Life Skills from FIRST

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FIRST Championship competition in St. Louis.

I am a champion/advocate/passionate believer in STEM and the value of the FIRST® programs. I have written multiple blogs on the subject and shared what I view as the value of the FIRST programs. My involvement started with FIRST LEGO® League (FLL) over six years ago primarily because my daughter was old enough to join FLL (and who doesn’t like LEGOs?). Today, my whole family is actively involved not just during the season, but off-season as well. Instead of giving my perspective again, I would like to share a team member’s perspective, namely, my daughter, Megan, who is part of a FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) team that competed at the FIRST Championship competition in St. Louis this past season.

In Case You Missed It: Spring ISOBUS PlugFest 2016

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Spring Plugfest

As usual, the Spring ISOBUS PlugFest was held this past May 10-12 in sunny Lincoln, Nebraska. Sadly, Benjamin Jefferson had to miss this time at the last minute, but his bad luck turned out in your humble author’s favor, as I (a newer member of the VIRTEC team) got to experience PlugFest first-hand!

Team of Teams

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Team of Teams

The book Team of Teams, by Stanley McChrystal, covers a lot of topics that strongly relate to the direction that DISTek is heading. Some of these concepts, such as shared consciousness, cooperation across silos, localized decision-making, and information sharing, I hope to write about in future blog posts. In this blog, however, I will discuss how the structure of Team of Teams fits with DISTek and how we are setting up our organization to be adaptable to growth.

NI Week 2016: LabVIEW Champions Track

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Ni Week

The 22nd Annual NI Week is slated to begin in Austin, Texas, on August 1st. NI Week provides the forum to bring together the brightest minds in engineering and science. More than 3,200 innovators representing a wide spectrum of industries, from automotive and telecommunications to robotics and energy will converge together to discover the latest technology to accelerate productivity for software-defined systems in test, measurement, and control. While DISTek regularly attends in various capacities, this year we will be making a new showing. Our very own Systems Engineer and LabVIEW expert, Ed Dickens, will be presenting on Wednesday, August 3rd from 4:45-5:45PM. His presentation is the result of National Instruments trying something new. This year, for the first time ever, there will be an advanced software topic track where all the presentation topics and content will be prepared and presented by various “LabVIEW Champions”.

Giving Back: DISTek Casual for a Cause

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There is a long standing tradition of giving back at DISTek, not only during the holiday season, but throughout the year. And even though DISTek has been conducting a weekly Casual for a Cause event for many years, where employees can dress casually on Friday’s with just a small contribution to a chosen cause, this year we made a small improvement that has had a big impact. Our employee-owners can recommend a particular cause and, if chosen, that cause receives the donations for the entire month. Not only does this provide a larger monetary donation to the worthy cause, but creates broader exposure for the cause as we internally promote it for the entire month. As an added bonus, this year we were able to secure some matching funds from the DISTek budget, further increasing the monetary donation each month and expanding on one of our core values – community.

Brainless LabVIEW Programming: CLA Summit 2016

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One of the presentations I attended at this years Certified LabVIEW Architects summit was given by Darren Nattinger of National Instruments. Darren is a Principal Engineer in LabVIEW R & D. One of the many things he’s responsible for is getting the Quick Drop feature added to LabVIEW. His presentation was titled, ”An End to Brainless LabVIEW Programming”.

Despised by Engineers: Software Documentation

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I recently graduated from Iowa State University and began my career at DISTek, and during that time there is one thing that I notice engineers hate doing: documentation. Despite being loathed, it’s widely believed documentation is one of the most important things in software development. I always strive to see that code my teams and I have worked on will be well documented in some form or another. I, especially, run into problems with code that is developed as a library (a set of functions and data structures).

A Look Back at FarmTrek 2015

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FarmTrek and DISTek

Farming. It’s the center of our world in America’s heartland. Even in mid-sized cities around Iowa, Illinois, and other ag-based states, people at least have an idea of the importance of the farmer, and many even have an appreciation of what it takes to get food to the masses. Carthage is a small town in west-central Illinois, in prime corn and soybean farm country. It also is home to one of the nation’s premiere swine farm management companies. Cattle farmers dot the landscape, too. Oh, and it’s home to DISTek Integration, Inc. and the corporate office is still there. We know farmers, and we know farming.

Avoiding the Flying Platypus: CLA Summit 2016

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In March I attended the Certified LabVIEW Architects Summit (CLA) in Austin, Texas. Every year National Instruments hosts this conference where CLAs can network, discuss best practices, and share ideas. This year the theme was Continuous Improvement: Building Better LabVIEW Applications.

DISTek Supports FIRST Iowa Regionals

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CFHS Robot w Logo

Recently, the Cedar Valley hosted the first Iowa Regional for FIRST® Robotics Challenge (FRC®) on the campus of the University of Northern Iowa. This was an effort of many years by many who have seen the value of the FIRST programs. DISTek® has been a sponsor of the Cedar Falls High School Swartdogs (team 525) since 200? and sponsored many other FIRST teams financially and/or through coaching or mentoring.

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