In a past career, I was a mechanical design engineer; I’ve probably spent 10,000 hours of my life in SolidWorks. Not once did I feel like a 3d mouse would speed me up or otherwise solve my problems. I trialed a spacepilot for several months and just couldn’t be arsed after awhile. What do others get out of them?

I started using Python ~15 years ago. I didn’t go to school for CS.

Compared to using literally anything else at the time as a beginner, pip was the best thing out there that I could finally understand for getting third party code to work with my stuff, without copy paste… on Windows.

When I tried Linux, package managers and make were pretty cool for doing C/C++ work.

Despite all that, us “regular” engineers were consigned to Windows.

We either had to use VBA or a runtime that didn’t need to be installed.

https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/

Enjoy a new rabbit hole to dive down

Got a link to that?

AutoCAD is amazing once you get all your shortcuts and settings set up just the way you like it.

100% this. I used to work at a company that sold software that mechanical engineers used all day, every day in a certain field. Our app looked like the last pic but with better alignment.

People who are competent want all the things on their screen all at once all the time. They also want keyboard shortcuts.

Two days ago lol

I watched Jon Gjenset’s stream where he implemented the beginnings of a BitTorrent client in Rust and of the four hours about 25% of it was spent wrestling with quirks in serde and reqwest.

It was pretty discouraging watching a pro have to fight the ecosystem so hard.