As an Mechanical and Electrical Engineer by profession and Computer Programmer by passion I’ve been building my own software tools for over 20 years.
My career has taken me across multiple engineering areas including Design, Manufacturing, Field Operations, Maintenance, Refurbishment, Product Development, Asset Management, Customer Service, Process Improvement, Consulting and Software Development.
Mainly driven by challenges that I’ve faced on my day-to-day work and my own laziness and refusal to do repetitive and menial tasks, I always find myself creating software applications to automate the boring parts of my job.
I quite enjoy the process of facing a brand new challenge, thinking about the best way to solve it, designing the architecture of the application and then implementing it. It is very satisfying to then see peers and colleagues use and benefit from my tools to make their lives easier and ease their workload.
I’d like to think that this has given me a unique perspective by having the engineering domain expertise as well as the mind of a computer programmer. In my time, I’ve seen plenty of failed projects because the engineers didn’t understand programming and the programmers didn’t understand engineering. I’m really comfortable working in this boundary between the two disciplines and providing a vision to bridge the communication between both sides.
The applications I’ve made range from simple Excel workbooks or Access databases (yes, they were very useful in their time and very powerful if you knew what you were doing) to full-fledged web applications that went on to become commercial products (like TxAnalyser for example). When my job has allowed me to do so, I’ve also been either, part of or led teams that create reasonably complex internal corporate systems.
Whilst I’ve used many programming languages over the years, these days I tend to program mainly using .NET (C#) or PHP for the back-end and standard web technologies (HTML, CSS and JS) for the front-end when working on web applications. For desktop applications I’ve used various stacks, from proven and mature technologies like .NET to more recent systems like Electron.
Along this journey, and while searching to fill my own needs, I’ve also come across great engineering-related projects scattered all over the web. There are resources out there ranging from open-source projects to commercial products that could benefit engineering students, enthusiasts and professionals alike.
In the hope that other engineers would benefit from having a comprehensive repository as a reference, I created this website (Engineers Tools) as a way to share these tools with the world.
In this site you will find links to software, books, articles, videos and any other engineering information that I think is of relevance for people working in the various areas of specialisation in this vast discipline. This includes some links and downloads to software and other resources that I’ve created myself. I also include some links to commercial products as a way to provide some funding to keep the site running.
I hope you find this site useful and look forward to hear any comments or suggestions you might have.
As a complimentary aspect to the site, I have dedicated LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter (@Engineers_Tools) accounts, feel free to follow!
Thanks for reading this far and let’s keep making the world a better place to live, one engineer at a time.