SOLIDWORKS World 2015 Top Ten ideas – a time for voting

There is still time to vote for your favorite ideas on this year’s SOLIDWORKS World 2015 Top Ten list.  There are a lot of ideas this year.  In fact, with nearly 10K submissions, this year’s list of ideas has broken all previous records.  That means, there are a lot more ideas for which to vote!

To vote for your favorite ideas, first sign in to SOLIDWORKS Forum.  Then, go to the SOLIDWORKS World 2015 Top Ten ideas areas (this link will only work once you sign in).  Or, you can navigate to the voting area by logging on to the forum and going to General>SOLIDWORKS World 2015 Top List>Content>Ideas.  Voting will close on Friday, January 23, 2015.  The final top ten vote-getters will be announced at SOLIDWORKS World.

Drawings Top Ten list from years past: SWW2013

This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series Past Years Drawings Top Ten

The top ten Drawings specific ideas submitted to SolidWorks World 2013 Top Ten list were heavily focused on dimensions and drawing views.

SolidWorks World 2013 Top Ten Drawings Ideas

  1. Create auxiliary line for dimensioning angles – Implemented in SW2015
  2. Perimeter Dimension or Total Length Dimension
  3. Allow mirroring of drawing views in the drawing
  4. Isometric view break
  5. Ability to create half dimensions (Option to change any dimension line to foreshortened)
  6. On drawings, zoom to fit should ignore view bounding boxes – Implemented in SW2015
  7. Don’t re-size center marks with scale of drawing view or sheet
  8. Ability to create Alternate position view on sectioned/broken-out section view
  9. Make an easy interface to modify format of hole callouts (without having to edit calloutformat.txt)
  10. Projected view of a break view should have option ‘align breaks with parent’ enabled by default

As of SOLIDWORKS 2015, the implementation for the SWW13 list is 20%.  Create auxiliary line for dimensioning angles was the only Drawings idea to get onto the official SolidWorks World 2013 Top Ten list.

Voting is now open on the current SOLIDWORKS World 2015 Top Ten list.  Vote on as many ideas as you wish!  Just remember, you have to logon to see the ideas and vote for them.

SOLIDWORKS Certification – CSWP to CSWE

This entry is part 5 of 5 in the series SOLIDWORKS Certification

I first earned my SolidWorks Professional certificate (CSWP) at SolidWorks World 2011.  Attendees of SolidWorks World are able take the CSWP exam if they specify such when they register for the conference.

Between SolidWorks World 2011 and 2012, I joined the DS SolidWorks Corp on the Product Definition team.  This is a busy job.  There was quite a stretch before I attempted any of the advanced certification exams.  There are several advanced exams, covering various areas of SolidWorks functionality.  You need to pass any four of the five CSWP advanced certificates in order to qualify to take the Certified SolidWorks Expert exam.

Chart of my certifications leading up to the CSWE

My path to earning my CSWE

As shown in the above chart, I took most of my advanced exams this year: Mold Tools, Surfacing and Weldment, after having the Drawings Tool certification for awhile.  I’m excited that I just earned my CSWE this week; a Christmas present to myself.  Just in time for SOLIDWORKS World 2015 and its secret CSWE event.  Jeff Mirisola wrote about his first CSWE event a couple years ago.  This year will be my first, having missing out for two years.

Here’s my badges of honor:

CSWE_MD_smallCSWP_MDsmall CSWP_Drawing_smallCSWP_Mold_small CSWP_Surfacing_small CSWP_Weldmentssmall

 

 

 

Even though I’ve earned my CSWE, I may still attempt the final advanced exam for Sheet Metal at some point, plus any new exams that may come out eventually.

The number of CSWE’s worldwide is still less than 1950 as of today (December 22, 2014), according to the Certificate Virtual Tester database.  Being a CSWE makes you stand out.  As an employee of SOLIDWORKS, it shows that I have a thorough understanding of how to use the software that I help design.  For users, it is a clear demonstration that you have excellent understanding of SOLIDWORKS and its various tools.

Site Status: News about SolidWorks Legion

SolidWorks Legion logoIt’s been a long time since things have worked the way I want on SolidWorks Legion website.  This blog was started back in 2007 as a follow-on to my SolidWorks resource website.   SolidWorks Legion is now many times more popular than that original site.  When I first started this blog, I loaded it up with as many bells and whistles as I could find from WordPress.  The blog was loaded pretty heavy with plugins.  Despite using WordPress at its limits, SolidWorks Legion worked well enough for a long time, with a lot of cool features via the plugins.

This all came to a crashing halt when my article about Linux support for Draftsight went viral in March 2011.  With 10’s of thousands of hits in an extremely short period, SolidWorks Legion was literally slashdotted (a.k.a, hug of death) from Slashdot and other sites by very happy Linux fans wanting a free or cheap professional 2D CAD application.  SolidWorks Legion was up and down and up repeatedly for several days.  Up to that point, SolidWorks Legion was running about 400 unique hits a day.  Nothing has been the same since.  After the traffic settled back down, site traffic averaged 600 hits per day.

Unfortunately, that pushed the site up over the capacity allowed by my shared server.  I had to move SolidWorks Legion to what’s known as a Virtual Private Server.   Since traffic seemed to be steady, I didn’t mind paying the extra.  The problem is that SolidWorks Legion never really recovered from being slashdotted.  I had to scale back features, remove this and that elements, and tinker with settings just to get things to the point where I wasn’t constantly monitoring the site.

To add insult to injury, since that time, Google changed its search result algorithm to reduce the importance of blogs.  Over night, my unique hits dropped from an average of 600 to 200 per day.  It’s been a painful few years of website management.   On top of it all, I was hired on the Product Definition team by DS SolidWorks Corp later in 2011, so my available time for the site has been more constrained that ever.  This blog has been limping along for awhile now.  Each new release of WordPress seemed to slow things down even more, even with the use of site caching.

Well, I have some good news.  Thanks for a couple of friends (Dan Herzberg and Charles Culp) recently, I discovered new ways to get the website humming again (I hope).  First thing I was able to do it get notifications working again with IFTTT.com.  Using this site helps take pressure off my site by removing the need for various questionable social media publishing plugins.  SolidWorks Legion is now publishing automatically to Twitter (@swsuper), SolidWorks Legion page on Facebook, and several other outlets.  The one annoying hole has been Google+.   Jetpack WordPress plugin has solved this problem; and a whole lot more.  Jetpack brings a lot of functionality to self-hosted WordPress sites.  Much of this functionality was earlier only available via a myriad of poorly written plugins.  Jetpack appears to be a well constructed plugin that allows SolidWorks Legion to have all of its old bells and whistles again, plus a lot more (stuff I’ve wanted to add for a long time).  In addition, I’ve dropped caching, as that seemed to make things worse in the long run.

Let’s see how things go.  I’m hopeful that my old site is not just back to its old self, but better than ever!  Let me know what you think!  Has  SolidWorks Legion been better behaved over the past week?