The Cedar Falls Regional Qualifier for FIRST LEGO League (FLL) and the Cedar Falls Regional Expo for Junior FIRST LEGO League (Jr. FLL) took place recently at Peet Junior High. DISTek and its people are very active in supporting FIRST related teams. There were at least three DISTekians who served as coaches or mentors for FLL teams and one DISTekian who was the coach for a Jr. FLL team. DISTek was also a sponsor of multiple teams.
In a previous blog entry, I provided a book report on The Fred Factor by Mark Sanborn. I discussed how people can make a positive difference in how they go about their lives, turning something ordinary into the extraordinary. I also shared Sanborn’s acronym FRED to explain how to develop “Freds”.
I became sick of clerical work and odd jobs that would never help me in my career, so last summer I went on the hunt for something with embedded systems around Cedar Falls. I found DISTek and sent a message on their “Contact Us” link. Never would I have imagined that it was going to be such a great experience in my life. When I was a freshman in college, my first semester I told one of my professors that I was interested in the computers inside of the Ag machinery. A year later, I was offered a job at DISTek and my dream had been fulfilled.
As a student you feel fortunate to have an opportunity to get an internship, but to get an amazing internship, such as DISTek, is a true blessing. DISTek is the ultimate playground for embedded systems programming nerds that love manipulating hardware through software and who relish at the thought that their work will eventually end up on a microcontroller of an agricultural or off-road vehicle. To my delight, within an hour on my first day, I was assigned to a CAN bus project, based around ISO 11783, working side by side with full time employees on a real product intended for real customers. After receiving a binder full of ISO standards and a quick, but quite necessary, pep talk from my new coworkers I was set to start programming… or so I thought.
At the AEM Annual Conference last year, Peter Diamandis, CEO of XPRIZE, made a bold prediction to those of us in the audience. He predicted that a decade from now 40% of today’s Fortune 500 companies will be put out of business by disruptive technologies. Although that probably sounds extreme to many of us, I’m sure that former employees at Kodak, Blockbuster, and Borders are less blown away the prediction.
This is the first in a series of posts by the folks that keep this place on track as a business – giving a non-engineer perspective on the culture of engineering.
Lost In Translation-The Bill Murray movie-That’s working with engineers.
I’ve come to the conclusion that my career has been headed down the wrong path for a long time. I know sales people who sell commodities, specialty products, medical devices, and they all tell me the same thing: It was easy once I learned my product. Well to heck with you guys, my product has no owner’s manual, has vacation days, and such a range of skills that I can’t simply say “That’s on page 38 of your product manual ma’am.”
April 1, 2014. 22ºF (coldºC)
Here in Iowa, we’re tired of waiting for spring. This winter was awful, setting records for snowfall and below-zero temperatures. Like Vanilla Ice said “too cold, too cold!” All caused by the Polar Vortex. That’s why at DISTek Integration we are pleased to announce that we are going to destroy the polar vortex by demagnetizing the north pole!
Last week I attended the NI Architect Summit, and I saw some patterns emerge while sitting in on the frameworks track. All of the framework content was related to challenges in LabVIEW Object Oriented Programming (LVOOP). LabVIEW is sold as a software tool for scientists and engineers, yet also provides features including LVOOP for advanced users. The takeaways below speak to the challenge of transitioning from a procedural single-threaded dataflow design to a parallel messaging architecture using LVOOP.
