Is certification a good thing for the LabVIEW community?

I gave a talk at NI Week '08 titled "From Spaghetti Code to State Machines: One Man's Journey through the Certification Process" about the positive effect certification has had on my LabVIEW programming ability and style. The talk was on Tuesday and it generated some interesting and sometimes heated conversations the rest of the week. People would come up to me, tell me they liked my talk, and would proceed to give me their opinions on the topic. It was great, I didn't have to solicit people's opinions, they just came up to me and started talking. The responses tended to follow a bipolar distribution. People said either "That was my story you told!" or "Certification sucks, it's just a way for NI to milk their user base for more money!".

I hope to discuss these responses more fully in future posts, but for now I've put a poll on the sidebar of this blog asking a very simple question. Is certification a good thing for the LabVIEW community? This is not a referendum on NI's current implementation of the certification process. I'll save that for future polls. This is simply a thumbs up, thumbs down vote on certification in general. Do we need it? Is it beneficial?

This is an important question to us as a community. Certification is a major part of how the LabVIEW community relates to National Instruments. If certification is a bad idea, we should tell NI to scrap it. If it is a good idea, we should be part of the process of helping NI improve it. Which is it going to be?

Welcome to The Paper Chase

Welcome to The Paper Chase. My name is Tom Bress, and I'm a certified LabVIEW developer working for the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I am also pursuing my PhD in Mechanical Engineering on my own time. I am also pursuing the LabVIEW Architect certification as well as the National Instruments Professional Instructor certification. Throw in a Professional Engineer's license and you'll see that I'm an old hand at the paper chase.

I recently gave a presentation about the certification process at NI Week '08. It sparked a number of interesting conversations with fellow LabVIEW programmers, as well as with NI employees. I created this blog as a way of continuing that conversation with the broader LabVIEW community.

Most blogs start with an initial burst of enthusiasm, leading off with a flurry of posts. Then they settle down to slower but steady stream of posting until they finally make the transition from "web page" to "cobweb page". The author then makes a tearful exit, leaving only the archive behind like the ruins of an ancient statue lying buried in the sand. I am Ozymandius, look upon my blog and despair!

This is the model that I intend to follow. So enjoy it while it lasts!