Engineer

The Engineer

No, not everyone who graduates with a degree in mechanical engineering is an engineer. Graduates may call themselves that, but in my work as a research assistant, I have far too often noticed that many graduates lack the fundamental skills required of an engineer:

1. A logical, strategic, and thoughtful approach
2. Abstraction of known and unknown processes and problems, reducing them to their essentials
3. Solving the abstracted problems in the simplest way possible

Engineers are lazy. So lazy that they won’t settle for simply copying data from A to B by hand or redoing calculations for recurring tasks. Instead, they write a program to do the work for them - now and in the future, always.

At the same time, engineers must deal with existing. It’s great when theory tells us how flows behave, but if the math doesn’t give us a solution to the Navier-Stokes equations, engineers have to discretize in a CFD, develop boundary treatment methods, and make approximations and estimates.

Building and stuff

As a freelance building services engineer, I’ve designed heating systems, sized heat pumps, laid kilometers of virtual pipes, conducted energy audits on existing buildings, prepared them for renovation, and done everything else that goes with the job. You can make a living doing this, but after the fifth heating load calculation using Revit and the Linear plugin, it gets… a bit monotonous. DIN EN 12831 is all well and good, but it nearly dates back to the last millennium. (It’s no coincidence that an RWTH professor recently remarked, “The calculation is far too complex; we’ll never fit that into a standard”, referring to an equation with more than three summand terms.) One thing is certain: If I had done DIN 12831, there wouldn’t be a standard 10 % discrepancy between the sum of the room heating loads and the building’s heating load. And I certainly wouldn’t have attached a (non-digital) spreadsheet as a template for calculating the room heating load or at most, a QR code with a DOI to the finished script or repository.

Fortunately, I am a skilled engineer and can apply the three points mentioned, whether in the context of buildings, heat transfer processes, or mechanics. Or new problems.

Skills

Everything is relative, but as far as I can tell from comparing myself to those around me, I am

Professional for

• Applied logic
• Python
• LaTeX
• Problem abstraction and proposed solutions
• Transitioning to a FOSS-only lifestyle

really good in

• LAMP-Servers
• Heat transfer and heat balance
• Neural networks (commonly referred to as “AI”)
• A lot of software (a lit would be way too long...)
• Linux and Windows
• CFD simulations with OpenFOAM
• Hardware and PC configuration
• Knowledge of additive manufacturing and DfAM

willing to help, but you have to be prepared for a lot of complaining with

• Printers and everything that goes with them. People! It's time to finally step into the 21st century
• Support for something I just really don't see the logic in (which, ultimately, also applies to the printers)

totally against

• “That's how we've always done it”
• Lack of logic
• Smoking
• Lying
• Stupidity
• Injustice

Here’s what I’d like to try, because I’m 99 % sure I’d succeed:

• Management consulting on efficiency and workflows
• Digitizing all kind of businesses:
  • Setting up servers/mainframes with Nextcloud collaboration, ERP systems, n8n, or similar
  • Developing automations
  • Creating forms that reduce repetitive work from 10 minutes to 10 seconds
  • Enhancing security through cryptography
  • Reducing/eliminating dependencies on Big Tech (okay, the success rate here is 100 %)
  • And much more...

Contact

Anyone with an interesting problem can contact me at info@ing-kimmich.de