Developing a Course to Build Awesome Programs at Work - Need Your Opinion

You probably lost many engineers at "awesome".

Computer geeks and marketeers understand "awesome".

I'd guess that these things already exist, though maybe not without a cost.

I suggest that you proceed at warp speed and let the forum know of your progress.

Of course, if you are doing this while being paid to be an aerospace engineer, your employer may have an opinion about what you release into the public domain.

I don't know if this will help much? You seem to be in way over my head, but, years ago when having problems I solved it by making myself aware of how the compiler looked at the soft ware and how it went about compiling it.

Regards JD.

Yes, this is an interesting proposition.

There is a great need for such skills for working engineers. I have also evolved the same skills using simulation software, writing subroutines, macros to fetch data and custom reports out of the simulation software.

Go ahead. God bless you for this course!

Regards,

Vinay Mehta

I am about half-asleep today, was extra worn out yesterday from tinkering in hot shop space, instead of resting up on the couch.

You wrote: "Go ahead. God Bless you for this course!"

I read: Goat heat. God Bless you for this curse!" Wow.

GIGO in charge of the GI unloading staging area.

To build "useful software" one has to understand the problem and the solution to the said problem. Thats the part where Engineering software becomes useful.

From there its just stepping into GUI development, Calculus engine design, I/O organisation, and report formats and automatisation.

I hope you are not trying to develop software to fix a none-existing problem.

Try to stick to "useful". The computer science course should have given you the basics on the stepping stones. The engineering knowledge, experience and problems should be found in the daily work. You might want to teach based on some real stories which exist out there where software development came up with "awesome" engineering solutions.

as for your points:

1. Excel handling should be a simple import export function. make sure you have cut-n-paste enabled.
2. Any repetitive stuff should be automated and minimum input should be required
3. Viewing options with an App or on tablet is so not engineering as you still will need a big powerful machine to run simulations. Viewing App is secondary. What about your primary viewing options? Engineers do not impress the boss with nice fonts. Get this out of the course asap. Think about primary viewing options first.
4. Report generation is probably a mine field if you ask how much interaction do you need or want to allow.

What I miss is: Data storage, data handling, project management, engine development. The engine is your core of the software system. Whats it gonna be?
You are still way off to make something "useful".
But you did start.

Good luck

IS

I think you need to simplicate and decomplicatify. Virtually everything you want to do can be done in Excel itself.
Data entry? Manual by any copy typist. Automated? Your data generating machine needs to be programmed to produce .csv files. As we don't know what your data generators can do, you will have to ask the manufacturers
Data analysis? Learn to use Excel formulae.
Automate repetitive stuff? Learn to use the Excel macro language. Build a smartphone/tablet app? Why bother??? Open the laptop Excel program and show the screen/feed a projector.
Automate report generation? Learn to use the Excel macro language.
There remains the programming of simulators. Without knowing the scope of your simulations the only answer I can give is to learn a general-purpose language (e.g. C++ or Java) and get on with it.

I don't do that. I call up my software guy and say "I want it to do this or that", he does it and all is right with the world.

If you want to make software go into a mobile app, it might be easier to use dudamobile.com which takes any web page(site) and mobilizes it, but as others have said, that probably wouldn't be too useful to many, but this way you wouldn't have to spend any time on it either.

As a former software developer, I agree with many of the other contributors who say there are too many variables for too many people to come up with a one stop shopping experience. Getting people to know how to gather the facts and do proper systems analysis would get you closer, since you're saying most people know a language or two. Maybe teach them pseudo code to define how a person would attack the problem would be a better class, because then they could pass it off to a programmer or they could see the problem clearly enough to then take it to code themselves.