about

The story behind the platform.

Hi, I'm Ajay, a passionate structural engineer.

Almost seven years ago, I had a vision for how structural engineers could work. I'd worked in large design firms and smaller practices, designing underground tube stations, high-rise buildings and everything in between. I realised that whichever project you work on, the underlying methods and workflow rarely change.

It starts with clearly defining the design problem, establishing the governing inputs, and drawing on well-established theory, or exploring new territory on the unusual problems. What follows is the analysis, the design checks, the results review and the (endless) tweaking. The final output is a neatly crafted report, stitched together with the supporting calculations.

The tools to execute this workflow, however, are scattered. We reach for a textbook, open the Eurocodes, ask a colleague for advice, work through pages of calculations, build numerous spreadsheets, and end up with multiple versions of a report. Over time, you lose track.

So my vision was to bring it all into one home, Snare:

• The textbooks and Eurocodes now sit neatly in carefully curated pages in the Knowledge Hub.
• The senior engineer's advice, and the junior engineer crunching the numbers, became the Design Assistant.
• The calculations live inside each Design Module.
• Our trusted spreadsheets convert into Custom Modules.
• The report is written in the Report Editor, with the calculations stitched in exactly where they belong.
• And everything is saved to the cloud, so it's reachable anywhere, on any machine, any time.

What's particularly exciting is that this is just the beginning. With your feedback and input, the platform can evolve to cover more design modules and capture other parts of an engineer's workflow.

— Ajay Shrinivas · MEng, PhD, CEng, MICE