Engineering software, by someone who engineers

Why I built it

I have practiced structural engineering since 2007, the year after I graduated, and later founded my own structural engineering practice. Since then I have worked on thousands of residential, commercial, industrial and agricultural projects, in concrete, wood and steel.

For several years I designed hundreds of metal buildings. That work taught me how much a building depends on its connections. A member can be sized in minutes; the connection is where the checks, the details and the drawings pile up, and where a mistake costs the most. It also taught me how much a good connection design program matters, and how hard it is to find one that is clear, quick and fairly priced.

Writing software to solve a problem is not new to me. In college I wrote my first program in C and C++, and later a full scientific graphing calculator in Visual Basic. As an engineer I kept going: Excel macro programs for the design of biaxially loaded concrete columns and of steel trusses inside a spreadsheet, and hundreds of small programs that took the repetitive part out of my day-to-day work.

Every engineer knows the feeling: the deadline is close, the software fights you, and you end up checking the tool instead of the design. For years I fixed those problems a little at a time, one spreadsheet and one macro at a time. ILX Connection is what those years add up to: a complete program, built by an engineer, for the work engineers actually do.

— Founder