LEDAS Blog

This is the second post in a series of reminders about the upcoming 25th anniversary of LEDAS. After talking about the first programming languages and the number of strings that musical instruments have, it’s time to move on to something really serious. Or outdoor active games, for example, Doom and Quake, but more on that below.

But first, let's take a look at an unexpected coincidence:

  • This wonderful leap year of 2024 has exactly 366 days, as it should have.
  • Our internal employee database currently contains exactly 366 records.

This means that over 25 years, 366 developers and testers became LEDAS employees. Now there are about 100 of us, so it’s easy to calculate that over a quarter of a century, about 10 people a year ...

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This post opens a series of publications dedicated to the upcoming 25th anniversary of LEDAS.

In our era, which in many respects is not much different from the era of two thousand years ago, it is still important to periodically ask the question of who we are.

To get at least a partial answer to this question, which worries not only philosophers who occasionally think about it, but also always active recruiters, we conducted a survey of company employees.

And before we get to the strings, let's find out at what age and in what language the developers of CAD components and solvers begin programming.

It turns out that most people start doing something interesting at the age of 11-15, but there are quite a few developers who started ...

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Our Top 5 Blog Articles

Dec 20, 2023 Ilya Lichman

We recently shared with you a list of books that we have been reading for joy and to build up our neural connections, while developing our mathematical algorithms. And so today, as we reach the end of the year, we thought we would list the most popular tech articles from our blog.

  1. Fast Debug in Visual C++

    Usually, debug builds are 10-20 times slower than release builds, but the slow speed is not usually a problem. But what if you need to debug code with a very large dataset? In this case, to catch bugs you may well end up waiting far too long, or else you might encounter many problems with the release build, when you skip the debug stage.

    In our “Fast Debug in Visual ...

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Our Autumn Update

Nov 27, 2023 Alexey Ershov

Hi there! Let me report to you our recent activities, from late summer to mid-autumn. We have been busy!

It was in August that we launched a new project in the area of digital medicine. It is somewhat different from our usual work in digital healthcare in that it combines software with hardware development. It is the innovative hardware part to which we are paying a lot of attention. Although I cannot reveal the name of the client, I can tell you that we are working on a start-up project initiated by a team already established as successful entrepreneurs in Industry 4.0.

September was the month in which we organized a week-long series of technical meetings in Italy. Together with one of our biggest customers, we discussed their ambitious ...

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The Book Club at LEDAS

There are exactly 42 books on our reading list, something Douglas Adams would approve of!

Nov 14, 2023 Ilya Lichman

Just as it is hard to clap with one hand, it's hard to develop mathematical algorithms only by reading technical articles. And so despite the fact that we regularly read and write about C++ and CAD (for instance, about constraint solvers and plugins), we have regular book club meetings at our company at which we read fiction and non-fiction.

Perhaps one day we'll make a list of our favorite technical books on designing complex and reliable systems and must-read articles on mathematical algorithms, but for today we'd like to share a list of the books that interest us.

Back in 2018, LEDAS Book Club meetings were held in person, but gradually we've come to realize that it's much more convenient to meet online. As of 2020, ...

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Some parts of the history of CAD are intertwined with card games and other fun activities, perhaps more than CAD/CAE/CAM users and developers realize. One of the most famous events occurred in the late 1980s when Jon Hirschtick trained the MIT Black Jack team.

Using his techniques, the team won millions in Las Vegas, which then went on to blacklist him from their casinos. You may have seen the movie or TV series about his amazing journey, going from university to winning at casinos, and then using $1 million of his winnings in 1993 to create SolidWorks, the first – and then best-selling – mid-range mechanical CAD package to run on Windows (now owned by Dassault Systѐmes). Later, he went on to lead the development of Onshape, now owned by PTC. You ...

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International Women's Day at a climbing wall

New interesting experience and a great time

Mar 30, 2023 Ilya Lichman
Designing and implementing mathematical algorithms for CAD/CAE/CAM has a lot in common with climbing a steep cliff. In both cases, we have to overcome obstacles and ourselves, find non-trivial solutions and hidden reserves. There is also a lot of fun in both of these very different actions.

Given this circumstance, we decided to celebrate International Women's Day at the climbing wall. The employees and their families got a new or expanded their existing climbing experience.

Interestingly, it's not as easy as it looks from the outside. However, this applies to almost any activity. After all, it is only when we start doing something that we realize why a colleague just couldn't "simply lift his leg and pull himself up on that ledge," as everyone ...

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Since 1999, LEDAS has provided software development services to clients in a number of areas of hi-tech engineering, and as a result our team of developers works with a broad set of software tools.

At the very least, we need project management software, a compiler, and an operating system. In fact, we need more software than on that short list, but for now let’s focus on these three categories. They are the most critical for any software developer.

At LEDAS, these three main categories are represented primarily by Jira, Visual Studio, and Windows. Some other programs, such as for version control, text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, are now freely available, so anybody can avoid those licensing costs.

Jira

Jira is often considered a leader in the market for project management ...

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LEDAS’ Intellectual Games Club Flourishes Online

Jul 01, 2021 Nikolay Prytkov, Ivan Rykov

“Our life is but a game,” sang Herman during the opera The Queen of Spades. Which game exactly? That one everyone should decide for himself.

We at LEDAS love playing games, as is probably the case with most developers around the world. Sometimes we prefer video games; other times, board games that provide the extra special kind of social enjoyment that allows us to develop good relations with teammates and colleagues.

We have a collection of board games in our coffee room and so during that “before pandemic” era we sometimes stayed late in the office playing them.

People have always been curious, searching for answers to many questions. Discovering an answer is emotionally comparable to scoring a goal during a football World Cup finale. Over the decades, mass media ...

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