One of the reasons I became a blogger was to become more involved in a community which could offer me advice and support on the problems I face in graduate school and as a woman in STEM. In many cases, others have faced the same types of problems I’m encountering and have found possible solutions. So what does this have to do with open source software? In many cases, there are communities of users that will offer beginners advice and support on starting out with a new software package or help troubleshoot problems. One of the open source software packages I use pretty much daily is LAMMPS (Large-scale Atomic/Molecular Massively Parallel Simulator), developed and maintained by a team at Sandia. While it’s a very well-documented code, the error messages can be vague. This is where the support community comes in. The lammps-user mailing list archive is usually my first stop, to [...]
“I know how to code,” I said, “but I don’t know how to Code.” “Umm. You just said the same thing twice and said there was a difference.” “Yes,” I said, “but I said it with different emphasis each time.” “Please explain.” So this was how I explained my frustrations to a sympathetic ear. See, I had dabbled and learned all sorts of programming languages: Basic, C, a little Java, Javascript, Scheme, a bit of 8086 assembly and even Zilog-80 assembly so I could try to make calculator games for my old TI. I’d also managed to learn enough HTML and CSS to hack up my personal blogger site. I mean, I know about For loops, If/Then statements, functions, objects, quick sorts, and so on. Despite all that, I was completely flummoxed if I wanted to make anything substantial or real. I didn’t know how to make standalone Windows executables, or set [...]
For many people they just except that software exist as some form of stuff that allows you do do things on computers or is hidden inside machines. In a way software can be as hard to physically get hold of as it is to see the flow of electronics in a wire or see the flow of air particles generating a vortex off a wing tip. However software is a important components in nearly everything you touch, from the mouse your scroll around the page with to the hundreds of servers that send you search results when looking for that next holiday. Software engineers are a massive part of the industry but what does software really do and can software really break? It would be difficult to explain software and how the flow of code works in a modern computer as they have become very complex machine. Instead its possibly [...]
How well you get along with your coworkers can have a huge impact on how effective an engineer you can be. I’m not just talking about meetings, but how well you can collaborate on projects. People generally know you don’t pass off shoddy work or incomplete projects to the next person who has to work on it for you. But sometimes I’ve seen exactly that in the design world. Even though most CAD programs track everyone who touched that part or drawing, people seem to think they can get away with things they generally wouldn’t try in a report or presentation. A couple months ago Peter J Francis asked whether MCAD or ECAD was more trouble than it was worth. GEARS discussed his love hate relationship with it but admitted that the skills he learned with ProEngineer allowed him to really kickstart his career. Skills with a particular CAD or [...]
Few have escaped the news that there is a new shinny social media network launch underway – Google+ is here but what are we the engineering community making of it? Over the last few years I have become a convert when it comes to social media. If you had told me that facebook and twitter were good engineering tools then I would have laughed at you. However just over a year ago when I joined DesignSpark as a blogger for ebmpapst I started the slippy slope into online networking. So Google+ is here in Beta phase at the time of writing this and I got an invite from a fellow engineer about a week ago. The community is still growing all under the control of Google but is slowly starting to show how it can be used. So early on I wanted to capture the first views of other engineers [...]
Last week I talked about keeping track of your work in lab notebooks. There were some great comments on alternative systems, such as PowerPoint slide decks, simple memory, README files or digital scripts, or cataloged data in folders on the laptop. So that’s all well and good for writing down what you do – but how about keeping track of WHEN you need to do things, as well as what you’ve done? For scheduling meetings and events, I still like using a paper calendar. But I think I’m in the minority in that regard – most of my colleagues use Outlook, or Google Calendar, or some other online system. I’ve tried to go online (as with so many things these days, to the cloud!), but it’s just not my preference. I’ve used Tungle with classmates before, which is a group calendar that can coordinate between lots of different online calendaring [...]
When I began writing my master’s thesis, I had a big decision to make: Microsoft Word or LaTeX. I didn’t like the equation formatting in Word, but I could live with it. However, I was at the tail end of a campus thesis editor who HATED LaTeX, and so I was told that I would save myself a lot of heartache if I just went with Word. I also figured that the learning curve was significantly less steep for Word. I was wrong on both counts, and the equation formatting ended up being the least of my concerns. As it turns out, writing a large document in Microsoft Word required me to learn to use settings I wasn’t familiar with. For instance, I had to learn to put pictures in such that they would be recognized by the program as a figure. Then, I had to make a table giving [...]
This week’s Theme Week at Engineer Blogs is dealing with cross functional engineering material. Like most mechanical engineers, I’ve had to do my fair share of other engineering disciplines, mainly civil/structural (on the small scale) and electrical (basic circuits, signal processing). Because ME, EE, and Civil are all what I would consider core engineering disciplines, I think most engineers in one of those three fields should understand the basic concepts of the other two fields. Typically, the fundamental concepts in Civil are easier to understand for a ME. (I mean, you have to know your target to make the right bomb ). Basic concepts on the EE side are a little harder to grasp because they tend to be more abstract. But if you’ve had to do any programming, you understand Paul Clarke’s underlying argument, even if you don’t get the complete package. As we divert from the core engineering [...]
PTC’s Pro/Engineer (now called Creo Elements), in my humble opinion, is a terrible software. I say this as someone who used to have a lot of experience with it. I started using Pro/e during my UG freshman year. During my sophomore year, I started being a TA for the class. During that year and the following 3 years, I TA’ed between 4 and 8 sections of Pro/e (and Pro/e2 and Pro/e Wildfire), to hundreds of incoming freshman, getting to the point where I was going over the design lectures and the main prof for the class only showed up for tests. In general, being a TA and pseudo-lecturer gave me some good exposure to how lectures really work in college from the other perspective and it got me over my fear of public speaking. So the intangibles associated with the position were pretty good. But man, Pro/e is a terrible [...]
So some time back, I did a few blogs about how much I like writing VHDL and what a wonderfully language it is. I also did a bit of an intro for software engineers (don’t worry, you don’t need to read them to see where I’m going here). However, I came under a bit of criticism about what I wrote and my use of the evil STD_LOGIC_ARITH package. OK, I may not be a full-time VHDL engineer but I think there are far too many people being sheep and using the numeric library though peer pressure while not considering true engineering principles. So first off, let’s get this all straight – I class myself as a embedded electronics design engineer. My day job is all low-level electronics and microcontrollers, no FPGAs. However, I spent a few years working on a VHDL design for a Gigabit Ethernet Card where I looked [...]
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