEW blogs out there, and this post only scratches the surface.  What are the favorite blogs you follow (shameless plugs graciously accepted)?