HN Explorer

Ask HN: Who Are the FEA, CAD, etc. SWE's?

4 points by hydrogen7800 ↗ HN
I'm a mechanical engineer who mostly lurks here. Much of the shop talk is over my head, but I figure I would occasionally come across folks who work on finite element analysis (ANSYS, Abaqus, etc.), CAD (Solidworks, Creo, Inventor/AutoCAD, etc.), CMM (Faro, Zeiss, etc) or other design, manufacturing, or inspection software/hardware packages.

I'd love to see how these tools are developed, and how such developers manage expertise in both software and the field in which the tool is being used. I suppose that last point is true of software to be used in any domain.

2 comments

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Chris_Newton
Much of the software development discussion on HN centres on web apps — that’s where a lot of the startups and a lot of the money have been in recent years, after all — but now and then we do discuss things closer to engineering/science/mathematics. For example, a year or so back we had a discussion about geometric constraint solving in Blender¹ and it turned out that a couple of us have worked on a related library in the past.

Confidentiality permitting, if there’s anything in particular you’d like to know about developing that kind of software, I can try to answer, and maybe others will spot this and contribute as well.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30625341

hydrogen7800
Thanks. Like you said, industrial software isn't exactly on the bleeding edge or attracting lots of startup attention.

I don't have any specific questions, and I'm not necessarily interested in any single piece of industrial software. I think it would be interesting to eavesdrop on folks talking about these things.