It’s a Fine Line

The OpenSees Twitter bot started in December 2019 but didn’t “like and retweet” #OpenSees tweets retroactively. So, out of curiosity, I searched Twitter the other day for the first use of the #OpenSees hashtag. This tweet from 2011 came up as the winner:

Odio #OpenSees y con esto inauguro este trending topic

— David Escolano (@drescolano) March 8, 2011

Not an uncommon sentiment. Now, ten years later, I asked David if he still hates OpenSees and received this response:

Uf vaya pregunta 😅, creo que aún sigo en una relación amor-odio con #OpenSees. En aquel momento, 2011, como predoc creo q era una opinión sincera de la frustración del que empieza a aprenderlo. Ahora lo recomiendo en el @SismicaUpm como el mejor programa para análisis dinámicos

— David Escolano (@drescolano) June 20, 2021

It’s a relief to know that even though David’s love-hate relationship with OpenSees continues, he recommends it to students in his earthquake engineering graduate program as the best software for dynamic analysis. ¡Yo no podría estar más de acuerdo!

This is a good reminder-to-self that learning new structural analysis software can be difficult and frustrating. Not everyone had Frank McKenna a couple cubicles away when they started to learn OpenSees.

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“It’s a fine line between love and hate” is a widely used expression, but “Liberation” by Outkast is the first thing that comes to mind.