{"id":33587,"date":"2008-08-06T11:01:16","date_gmt":"2008-08-06T15:01:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/swcommunity\/mad-about-madis"},"modified":"2008-08-06T11:01:16","modified_gmt":"2008-08-06T15:01:16","slug":"mad-about-madis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/2008\/08\/mad-about-madis.html","title":{"rendered":"Mad About Madison"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The good folks at <a href=\"https:\/\/www.swugn.org\/pages\/calendar\/UGdetails.html?id=119\">MASWUG<\/a> threw quite a meeting last night.&nbsp; David Hurst and Shawn Fogel did a great job getting things setup, keeping the meeting moving along, and wrapping up right on time.&nbsp; Someone mentioned to me that the sign in sheet had 60 names on it, but I counted the chairs before the meeting, and all 72 were full &#8211; with more people standing in the back of the room.<\/p>\n<p>Jeff Ray was the featured speaker, and as usual, did a great job.&nbsp; Jeff doesn&#8217;t use PowerPoint, preferring instead to talk about the company for a few minutes and then opening up the floor for questions.&nbsp; Jeff&#8217;s candor and sense of humor make him very popular with user group members.<\/p>\n<p>A portion of the meeting included a tour arranged by <a href=\"https:\/\/homepages.cae.wisc.edu\/~oliphant\/pho\/cae_job.html\">Paul Oliphant<\/a>, an instructor at the university.&nbsp; We were treated to a look at the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.uwracing.com\/\">UW-Madison Formula SAE<\/a> cars.&nbsp; Members of the team were on hand to give us a good look at what <a href=\"https:\/\/students.sae.org\/competitions\/formulaseries\/\">Formula SAE<\/a> is all about, and answered a bunch of questions.&nbsp; It&#8217;s an amazing program, not just a bunch of college kids racing around in cool cars.&nbsp; The students design and build a new car every year (using SolidWorks and COSMOS of course), and compete each May in an event that draws more than 140 other teams from around the world.&nbsp; Not only are the teams judged on the dynamics of the car (acceleration, autocross, endurance), they are also required to present a business plan and costs analysis to complete the competition.&nbsp; The UW-Madison team has finished in the top 5 for 5 of the last 7 years. <\/p>\n<p>The Developers Roundtable went quite well too.&nbsp; Several members of the SolidWorks Development team fielded questions and took suggestions on enhancements and improvements to SolidWorks.&nbsp; Look for this kind of interaction with the user groups to continue &#8211; it&#8217;s a great source of information for us, and allows discussion among the users and developers to really help us understand how SolidWorks users expect things to work.&nbsp; The next Developers Roundtable will take place at the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.swugn.org\/pages\/calendar\/UGdetails.html?id=394\">Tri-Valley SolidWorks User Group<\/a> in September.<\/p>\n<p>Thanks to David, Shawn, and Paul (and Wendy too) for making this a great trip.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The good folks at MASWUG threw quite a meeting last night.&nbsp; David Hurst and Shawn Fogel did a great job getting things setup, keeping the meeting moving along, and wrapping up right on time.&nbsp; Someone mentioned to me that the<\/p>\n... <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/2008\/08\/mad-about-madis.html\">Continued<\/a>","protected":false},"author":80,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-community"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/80"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33587"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33587\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}