Little Projects

Most of the time we get to work on massive projects. The sorts of things where you spend weeks or even months in meetings at the start of the thing to try to figure out what exactly it is the program's supposed to do.

These are great fun. You get to come up with a few grand new ideas to incorporate into your standard approach and architecture. And then you get to do it. And in the end, you have this big thing that you contributed in large part to that does something significant.

At the other end of the spectrum, you sometimes get these little one day jobs. Just a simple data logger or temperature controller. These are really fun in their own way, too. There's something to be said for sitting in front of a blank VI at 9AM and walking away from a screen full of graphs and a disk full of data files at 5PM. Just an hour's worth of defining requirements and a few hours of coding and a few hours of touch-up and you're done.

It speaks to the power of LabVIEW that you can perform both of the above tasks with the same environment.