Catching Up with Alex Clark from Linus Tech Tips
Think about some of your first jobs out of school. For some of us, they set us on stellar career paths. For others, they represent missteps – hopefully ones we have course-corrected from since.
Now imagine, fairly early on in your career, scoring a job working on one of the coolest YouTube channels out there. One that puts to good use your engineering smarts, and affords you the ability to work on cool, super-out-there projects while regularly publishing the journey of your efforts to a vibrant community full of fanatical technologists and avid supporters.
Watch how Alex and Linus from Linus Tech Tips recently used SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation to test the cooling of a Peltier module
I mean, that sounds pretty neat, doesn’t it?
Earlier this summer, I caught up with Alex Clark, a longtime SOLIDWORKS user. Alex works on the Linus Tech Tips channel on the writing/pre-production side. Prior to working there, he did his engineering studies at Memorial University, where he participated in Baja SAE like many other engineering students.
“I was mainly responsible for the rear suspension,” Alex recounted. “And as the suspension lead we went from a double wishbone suspension to a multi-link. “
“The main reasons for doing this were that it was lighter,” he explained. “We could tune it so the most likely thing to fail were the lateral links (the two small rods in the back). The good thing about this is the lateral links are super cheap to make and can be replaced in a couple minutes.”
“They are most likely to fail by buckling.”
If you watch Linus Tech Tips (as many millions do), you’ll notice a lot of their videos involve pushing technology to its limits. Sometimes, that means tinkering in ways you and I would never think of. Sometimes, that means making things ‘buckle’ and break.
When Alex thinks back to when he came aboard, he remembers reading that “they were looking for writers who know 3D modeling and like making things.” In my conversations with Alex, it’s clear he likes doing these things, but it’s also clear he likes trying to make sound engineering decisions and truly understanding how things work.
You can see these traits exhibited in the passages in this post, as well as by listening to him on any of the many Linus Tech Tips videos he’s featured in.
It’s always refreshing to be reminded that, whether a SOLIDWORKS user in our community has an audience of 9, or, I don’t know, over 9 million, that these traits appear present in so many of us.
Be sure to check out some of Alex’s models here, and, of course, join the millions who have subscribed to the Linus Tech Tips channel today!