Python in Structural Engineering: Load Factors (Your first Python library?)

Factoring loads is a technique that is taught early in engineering education, however, from my experience working with young engineers, it is not very well understood. Further, the process of "load take down" is essentially a very complicated accounting exercise similar to managing business ledgers in multiple currencies but general techniques for performing this accounting work are not generally taught or discussed. As we develop our own Python tool-kits, I think that developing a general-purpose library for factoring loads is a good place to start. In this video, I discuss different approaches to developing such a library and show how I tackled the development of my own load factoring library. Streamlit demo application: https://structuralpython-load-factors... GitHub Repos: https://github.com/StructuralPythonVi... Want to learn Python for structural engineering? https://structuralpython.com Chapters: 00:00 - Intro: Your experience? 00:41 - The Currencies Metaphor 02:28 - Technique 1: Individual functions 03:49 - Technique 2A: A Generic Function (for dicts) 05:43 - Technique 2B: A Generic Function (for arrays) 07:30 - Store load combos in JSON 10:36 - Technique 3: NamedTuple 13:57 - Load alias dicts 16:52 - Finding Max and Min 22:28 - Occupancy dicts 23:59 - Practical example with pycba 25:22 - Analysis results 26:02 - Summary & Streamlit app 26:35 - Outro - StructuralPython.com