Discussion Thread

On Nov. 5, 1852, twelve esteemed engineers gathered at New York City's Croton Aqueduct to establish what would become the American Society of Civil Engineers. Here's to our collective impact and the limitless future of our profession. 

In honor of ASCE day, I wanted to share one of my first ideas that I believe contributed significantly to the success of something I work on. I was able to help increase the efficiency of one of our workflows for a task, enabling us to start doing more work with fewer human inputs.

A few years ago, I was assigned to support a contract that my company held with one of our clients, performing sewer capacity analyses within GIS. There was a learning curve associated with this task, as most of the work involved is focused around setting up all of the elements correctly. The actual "analysis" part of the task is pretty much just the push of the button. The more I spent time setting up analyses, the more I understood why I was performing certain steps. I eventually recognized that there was no reason to be setting up one of the steps manually when it was possible to use a script to do it for us. Apparently, none of the other staff had thought to do it before, or didn't know how to get it done. Fortunately, we had some budget available and after asking around, I became aware of a colleague who could help us write this script. The end result is that we now have a tool that can be run to automate one of the steps that we used to have to perform by hand. This both saves us time and also reduces the opportunity for human error. I feel some satisfaction for thinking of this every time I run this script, and thank the person who helped write it every chance I get.

This idea came to life through communication and collaboration, and I believe is a small example of the progress we can make when we're inspired to create change and work with those around us to bring it about.

Are there any anecdotes from your own career that define what it means to be an engineer to you?

On Nov. 5, 1852, twelve esteemed engineers gathered at New York City's Croton Aqueduct to establish what would become the American Society of Civil Engineers. Here's to our collective impact and the limitless future of our profession. 

In honor of ASCE day, I wanted to share one of my first ideas that I believe contributed significantly to the success of something I work on. I was able to help increase the efficiency of one of our workflows for a task, enabling us to start doing more work with fewer human inputs.

A few years ago, I was assigned to support a contract that my company held with one of our clients, performing sewer capacity analyses within GIS. There was a learning curve associated with this task, as most of the work involved is focused around setting up all of the elements correctly. The actual "analysis" part of the task is pretty much just the push of the button. The more I spent time setting up analyses, the more I understood why I was performing certain steps. I eventually recognized that there was no reason to be setting up one of the steps manually when it was possible to use a script to do it for us. Apparently, none of the other staff had thought to do it before, or didn't know how to get it done. Fortunately, we had some budget available and after asking around, I became aware of a colleague who could help us write this script. The end result is that we now have a tool that can be run to automate one of the steps that we used to have to perform by hand. This both saves us time and also reduces the opportunity for human error. I feel some satisfaction for thinking of this every time I run this script, and thank the person who helped write it every chance I get.

This idea came to life through communication and collaboration, and I believe is a small example of the progress we can make when we're inspired to create change and work with those around us to bring it about.

Are there any anecdotes from your own career that define what it means to be an engineer to you?

On Nov. 5, 1852, twelve esteemed engineers gathered at New York City's Croton Aqueduct to establish what would become the American Society of Civil Engineers. Here's to our collective impact and the limitless future of our profession. 

In honor of ASCE day, I wanted to share one of my first ideas that I believe contributed significantly to the success of something I work on. I was able to help increase the efficiency of one of our workflows for a task, enabling us to start doing more work with fewer human inputs.

A few years ago, I was assigned to support a contract that my company held with one of our clients, performing sewer capacity analyses within GIS. There was a learning curve associated with this task, as most of the work involved is focused around setting up all of the elements correctly. The actual "analysis" part of the task is pretty much just the push of the button. The more I spent time setting up analyses, the more I understood why I was performing certain steps. I eventually recognized that there was no reason to be setting up one of the steps manually when it was possible to use a script to do it for us. Apparently, none of the other staff had thought to do it before, or didn't know how to get it done. Fortunately, we had some budget available and after asking around, I became aware of a colleague who could help us write this script. The end result is that we now have a tool that can be run to automate one of the steps that we used to have to perform by hand. This both saves us time and also reduces the opportunity for human error. I feel some satisfaction for thinking of this every time I run this script, and thank the person who helped write it every chance I get.

This idea came to life through communication and collaboration, and I believe is a small example of the progress we can make when we're inspired to create change and work with those around us to bring it about.

Are there any anecdotes from your own career that define what it means to be an engineer to you?