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