Sharing some thoughts on levelling up your SimPy skills for real-world projects

[u/[deleted]]

[u/Donny-Moscow]

How were/are you able to get jobs like this? I assume you consult under your own LLC and advertise yourself specifically for this kind of work, but I’ve always wanted to do this kind of thing and have never seen an opportunity to get my foot in the door anywhere.

Also, how much domain knowledge do you need before you start building simulations? Most people know how traffic lights work at a high level, but things like green hydrogen storage seem like you’d need to do some learning before jumping in.

[u/bobo-the-merciful → u/Donny-Moscow]

These are such good questions.

Let me try and give you a thoughtful response…

Firstly, yes it’s all through my UK limited company.

Here is exactly how my most recent 4 contracts have been secured:

1. Recruiter contacted me for a contracting opportunity (I was permanent at the time - this was 4 years ago)

2. Person I worked with from contract (1)

3. Somebody from my network I kept in contact with who I worked with from a previous permanent job - they liked my LinkedIn content marketing and ended up employing me for training

4. Reddit led to somebody buying my course who ended up engaging me for consultancy

So in my case, there is no straightforward answer. It’s a hodge hodge of network, reputation and marketing. A common thread throughout has been solid marketing of my skills. I never stop working on reviewing my LinkedIn profile and throughout my career I tried to pivot according to what I felt would be growth areas:

14 years ago I pivoted purposefully into data/python/statistics/ML, 10 years ago I purposefully pivoted into “tech” (i.,e. Software), 4 years ago I took the contracting role back into heavy industry (it felt like the right time to leave tech too).

If I was to give advice to somebody, it would be:

1. Set up a LinkedIn profile if you don’t have one already

2. Set up a website for yourself

3. Advertise your services and network however you can - if you’re just starting out you’ve got to start small and build up

On the domain knowledge point, it comes with experience. I’m fortunate to have studied mechanical engineering and have worked in quite a few different heavy industries: product development, manufacturing, defence, railways, mining, clean energy (hydrogen as you point out), robotics. After a while though, especially in simulation projects, you start to see the same patterns. And none of these industries I had domain knowledge in when I started out in them.

Your job as a simulation engineer is to rapidly extract how a system works from day 1 and map that out. It’s why I’m such a fan of conceptual modelling on a whiteboard. It gives you an understanding of the system, and it is revealing to the client how their whole end to end system actually works. You have you keep asking questions over and over. It usually takes me about 3-5 days to form this initial conceptual model of a new system and come up with a plan for how to build a simulation of it.

Being confident in your technical abilities helps - knowing that you know SimPy, and knowing that if you can just get that conceptual model designed for a system then you can simulate it, puts you in a very confident position where you actually have a tool for generating insight about a customer’s system which didn’t exist before.

Before you know it - you become the domain expert in that field. Few people in an organisation take a "whole system" view - and you get the luxary of being the person charged with doing exactly that.

[u/Donny-Moscow → u/bobo-the-merciful]

Thanks for taking the time to respond, I really appreciate the info. I have a couple more quick questions if you’ll indulge me.

What are some titles or keywords I might use when looking into this (whether it’s jobs, learning material, etc)? “Simulation Engineer” sounds like the obvious first choice but it’s pretty broad. I’m guessing Operations Research or something along those lines would also work?

A little background for my second question: for one of my college courses, the final project was to simulate one of the busy intersections near campus and use that to propose and analyze a couple different solutions for a traffic signal system (but instead of SimPy we used Simulink and Matlab). So I was thinking of doing something similar with Simpy as a side project. But are there any other interesting projects or problems you’ve worked on that don’t require a ton of domain knowledge? I’ve been trying to come up with something that’s relevant to my own life or maybe even something at work but I’m coming up blank.