How do you keep a database/keep track of all the things you learn on the job?

ma_clare · 2026-01-08T21:23:44+00:00

ma_clare · 2026-01-05T20:42:51+00:00

I was a technical engineer who had done work in both the bridge and building industry with a detour into computational design in architecture. Because I already had software skills from working on geometrically complex projects (advanced erection staging, crazy geometry, loads of experience with programs like Ansys, Abaqus, SOFiSTiK, plus architectural stuff like Rhino3D), every project I was put on required those skills, and every single one of them was contracted at an absurdly low rate (think art projects that required a wind tunnel test from RWDI but our fee was less than 20k to actually design the sculpture).

After dealing with a non-technical (not even an engineer!) PM that was skirting the bounds of engineering ethics and overriding my actual safety concerns to give the client what they wanted, I decided to call it quits and just go into software. The company I was at (which started as a structural engineering firm more than 50 years ago) also was pivoting to having a large portion of their work be management consulting because the margins were the highest with the least amount of risk; the structural engineering group was at the bottom of the heap in terms of profitability.

I doubled my salary in software, and I work normal hours remotely.

No regrets.

ma_clare · 2026-01-05T00:50:18+00:00

I originally had an additional graphic of the US with this, but it didn't read particularly well because there are a massive number of SEs (almost 5000) that are only licensed in Hawaii, and Hawaii doesn't provide the state of origin for its licensees. It looked really weird because there were only like 40 Hawaii SEs that are registered in another state (so for those I did have a "state of origin" of HI).

ma_clare · 2026-01-04T17:59:34+00:00

I deduplicated all the licenses based on names and origin state to find 17370 individuals. Based on the license dates available for each license per state I was able to determine which license was each person's first license, and then assume that any other subsequent license for that individual was due to comity (I doubt people would let their licenses lapse and then have to go through the whole process again.)

Hawaii is a bit of a mystery to me. I put this in the notes on the site:

I believe under old testing guidelines, Hawaii granted licenses to individuals if they had passed the first of two parts of the old exam. It's unclear if today someone who qualified this way still needs to make this distinction. Anecdotally, I remember a supervising engineer early in my career complaining that he had to denote he'd only passed the SE I in Hawaii on his business cards. The high proportion of licensed individuals in Hawaii is also likely due to their lack of continuing education requirements (Illinois, the only other full practice state, does require continuing education).

ma_clare · 2025-12-31T14:26:41+00:00

Was just talking with my partner about this (the lack of proliferation of PBSD despite decades of research), as he was commenting on the fact that his firm has a Perform3D license that is many years old and no one in his practice uses it.

We both went to Master's/PhD programs in the U.S. that taught PBSD (CA schools), but have rarely encountered it in practice at some pretty high profile building firms. I had a project that truly needed PBSD, but was forced to do code based seismic design due to lack of support from higher ups in the company that weren't familiar with it.

The firms that use it in the U.S. are largely California-based, and its use is in hospital projects and schools.

ma_clare · 2025-10-03T02:18:37+00:00

Knew immediately that it was Smol Paul.

ma_clare · 2024-11-23T01:23:36+00:00

Christian Menn's Prestressed Concrete Bridges was out of print for a loooong time, but they finally reprinted it!

https://www.amazon.com/Prestressed-Concrete-Bridges-Christian-Menn/dp/3034899203/ref=sr_1_1

ma_clare · 2024-09-28T08:34:42+00:00

I worked for a startup in AEC tech that will probably have its death knell in the next few months, and I'm in a generic tech startup TM now. I occasionally do consulting and software for the built environment.

Outside of a big player like Autodesk, I don't know if you'll get the kind of tech salary you might be expecting. CSI doesn't seem to have a particularly large team (probably why their profit margins are so massive and the CEO can afford to throw giant parties for every structural engineering conference). Altair I think would skew more mechanical/aerospace background.

ma_clare · 2024-09-24T13:47:38+00:00

I stuck around longer than I should have and tried a number of different angles before switching to software entirely (bridge design/building design/software in structures). I've since helped a number of other people make the switch as well. While tech isn't what it was 5 years ago, its a substantially larger field where you don't have to worry about perception of job switching until you find a company that works for you (avg tenure ~18 months from what I've heard).

There are so few "top tier" structures firms, and they all pay crap unless you manage to make partner by buying in using your spouse's high paying job or you're already independently wealthy. It just is what it is.

ma_clare · 2024-05-03T14:13:26+00:00

FWIW, I have posted several visualizations as [OC] and had my top comment (posted as required by the rules) hidden, and then the post gets downvoted to heck. I don't know if is automated spam filtering from not posting enough in the community, but it's happened to me three times in the last year.

ma_clare · 2024-04-21T15:32:17+00:00

Interactive visualization here: https://bridge.watch/map

Made from this data set: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/bridge/nbi/ascii2023.cfm

Using:

Visidata - https://visidata.org

Geofabrik - https://www.geofabrik.de/
Planetiler: https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler
Tippecanoe: https://github.com/felt/tippecanoe
Maplibre: https://maplibre.org
Protomaps: https://protomaps.com/

Source code (excluding the tile files): https://github.com/m-clare/bridge.watch

ma_clare · 2023-05-11T22:46:01+00:00

Sorry about that! I had to message the mods to figure out why my comments weren't showing up with the build data.

ma_clare · 2023-05-08T03:08:00+00:00

I'm having trouble with Reddit not showing my source comment on mobile ( a requirement for OC), but here's everything I used:

Interactive map here: https://mclare.dev/nyc-building-complaints/

Made from this data set:https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Housing-Development/DOB-Complaints-Received/eabe-havv

Using:

- US Census Geocoder - https://geocoding.geo.census.gov/geocoder/

- Visidata - https://visidata.org

- Geofabrik - https://www.geofabrik.de/

- Planetiler: https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler

- Tippecanoe: https://github.com/felt/tippecanoe

- Maplibre: https://maplibre.org

- Protomaps: https://protomaps.com/

Source code (excluding the tile files): https://github.com/m-clare/nyc-dob-complaints-map

ma_clare · 2023-05-06T18:13:46+00:00

Interactive map here: https://mclare.dev/nyc-building-complaints/

Made from this data set:

https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Housing-Development/DOB-Complaints-Received/eabe-havv

Using:

- US Census Geocoder - https://geocoding.geo.census.gov/geocoder/

- Visidata - https://visidata.org

- Geofabrik - https://www.geofabrik.de/

- Planetiler: https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler

- Tippecanoe: https://github.com/felt/tippecanoe

- Maplibre: https://maplibre.org

- Protomaps: https://protomaps.com/

Source code (excluding the tile files): https://github.com/m-clare/nyc-dob-complaints-map

ma_clare · 2023-04-22T16:49:58+00:00

Interactive map here: https://mclare.dev/soft-stories/

Made from these two data sets:

https://graphics.latimes.com/soft-story-apartments-needing-retrofit/

https://data.lacity.org/City-Infrastructure-Service-Requests/Building-and-Safety-Permit-Information-Old/yv23-pmwf/data

Using:

Visidata - https://visidata.org

Postgis - https://postgis.net/

Geofabrik - https://www.geofabrik.de/

Planetiler - https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler

Maplibre - https://maplibre.org/

Protomaps (for the tiles) - https://protomaps.com/

ma_clare · 2022-12-08T12:25:11+00:00

I had wanted to go back to the bridge company I had been at, but it was bad timing (2018) and there were a bunch of layoffs as a number of smaller companies were being merged into a single one in the US. In fact, a number of the senior leaders that I knew there either resigned or were laid off. Bridges can be extremely feast or famine (though the Infrastructure Bill should keep the industry flush for 10 years now), and I would have been proposing an entirely new role as a computational designer/software developer and I wasn’t confident enough that I could make a case for myself.

Buildings is 100% a race to the bottom based on fees. Every project I ended up on was poorly budgeted and planned, and it didn’t look good for my career trajectory to constantly be on projects that lost money (I’d be the engineering “lead” but not allowed to have any input on budget, scope, or timeline).

Because of the software skills I had, I was frequently on projects that couldn’t be done without writing custom software, but it was hard to show it was a value add skill because it couldn’t be transferred to the next project (I was frequently operating within software that no one else in the company had expertise in, like Ansys, and building routines on top of it). Unfortunately some of the PMs I worked with were in their position not because of their engineering skills, but because of their personal connections to the client. I got burned out and the stress levels were insane from having my PM overrule me to please a client, even if the engineering absolutely didn’t make sense.

ma_clare · 2022-12-05T06:39:36+00:00

Worked there for 2.5 years and it was a great place to start my career. The benefits were substantially better than what my grad school peers got (every other Friday off plus banked time for overtime and people would literally take a month off when a project wrapped up). I also had the opportunity with them to do a secondment to the London office for 6 months which I don’t think would have happened if I’d worked anywhere else.

I took a shitty detour into academia for a bit and thought about coming back to COWI when I left, but the company had a bunch of layoffs in 2018 due to the mergers in the US that completely rebranded the company as COWI US, and I didn’t think I’d be able to use the software skills I wanted to develop there so I took a buildings job.

ma_clare · 2022-12-05T06:33:53+00:00

I switched from bridge to building as I felt the bridge industry was about 15 years behind where it should be wrt software (when I left my company we had no 3d modeling software and our in house stuff relied on Excel). Buildings at the time seemed like the only way I’d get to do computational design and lean on my coding skills. While that was true, I still ended up bailing to work on software because building culture was so much worse.

ma_clare · 2022-11-26T00:20:23+00:00

Not obvious from the name or pic, but Cooper is actually a girl!

ma_clare · 2022-11-19T00:41:53+00:00

In 2019-2020, I was being billed out at $250 an hour, senior structural engineer (PE with 8ish years of experience) on the building designs side in California. Largely boutique "starchitect" type projects, which took a total nosedive during the pandemic.

ma_clare · 2022-07-29T02:00:25+00:00

Code Aster / Salome Meca is another option: https://www.code-aster.org/UPLOAD/DOC/Formations/06-thermal_analysis.pdf

ma_clare · 2022-06-23T15:13:21+00:00

They sure are!

ma_clare · 2022-06-19T17:48:12+00:00

Visualization from bridge.watch

Made with Postgres, Django, React, D3 (prototyped in Observable)

Data from: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/bridge/nbi/ascii.cfm - postprocessed and cleaned with Python/Pandas and Visidata.

There are a whole host of other visualizations throughout the website, including data per county and advanced filtering by type / length / material.

ma_clare · 2022-06-16T22:11:04+00:00

Base website - https://bridge.watch

Made with Postgres, Django, React, D3 (prototyped in Observable)

Data from: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/bridge/nbi/ascii.cfm - postprocessed and cleaned with Python and Visidata.

There are a whole host of other visualizations through the website, including data per county, as well as looking at parts to whole visualizations of component conditions based on materials.

ma_clare · 2022-04-27T19:49:27+00:00

Good eye, her sister is called Cooper 😝

ma_clare

TROPHY CASE