Rings of Fire followup

Another “on the road again” blog entry. Heading into an industrial design house tomorrow for a free-for-all session. I really enjoy this kind of work, where you don’t really know exactly what to expect.

Helping companies develop best practice, or to apply available tools to their existing processes to improve productivity is fun an frustrating at the same time. You get to see people get very hopeful when you describe the vision for tools like Toolbox, or Smart Fasteners or Smart Components, and then see the disappointment in their eyes when they realize that the vendor has failed in the implementation. You really want these people to be the ones to take the risk.

The Rings of Fire image from a couple posts ago struck a chord with a lot of readers. The idea of some features being riskier than others seemed like a simple fact of life to some readers, but was a revelation to some others.

Another way of visualizing the various library techniques hit me today, with simple methods on the left, and Toolbox or Smart XXX techniques on the right, separated by the Rocky Mountains, representing a lot of effort. It’s a tough sell when you are trying to convince people that some of this stuff is worth your time. It’s almost as if the developers are daring you to actually try to implement any of this stuff, or they make it only good enough to survive a 45 minute sales demo.

Anyway, more interesting stuff later. I’m starting to look into CASCADE and AvoCADo, open source CAD systems. We’ll see what comes of that. It never hurts to have alternatives