 Welcome to this episode of the Structural Engineering Channel podcast. A podcast focused on helping structural engineering professionals stay up-to-date on technical trends in the field and also help them to succeed in their careers and lives. I'm your co-host Alexis Clark. I work in Hilti's North American headquarters as the product manager of our chemical anchoring portfolio in the U.S. and Canada. I'm a licensed professional engineer in Texas and I graduated with a degree in civil engineering from UT Austin. And I'm currently pursuing my MBA at Auburn. I'm your co-host Matt Bacartal. I'm a licensed engineer at DCI Engineers, practicing on structural projects in California with an undergraduate degree from Cal Poly Pomona and a master's degree in structural engineering from UC San Diego. Before Matt introduces our guest, I wanted to share with you that the very first episode of This Week in Civil Engineering, also known as TWICE, has been published today. TWICE is a 10 to 15 minute weekly audio and video podcast hosted by practicing civil, structural, and geotechnical engineers, bringing listeners the latest industry news. We recognize that none of us have the time to read up on all the news we'd like to anymore and soon we won't have to. Thanks to TWICE. Go check it out at www.twice.news. That's T-W-I-C-E dot news. Make sure to subscribe to the show to get your weekly updates. Now I'd like to introduce our guests for this episode. Sam Corrigliano is the CEO and co-founder of SkySib dot com, the first structural analysis and design software available 100% on the cloud. Sam has a degree in business, engineering, and is a full stack developer, leading him to launch SkySib in 2015. Since then, SkySib cloud technology has served 200,000 users in over 160 countries worldwide. He's also responsible for the day-to-day operations, functions, and vision of SkySib. Now let's jump into our conversation with Sam. Sam, welcome to the podcast. Hey, great to be here. Thanks for having us. Glad to have you. Before we dive too further into our questions, can you tell our audience a little bit more about what it is that you do on a daily basis at SkySib cloud engineering software? Yeah, sure. So I manage a lot of the day-to-day operations at the company. So regular meetings with product development team, marketing, sales. I'm still quite heavily involved in the product itself. Paul and I, my co-founder, we're really big product guys, so we really enjoy having a hands-on approach to the product. And we really believe that if you make a good product, it sells itself. So that's really at a very core part of the company. So in order to keep that vision on trend, we definitely like to be involved with the product development side. But usually my days start off with a team meeting. We have a couple of those through the day. The first one kicks off at 9 a.m. We're liaising with the product team, figuring out what updates to do or what feature requests we have and kind of organizing those to go out after testing. So yeah, it's usually wearing a few different hats in any given day, but I really enjoy where we're at. So yeah, it's a labor of love. Thanks, Sam, for that. Welcome to the show again. And you know, with the sky-sip, I checked out the software and tried it out a bit. Q, it really looks like a, it reminds me of a tech startup journey, kind of, but in the structural engineering field. Q, tell us about the journey, how you, I believe you're the co-founder. So how did you and your other co-founder startup from Sydney to now, you know, reaching a global audience with the software? Yeah, so my co-founder is actually my next-door neighbor. So we were studying engineering together and we're just kicking a ball around the backyard one day and we're sort of just discussing our degrees and also just the lack of easy-to-use software and software that was specifically online. We realized that our structural engineering software that we were using at the time, it wasn't great to work with and it was, you know, very difficult to learn and also being desktop, you know, you had to download and install it, we're having some problems with that as well. So the idea kind of spawned from that, that there was no one bringing structural engineering to the cloud and we wanted to be the ones to fill that void. So we started tinkering with software and teaching ourselves how to program and released an early product, which is Sky-Sip Beam, which is still a very popular product today. And from that, we were just getting a lot of feature requests and people really loved it and people wanted to see more of it. So we decided to brand it as Sky-Sip and release a suite of structural analysis software and really focus on making it easy to use in cloud-based, which was what we're hearing our existing user base are really, really enjoying. So it's been quite a journey since then. That was five years ago. So, you know, we now have a team and as you mentioned, we have users across the globe, which is fun but also challenging, keeping us up at night sometimes. But it's been, yeah, it's been an amazing journey so far and we're really excited for what's to come in the future. So I'm really, first of all, I'm amazed that your next-door neighbor also happens to be a structural engineer because that doesn't happen very often. Yeah, he's actually the one that got me into it. I was doing business study, like studying commerce. And I always had a passion for building things and he was always like, you know, why don't you do engineering or combine the degrees? So yeah, I'm going to really thank him too because he's the one that, I guess, is like inception. He put the idea in my mind and it grew. And the next thing I knew I was doing engineering, which I absolutely love. I'm very passionate about engineering. That's awesome. I'm also so curious. So 2015 is kind of a new wave of time to be thinking about a fully cloud-based software, right? I feel like you guys are a little ahead of your time. Yeah, I think so, but I think it also gave us time to build the product to get it to a really good place to where the market was ready. Definitely, we're seeing it in other industries. Other industries have moved a lot faster than, say, engineering and they're, you know, completely on the cloud now. They've made that shift. They've made that transition. And sort of the way we see it is that the last real transition was moving from like large computers that took up, you know, rooms to desktop computers and that was sort of in the 70s and 80s. And now we're going through another transformation where we're moving online. We're moving to the cloud and we're seeing other industries make that shift and benefit from that. So, you know, I guess we wanted to get in early. We knew that that's where the future is headed. And I think that gave us time to sort of build up and prepare ourselves and focus on the product to make sure that that was right by the time. Yeah, I completely agree. No, I completely agree. I didn't mean to catch you off there. You're kind of flowing right into the question that I want to ask, which is, you know, you mentioned this big shift from desktop to cloud. What is it? How do you think that that cloud shift is going to affect the way that structural engineers design? Well, I really think there's a few core areas where that will come into play. I think the first and foremost is accessibility. Right now you have to have the software installed on your local desktop computer. And that's the amount of access that you have. You can't, you know, visit it from another browser or jump on another computer or jump on your mobile. We don't have that accessibility. That's kind of an issue in the industry. So being on the cloud means you can jump on your mobile. You can access it from a Mac computer. You can access it from a tablet. All your files are central in a central location. You can even, you know, share your models and collaborate and work in real time. It's kind of like, you know, if you've ever used Google Drive, having a sheet or a Word document on Google Drive, multiple people can be editing at once. And you just get a lot more work done in that way because it's a lot more collaborative and you can achieve high level of productivity. So I think that accessibility is probably the first issue that it addresses. I have a question that stemmed out of that, that accessibility standpoint. So this is, this is probably a very biased question because I was part of the development of a cloud-based software for Hilty and then launched it at the beginning of 2019. And we definitely saw a benefit to the accessibility to getting to your software from any computer, from any location, so long as your Wi-Fi connected. And that was a struggle for us sometimes because we had some pushback from existing users of our desktop software who said, well, I don't always have access. Maybe I'm on a job site and I'll have access to Wi-Fi or what if my connectivity is down? You know, does the cloud store everything that I've done up to that point? Have you had any issues with accessibility or with, have you gotten any pushback from potential customers who say they do still want a desktop version? How have you overcome those? Yeah, it's a very small percentage. I would say less than 1%, that have those issues with internet connectivity. It's only getting stronger. We've got 5G around the corner which is 10 times the speed of 4G. So even having access from your mobile is becoming faster. And if you really look at where the resources are being applied to, it's towards the cloud and this online technology and internet and making internet faster. So that technology and that connectivity is only going to improve. And for sure it might not be for everyone if you're in a very remote location with pretty poor internet connectivity. It's probably not the right product for you. But like I said, the pushback we receive is less than 1%. Mostly we're seeing the benefits and the positives come from being able to access from a device that they might not have otherwise been able to access from. Yeah, it just seems like as technology keeps going, you know, further advancing, I think they're even going to just start having more Wi-Fi even on construction sites or wherever you're going. And I think it would become less of an issue. And yeah, for me, you know, I mostly work at a typical design office and because there are some softwares that are, you know, trying to get on the cloud and when I tinkered with cloud-based software, like you were saying, like Google or whatnot, I do think that is where things should be going because I think one of the cool things is you don't have to worry about like those big updates or if you have the latest software or you need to install something. And I think as a firm, if you have like a medium to large-sized firm, you don't have to worry about manually updating everybody's software. But also the really cool thing is the collaboration. I think that's what opens up doors because, you know, we use software where everyone can collaborate, especially with, you know, everyone going virtual now. I think the more it opens up kind of that real-time updates, maybe even like, you know, commenting on someone's model while they're working on it, things like that. I think that's just really cool and interesting about, you know, getting on the cloud. So it's a, there's definitely a lot of benefits that I think that are definitely where the future's going. I think so too, yeah. And I mean, there's a lot of other sort of areas too where the cloud brings improvements to productivity and even design, things like optimization. If you have your cloud servers, you know, they can be 32, 64 core computers, huge supercomputers. Obviously, we don't have access to that as our local computers are only usually four cores. So what that allows us to do is run through thousands of iterations of possible models to find the sort of optimal design that reduces the cost and material usage for your clients. So there's things like that that we're exploring as well and even design automation where you're sort of automating parts of your job, which are pretty mundane and boring. So through like, you know, our API and things like that. So you can work a lot more productive where you're sort of automating certain tasks or certain design procedures so that you can turn around those projects a lot faster and give your clients a better service. So I think there's a few different areas where cloud is benefiting other industries and we're drawing on those and trying to apply them to the structural engineering profession. So Matt, I wanted to transition really quick because we had the opportunity to read a really interesting article that you wrote recently that was published on LinkedIn called Programming and Structural Engineering, Why It's Becoming an Essential Scale. And I'm fascinated by this because I will be the first to admit that up until a few years ago I thought that engineering was the only valuable skill. And I have since learned my lesson. I'm actually getting my MBA myself. So the business side I'm starting to realize is very useful. And to any of our audience, if you did not catch our last episode that just aired some different things, even if you're not interested in the business path for yourself, some things that you can learn from a little bit of business school in an hour from an episode of a podcast that can help you be better in your job as a structural engineer. Go back and listen to that one. But when I'm referring to this article that you wrote about programming being a skill for structural engineers, like even that, it's hard for me because that seems like such a very different technical skill to utilize in a consulting role. So can you tell our listeners a little bit? Give us a debrief on that article and why you believe it's important that our listeners learn how to program. Yeah, certainly. And to touch on a point you made, I guess I don't see them too distant just because you kind of apply the same logic that you would as an engineer to programming. You're sort of using like systems like if statements and procedures and sort of a protocol or a system of rules that you have to use in order to achieve a solution. So it's the same as like, you know, engineers will use physics. Programmers have to work within the bounds of what the programming language can do. So we're actually very good. We've got really good minds for programming actually, engineers in general. And I think there's quite a lot of people. I'd say maybe like in my experience I've noticed like say 10, 20% of engineers have a real interest in programming. And I think it's for the same reasons we're solving problems. It's at the core of what we want to do as engineers. And I think for any young engineers who any young engineers who do have that interest in programming there's a lot of opportunities. There's new roles coming up for data scientists or computational engineers. And these are very digital roles where they help companies automate or become more productive for the engineering team. So they might develop solutions that really remove some of those mundane tasks and let the engineering team be more effective. And I think that's where a lot of the benefit comes from the company side where they have a team of engineers really benefiting from having one two digital engineers that are able to program and able to develop these solutions to be more productive. And so that's why I really believe it's important. I also think by doing that we're future proofing our industry as well because if you look at the new technology that's coming across like machine learning or artificial intelligence it's going to be programmers that really run with this. So having that link to programming from a structural engineering profession industry having that link and having those grounds covered really future proofs our industry and also propels us forward in the future. So I really do believe it's important. I think it's an easy transition to make for an engineer because we're already very good at a lot of those things you need to be good at to be a good programmer. All right, perfect. So Sam, I want to dive into something really quickly and that is you just mentioned that structural engineers are primed to be great in programming. We're technically minded. We can work within the bounds of a structured system to create a solution and get to the end goal. So what I'm hearing is is anyone in our audience could do this but my question to you is are there characteristics or ambitions in a specific type of structural engineer that really plug in well to the programming thing? Who in our audience should their ears should perk up right now and say, oh, that's me. Maybe I should look into this. I think it's for anyone who has done some programming and been really interested in it. We get a lot of emails and people reach out to us saying I'm a structural engineer but I'm really interested in programming. And for me, I did a course at uni. It was just a computational course like a simple programming course but right off the bat, I really enjoyed it and I really had a passion for wanting to do more of that. So I think for those people who have been exposed to it and really get interested in it and find themselves sort of being drawn to that, I think definitely you want to dive deep into that. There's a lot of great courses out there like Udemy and Coursera and Codebase. They're free to subscribe to and you can learn the theory of the programming. And I think that is a great place to start. And then I also think it needs to also come from the company too who want to become more efficient and innovate and sort of empowering these engineers with this interesting programming to develop those skills and just develop some of those solutions, prototype things and just play around with it. I think it comes from both sides. Yeah, at the time in from a design firm perspective I can really see it going in the way of, I think at the end of the day for a firm the more they can automate some of these calcs the more profitable they're going to be. And I see it as a going into the future you already have engineers fresh out of graduation they're really good with Excel they're basically programming with Excel with all these scripts and I know during grad school for me we basically learned how to program for the most part and know how programming works and I think a good transition for like a firm is like you were saying Sam like the firm supports it and they want to get into it but I think with the technology where it actually gets into the programming I know there's like software is that allow you to go into you know the code and kind of make like scripts for it similar to Excel but like I think you I think there's potential for software is where you can get like really creative if you're a good programmer know how the program works and the scripting behind the program is it like a was it custom scripts or something like that? I know they're doing it for like in the BIM world with their scripts but I know that there's a disguise of have something like that where they can do custom programming or make their own scripts for for that type of software. Yeah, definitely. We have an open API which lets you sort of directly connect to the disguise of technology so you can directly connect to our structural analysis software or our design checks or our modeling or our rendering even reporting so you can automate any job that involves those parts and definitely that's another thing that we see in the future that we're seeing in other industries is having an open API where engineers can create their own custom solutions because no two structural engineering firms are identical they've got their own problems they've got their own needs so just giving them the tools that they need to develop their own solutions is what we want to do so that is the purpose behind the API and we're seeing so many improvements from other industries and other professions that are tapping into API technology and just they're flying they're working a lot more productive in their work and I think we want to share that with our industry. Yeah, really interesting. It's like I think of it as I know I'm not a programmer but I think of it as Excel how you can get into scripting but now you have a software where you can do the scripting and get all custom and do some crazy stuff but yeah, I know if you're a younger engineer and you're really familiar with programming that might be something that you might be interested in maybe messing around with different types of software to see how you can benefit your firm and I think that's definitely what you keep doing. We keep calling out to the younger engineers and we may have some older engineers who are interested as well we don't discriminate we encourage all people who have an interest to explore those interests. I know for me it's like oh I'm too old to program maybe that's like a myth. I 100% agree with that. It's like something scripting going on I'm just like I go to the younger ones because they are more savvy with it than me so that's why I'm looking at it. Yeah, we just click the run button when it's done. And you know what actually a lot of the engineers that are coming to us with these problems and they want to automate and they want to solve them through the API are the older engineers they are the decision makers that are saying we want our team to be more productive we want them to be to remove all those mundane tasks that are taking way too long and give them their time back to focus on improving the design. So it's actually a lot of the older engineers that are coming through and implementing this change and then the younger ones are the ones that are actually building it. So it's nice to see. Sam as a CEO obviously you have a lot of vision where do you see the structural engineering industry maybe changing or advancing maybe in the next five, ten maybe in 50 years what do you see like technology maybe specifically that you can give further insight on or at least what your vision of the future is. Definitely. I think there's quite a few technologies that are coming through that are really going to change the way we design and work in general not just in our profession but the world as a whole. I think machine learning is a really interesting one. I think AI is another one that is quite closely related but I think for our particular industry I can see there's quite a lot of interest in design automation. I think that will be the first steps to change in our industry. It kind of makes sense that we follow sort of procedures and physics and rules that don't really change much. The design codes and like I said physics and forces they haven't changed in hundreds of years. So sort of writing smarter algorithms to deal with those laws and rules I think is where we're heading and I see a big push from this from even companies like Autodesk they have an API as well and they're pushing for design automation as well. So I think as an industry we're moving in that direction having API technology having programmers who sit in between structural engineers and the programming side of things to develop these solutions. I think that's where the next big change is going to come from and I see that progressing over the next 5 to 10 years. And then beyond that I think the other technology will sort of start to take play things like machine learning and AI and VR and those sorts of technologies taking on from what we've achieved in the first 5 to 10 years through design automation. I think that's a really interesting vision and I certainly don't disagree with you. I am curious at least in the US we're kind of feeling this shift in structural engineering perspective. We have a design code and we're very prescriptive in nature in a lot of ways and in the past 10, 20 years there has been this rhetoric around performance-based design and designing outside of the code guidelines and being creative and being what that means to be more efficient or to be more conservative but designing for the actual need of and function of the building and the system and whatever else you're designing. And so I'm curious how do you think I don't want to say it's going above and beyond the code but kind of this play outside of code requirements could fit in with technology. I guess the kind of the way I'm piecing these two worlds together is I envision a structural engineer either programming a code through an API to say this is what I need it to do or an engineer guiding this bot of sorts that's actually executing calculations and providing suggestions and then the engineer maybe tweaks it. Help me visualize this vision of yours. Yeah, for sure. I think that in the beginning it's going to be definitely the bot we'll call it performs say 90% of the work or a big chunk of the work particularly like preliminary design stage and then the engineer takes off and runs with it to sort of optimize and improves it rather than it's sort of end to end being run by a computer. So I think what it does is enables it gives the engineer his time back to sort of optimize and focus on areas of the design where he can improve it for the client rather than those mundane early tasks. So I think that's where it's going to definitely start off with and then beyond that I think you make a very good point where the the needs of clients and architects is really changing. You know, we're even seeing like programs like Grasshopper and Dynamo what they can do and what they can create these really incredible designs and now the structural engineer has to adapt to those new designs and we have to do it in a very efficient efficient way because there's going to be more and more of these buildings coming up. So I think it's up to sort of the engineers to to to sort of navigate where that's going to go and where those how we're going to design these buildings. I think it's going to probably less and less pressure on less and less reliance on prescriptive design codes and it sort of opens up to how else can we we look at designing these structures in a more flexible way. Yeah, and I think maybe using FAA maybe using smarter technology around the analysis side could be a way around that and it also opens up to then you have a general sort of system that we can use country to country or and I think that's really interesting and it's a bit beyond my pay grade I think I would I'm I would leave it up to Smarter Minds and me to develop what that would look like and I think but I'd be really excited to see how we transition to those more creative designs as a profession. Yeah, there's always that automation right if you're a company you want to automate stuff so you can you know get more out of your your money and like what you were saying Sam focus on the the more important things maybe you can get more creative by having testing five different designs instead of wasting all your time trying to come up with one and then all your time is wasted on that so I really think that's what yeah, I definitely don't disagree with you like it'll give us more options creativity to to implement in our designs focus on the more important things but yeah I think also with the what it where it's kind of leading towards to is you know there's like talk about what will they even need structural engineers anymore in the future because of all the the software and you know I always tell people it's like you you need to be that guide for that robot or whatever that's producing all that because at the end of the day the robots not stamping the drawing someone needs to know what's going on and if it looks right and that's what I tell the younger engineers too it's you know you're being paid to interpret the results and and see if the software whatever it's doing is correct or not and then if you can get that out and you're doing well how to engineer things without quenching all the numbers and kind of get that structural engineering would be called like the feeling of what a structure supposed to look like and behave once you get the fundamentals and then you can go crazy with the software because you're comfortable with it and you know how it's outputting things and you're checking its results I think that's where you really have the engineers will have like the really good tools to optimize their creativity maybe with like the performance space design because there's probably soft words that deep performance space designs similar to that too but really I think it'll allow the structural engineer of the future to be really creative with putting out there so I think it's really exciting I think you said it perfectly Matt optimize your creativity for an engineer that's exactly what these tools should be doing that was just beautifully said exactly and I think so many times throughout history we've we thought though this new technology technology is going to take away all our jobs but actually what it's done is just shifted it to be actually creating different types of roles right and I think the same is going to happen but we're removing data integrations and things like that and allowing the engineer to have more freedom and more free time to to focus on better designs and I think that's a win win for everyone in inside and outside of the industry alright Sam the hot topic you have a this interesting combination of business and engineering and programming and you know you definitely have taken your engineering skill and transformed into something very different that most engineers may not do during to all of our listeners who are thinking you know what this guy has such interesting ideas and you know I don't really know if this is a path that I see for me I know that you have a wealth of insight to share with our audience to help them be their best selves in their personal and career so I'm curious what what kind of nuggets of wisdom would you like to share with us today I think for any any young engineer to sound corny but just follow your passion I'm so glad that I made that decision back and starting because when I was studying starting commerce I didn't really enjoy it then I looked at engineering I really like that and then programming was like a subset of that that I just you know fell headfirst into so I'm so glad I made that decision that I don't know where it's going to lead but I'm going to really follow and double down on what I'm really interested in which is the programming side and I think that that can apply to to any engineer in in any field you know whether started and maybe has a taste of hydraulic engineer or geotech or structural and I think just really really follow that don't be afraid to sort of do things outside of what you're studying as well so you know we're programming after hours at night time because that's where we were interested in so don't be you know afraid to use that some that free time you have as a student to follow some of those passions that you have because you don't know where they'll lead so I definitely think for a younger engineer that's that's what I would give my advice sorry that's the advice I would give to myself yeah 10 years ago and I think for a general engineer in an in an office who is interested in in sort of improving workflows and and and designing smarter I think freeing up some of your time to focus on those areas is is a great way to go I think the we always recommend 2% of your workforce should be applied to creating more creative designs created solutions to your workflow problems so having someone so if you're in a team of 50 having one person who's dedicated to developing solutions for your engineering team we find companies that do that are a lot more productive and companies who do more than that are even more productive so it's a good rule of them thanks yeah we sort of drawn on companies that we've and research other companies and sort of taken how much how much time are they spending to R&D and then look at a typical engineering team and how you can sort of yeah apply that rule to them I like it definitely great advice I know it's it because it is cool to see that there is you know if you're really interested in programming there's just whole other you know avenue that you can go into to really either maybe change your career path maybe get into more programming skills that you that you're really interested in to help your firm now like what you were saying Sam maybe putting those extra skills into improving the workflow that can really help your company out and that's one way to add value to your company because you know if you can improve the workflow that's and you multiply that by 50 people that saves a lot of time so really great advice and thank you so much for getting on the show and it's you know it's always really cool to talk to people with leadership positions that are doing some really cool things and it's really great to see what your vision of the future is and sharing your advice with us so thanks so much Sam yeah thanks for having me really enjoyed it we hope you enjoy today's episode we would love to hear your feedback comments and or questions to leave them please visit structural engineering channel dot com there you'll find a summary of the key points discussed in today's episode which is episode number 34 as well as links to any of the resources during today's episode don't forget to subscribe on apple podcast or wherever you listen to your podcasts and don't forget to check out EMI's newest podcast this week in civil engineering which can be found at twice dot news make sure to start with your civil engineering colleagues until next time we wish you the best in all of your structural engineering endeavors