Hope Harrison is a Systems Engineer at MGI, based in Utah. She has been tinkering with LabVIEW since she was a kid and has been programming in it full time since graduating from MIT. One of her passions is creating LabVIEW user interfaces that don’t look like “standard” LabVIEW, and she created the PaneRelief Quick Drop Shortcut to make creating UIs easier for all LabVIEW programmers. She loves contributing to open source LabVIEW projects and hopes to help the LabVIEW open source community grow. She is also a huge Actor Framework enthusiast.
Stephen Loftus-Mercer is a Principal Software Architect with National Instruments. He worked for LV R&D from LV6.1 (2000 a.d.) through LV2020 and was the tech lead for design and implementation of all LabVIEW Object-Oriented Programming features. He posts on LAVA and ni.com under the handle “Aristos Queue”, a reference to his first feature for LabVIEW, the queue primitives.
Casey May has been a LabVIEW user and enthusiast since 2006. He is passionate about advancing and maturing the state of LabVIEW software engineering and is excited to share some of his knowledge and experience with the wider LabVIEW community at GDevCon NA.
He’s owned and operated his own consulting company since 2011 and is a co-founder of Zyah Solutions.
Allen C Smith has been using the NI platform to solve complex engineering challenges for over 28 years. In that time, he has been a member of the NI Partner Program, worked for Partners, and served as a Systems Engineer with National Instruments. While at NI, he developed the software tool support and official training course for the Actor Framework. He is once again a member of the Partner Program, offering services as a consulting software architect and developer.
He remains an AF evangelist and active member of the AF community.
Allen is a Certified LabVIEW Architect, Certified Embedded Developer, and LabVIEW Champion.
Quentin “Q” Alldredge goes by “Q” and welcomes anyone to use that nickname. He goes by that nickname for both the Star Trek and James Bond references. Q received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering in 2007.
His first job out of school was with ATK (now Northrop Grumman) in Northern Utah where the Space Shuttle rocket boosters were made. They sent him to all of the NI training which he has since turned into his career. Later, he joined the US Air Force as a civilian. While there he earned his CLA certification and led his team to become one of the first LabVIEW Centers of Excellence. He worked on many projects including the A-10 aircraft developing ground support testing equipment.
In 2018, Q was inducted into the LabVIEW Champions and loves to share his love of the G language. Q is currently a board member for GCentral, to promote community G programming efforts; an admin for the LabVIEW Wiki (labviewwiki.org); and works for Testeract, a systems integration and automated test company in Utah.
Brian Powell is the CEO of Stravaro, an engineering and management consulting company. He worked at National Instruments for over 25 years, and went on to work in cloud-based healthcare and insurance technology as Director and VP of Engineering. Throughout his career, Brian has focused on growing strong software teams. He is a Certified LabVIEW Architect, NI Certified Professional Instructor, and LabVIEW Champion. He also teaches software engineering courses for the DSH Workshops.
John Giannangeli began programming LabVIEW and TestStand in 1993 on SunOS. After employment in the workstation and storage industries, he started his own NI Partnership in 2004, eventually becoming Bolder Software in 2011.
John and his team have helped solve challenges in Medical, Aerospace, Renewable Energy, Manufacturing, and other markets. He is an avid practitioner of software engineering including specialties in revision control, issue tracking, and requirements traceability.
When not coding, John enjoys skiing and flight lessons with his wife, trading and investing, tending the Koi ponds, and recording metal and jazz compositions in his studio.
John is a Certified LabVIEW Architect, Certified TestStand Developer, and a Certified Professional Instructor.
Eric Reffett has worked at NI for 23 years. In his current role as a Software Planner, Eric is responsible for the product roadmap for LabVIEW. Eric has met with hundreds of NI’s customers during his career at NI and he uses their feedback to improve the products NI creates.
Eric holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of Illinois and an MBA and MIS degree from Washington University. He enjoys playing games with his kids, planning his next Disney vacation, and learning to play the Ukulele from his wife.
Darren Nattinger (DNatt) is a CLA who has worked at NI for almost 23 years. He spent most of that time in LabVIEW R&D, thinking of and implementing editor features to delight LabVIEW programmers, but has recently moved into a Principal Technical Support Engineer role, helping build up LabVIEW expertise in the tech support department. Darren is the 7-time undefeated (now retired) World’s Fastest LabVIEW Programmer, and was the primary developer for LabVIEW features such as Quick Drop and the VI Analyzer Toolkit. His favorite LabVIEW framework is DQMH. Darren has a BS in Mechanical Engineering from UT Austin, and an MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Georgia Tech.
22 year veteran of the global LabVIEW community, and ardent evangelist of SMoRES design principles, Norm Kirchner is currently a Chief Technical Support Engineer at NI specializing in RF & communications.
Over the years, Norm has contributed several community tools/frameworks/templates including: Extensible Session Framework (ESF), Remote Export Framework (REx), The OG Tree API, Top-Level Baseline Prime (TLB`), and always a crowd favorite LabVIEW Speak, to name a few.
Norm now focuses his efforts on leadership and mentorship within Technical Support Engineering (TSE) at NI, instilling his passion for customer success in automated test and measurement using NI products as well as teaching RF to anyone curious enough to ask, babies to bookkeepers.
Norm! (N1NJK) has a BS in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Marquette University in Milwaukee, WI and hails originally from Cleveland, OH.
List of 28 hobbies available upon request
Nancy has worked in the Test and Measurement industry, particularly at NI, and within the NI ecosystem for over 25 years. Through many different roles: sales, field architect, customer proficiency, and global services, Nancy has focused on customer success and growing strong software development teams. Additionally, Nancy drove the creation of the CLA summit and helped start the NI LabVIEW Center of Excellence program. Nancy recently launched Henson Consulting LLC for conference speaking on creativity for left-brained professionals. She is giving a TEDx talk on “Engineering Creativity On-Demand” at TEDx CheeryCreekWomen on December 4th.
I’ve been using LabVIEW for ~25 years and while I’ve written a book, started a company, and created many tools/applications in LabVIEW; I still have a lot I’d like to learn and accomplish. I love the LabVIEW community of scientists, engineers, and other tech types who are trying to make a positive difference and work together for the benefit of everyone!
-Jim