Intro

This site was started in August 2017 with the goal of collecting and spreading ideas on how to use Free and Open Source software to assist civil engineers in their design work.

If you are an engineer who uses MS Excel frequently to assist you in design or do some programming the knowledge shared on this site should assist you in your future design endeavours.

The core technologies that will be used is Jupyter notebooks together with the Python programming language. Python is the 800 pound gorilla of scripting languages widely used in the scientific community. The main advantages of these technologies are:

• It is free software. It may be freely downloaded distributed and shared wtihout the need for licensing and licensing fees.
• It is cross platform. It can run on MS Windows, Linux or MacOS.
• Some engineering programs with a command line interfaces for example EPANet can be executed directly from Jupyter.
• Your full workflow is documented for future reference.
• You can work with much larger data sets than spreadsheets.
• Python is much faster than spreadsheet programs.

All blog posts will be done with Jupyter and can be downloaded and apllied to your own datasets.