HACKER Q&A
📣 hydrogen7800

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


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.

  👤 Chris_Newton Accepted Answer ✓
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