I enjoy writing software that solves real problems and makes people’s life easier. Even though nowadays I focus more on software development than anything else, I still have a passion for civil and structural engineering. My name is Vittorio and I have studied Structural Engineering at the university of Trento, Italy. The lack of a program that could do this is what ultimately pushed me to code Beamsolver, an online beam and frame calculator that lets the user find the analytical solution of both determinate and indeterminate structures. The regular FEA software that all engineers use can’t solve those kinds of problems, so I was out of luck if I wanted to check whether my results were correct or not. This means that the diagram equations (axial force, shear and bending moment) are symbolic as well, since they are a function of those quantities. One key aspect of the structure above is that the beam lengths and the loads are symbolic quantities. If I wanted to have a chance to complete the test in time, I had to calculate the axial force, shear and bending moment of every beam in that structure in under fifteen minutes. This was often just the first step in a much longer exam and a mistake here meant that everything else that followed would have been wrong as well! Those were fun times. I had to do it quickly and without errors.
