Brent Cullimore
I was told that, after a few years of producing this blog, our true identity would become evident. At least if we were true to ourselves, and if we didn’t just turn this into blatant marketing and self-indulgent yakety yak.
Instead of waiting, I thought I should just come right out and say who I think we are. Then maybe after a few years you can see how accurate I was.
First, we’re quiet. Maybe you haven’t heard of us … even though we’ve been around for almost 25 years.
We’re also geeky. We’re technophiles: thrilled by the latest cool gizmo, happy to be stuffing strange terms into hidden corners of matrices. Being thermal types, we tend to like things that generate or consume energy: cars, rockets, solar power systems, and so forth. We wait at parties for someone to ask why golf balls have dimples. Or look like they were thinking about asking.
I could say that we collectively have hundreds of years of experience, but that just makes us sound old and our younger engineers would object. Most of us didn’t get our start by writing, teaching, or supporting CAE software. Instead, we built and tested hardware, worked on huge multi-year projects, and sent our creations into the world (or above it).
But being engineers, we’re naturally obsessed with productivity and efficiency. So we not only became proficient in the tools of the trade, we started extending them and then eventually writing new tools. We write the tools that we ourselves want, and we support them like we would want to be supported. We know what it is like to be three days before a critical design review when you notice something odd in a plot.
Except for some of our “back office” staff, we’re all thermal engineers. Even our Director of Sales, Cindy Beer, is a thermal engineer who also supervises product support. How could someone recommend one of our software packages if they don’t understand how those tools are really used? For the same reason, if we don’t have the right answer, we’ll try to point you to someone who does. It’s the Golden Rule, people: that’s the kind of help we want when we’re searching for new tools.
What exactly is a “thermal engineer?” That’s a whole topic in and of itself, and I’ll address it in the next post.