Prepping for the CLD-R (part 1 of 3)

In my previous post I wrote about refreshing my Labview skills before I passed the CLD-R exam.  This post will talk about one of the things I focused on:

Seminar materials

I attended the Labview Developer Education Day back in March.  This accomplished three things related to my study for the CLD-R:

1. Ni will often give out discounts for training or tests at these events, so that saved me some money.   
2. Attending an all-day seminar sparked my memories in an entirely different way than just reading up on Labview tricks or working through code examples.  I think listening to other people talk about code issues stimulates your brain in a different way.
3. I got to see presentations worked out in detail.

Number 3 on that list related to something that I had already been doing on and off since the beginning of the year: going through presentation examples.  Just go to NI.com and search for "Developer Days" or "Technical Symposium."  I did it just a few minutes ago, and one of the first items that popped up were the presentations from the 2013 Developer Days.  In fact, with some digging you can find presentations going back to at least 2009.  Even better, with some more work you can find the examples that go along with those presentations.

So I did exactly that.  I went dumpster diving into NI's archives, digging around until I found about 4 GB worth of data (including actual videos of some presentations).  And then I read through them all, skipping over the duplicates and the presentations aimed toward introductions and hardware-specific issues.  And I worked through every single example, making sure I understood it.  It helped.

So that's the first of three things I did.  I'll try to post the second one sometime this weekend.