Behind the Design: Yahya Khedr, “Not Because I’m Paid to Do It, but Because I Love Doing It”
When Yahya Khedr was 14, his older sister came home from school one day and used SOLIDWORKS to complete a school assignment. Yahya sat next to her as she worked, and at first, he wasn’t very interested. But when his sister finished her work and then left her laptop open with SOLIDWORKS still running, Yahya took her spot and started playing around with it.
“If I recall correctly, I didn’t get up from that laptop until 10 pm,” Yahya laughs. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Yahya was raised in a family of engineers and grew up listening to them, including his sister, discuss engineering all the time. Naturally, Yahya also took an interest in the subject and began participating in robotics competitions before he even knew what SOLIDWORKS was.
Even after discovering the software, he didn’t use it for anything mechanical. He designed “fun things” in SOLIDWORKS by self-teaching with the built-in tutorials the same way that other kids might draw “fun things” with pen and paper. One of his most memorable designs is Shaun the Sheep from the British children’s animated stop-motion TV show.
Yahya credits this unrestricted phase of designing “fun things” to his heart’s content for his SOLIDWORKS expertise. And for a couple of years, that’s all it was – just playing around – until Yahya found online communities. At first, it was GrabCAD, and within a couple of years, it was the SOLIDWORKS User Forum. He was just eighteen years old.
“There are some trends that shape how an engineer thinks when he or she is limited to a certain geographical location,” Yahya, who is in Egypt, explains. “But when you talk to people from all over the world, you no longer have these boundaries. Online communities are a vast wealth of experience being put into the same place, where everyone can access it for free. It really helped me.”
Yahya says that the online communities helped him learn new, more efficient workflows. But for him, the true magic of 3D design is seeing his ideas come to life.
“When I tell the software, here’s a rectangle, I want you to make a cuboid out of it, it just does that on the screen, right in front of me. I put the parameters in, but it did the imagination for me, and that’s the really cool thing,” Yahya says excitedly. “Whatever idea I have in mind, I can see it happen in front of me.”
When it was time to choose what to study in university, it wasn’t much of a question. He opted for mechatronics engineering, which integrates mechanics, electronics, and computing. His university didn’t use SOLIDWORKS, but Yahya was relieved to learn that as long as he got the work done correctly, his professors didn’t care what CAD software he used. By that point, he’d already passed his SOLIDWORKS Electrical Design Associate (CSWA-E) exam and Certified SOLIDWORKS Expert (CSWE) exam, the latter of which he’d taken on the night before his 19th birthday.
In March 2020, Yahya made a series of animations using SOLIDWORKS, “just for the sake of it” – which I’m starting to understand is his style. At the end of the month, he uploaded them all into a single LinkedIn post and published it without a single thought. The post went absolutely viral, hitting 200,000 views in less than a week (which, he adds, is a lot for LinkedIn). People started asking him how he’d made his animations, and Yahya found that he was often repeating himself.
That was when he thought, Why don’t I do a presentation on this?
That would turn into his iconic “Zero to Hero” session on animation, targeting beginners, which he has now virtually taught in every continent besides Australia. To this day, Zero to Hero remains his most frequent SWUGN presentation ever, and Yahya is still asked to present it at least twice a month. In 2022, he presented his more advanced-level “Behind the Scenes of SOLIDWORKS Animations” at 3DEXPERIENCE World, and the following month he was even invited to speak about animations on the SOLIDWORKS’ YouTube Channel.
Yahya has also been a member of the SOLIDWORKS Champion Program since its beginning in 2020, rubbing virtual shoulders with what he calls the world’s most passionate “SOLIDWORKS community experts,” as well as internal teams and executives. From beta-testing new exams and products to providing insights and feedback on community events, it’s clear how much he loves helping shape the future of 3DS.
When I ask Yahya what he does outside of work, he looks baffled.
“This is not work to me,” he says. When I press him on this, and ask what other hobbies he enjoys, he tells me that every one of those activities – video editing, animation, graphic design, programming – revolves around SOLIDWORKS.
“When it comes to free time, and I have the choice to read some comics or do something online or watch some YouTube videos, nine times out of ten, I would rather check out the SOLlDWORKS User Forum and see if anyone has a question. Not because I’m paid to do it (he’s not) but because I love doing it.”
Yahya adds that it reminds him of when he first explored SOLIDWORKS and all the questions he had.
“A lot of people helped me, so this is the least I can do.”
Believe it or not, Yahya only graduated from university a couple of months ago and has just begun working as a SOLIDWORKS reseller Application Engineer.
If you ask him where he sees himself five, ten, or fifteen years down the line, I’m willing to bet SOLIDWORKS is still part of the plan.
Margherita Bassi