foundational-concepts-iconI went back into Autodesk's Fusion 360 learning resources for a refresher and to set myself up to learn the Fusion 360 CAM modules. The last time I went through the tutorials, I had skipped the CAM functionality because I had no machine tools and were not likely to get time on anybody else's machinery. Now that I might be able to access Tux-Lab fabrication machinery, I wanted to make sure I won't break the machine from doing anything stupid in Fusion 360.

Before I got to CAM, though, the "Foundational Concepts" section caught my attention. I either didn't see it the last time or it made no impression on me at the time. I went through the set of short videos and they were surprisingly informative. Most tutorials for Fusion 360 (and most other software packages in general) are happy to tell users how to accomplish their tasks. This is a slightly different twist - the foundation concepts talk about why Fusion 360 is the way it is. About how they tried to restructure a CAD package for the cloud-based future, about how they restructured the workflow to take advantage of today's level of computation power at our fingertips, so on and so forth.

I come from a software engineering background and I'm all too aware of the fact that the end user typically has no idea what the software developer had intended as they built the piece of software. It can be argued that the end user doesn't need to know anything about the intent if the software is sufficiently well-designed. But for something complex like a CAD package, I believe there is value in learning the motivation behind the design.

And even if the user doesn't need to know, sometimes the user is curious and wants to know. I appreciate the Fusion 360 user education team for putting this information out there available for those who want to know.