Wow, I wish that this was around a year and a half ago. I was working on a pet project of mine to do finite element analysis on PCB Gerber files. One of the biggest stumbling blocks that I ran into was taking a 2D image parsed from a Gerber (side note: Gerber files have a really wacky yet interesting format and structure) and triangulating it. I had wanted to use DT to clean up edges and thin traces in the model but I just couldn't seem to grasp it, as interesting as the math was. It's a shame that I never finished it, maybe I will need to get back to it one of these days.

I work in industrial controls and I have probably at least a dozen different VMs for all of the various programming softwares (each brand of PLC generally has their own proprietary software stack) and versions. Some of these things really don't play nice together and have the tendency to "blow up" now and again, where the whole OS needs to be nuked and reinstalled from scratch. Some programs are a nightmare to get working right and it's nice to be able to share working VMs with my coworkers.

IT also can't get their grubby fingers on the software inside and break anything. I also don't even have admin rights to change my network settings on my host OS, which is 100% required for the job as I need to connect to machine networks running a static IP. With VMs, I can get a USB Ethernet dongle and give it to the VM and get network control that way.

These days I do almost nothing on my host OS.

A while back over the course of a week I wrote a python script to modulate the extrusion flow on a 3D printer based on FEA data. I would simulate the forces that would be on the part in Inventor Nastran and export it to a text file (side note: Nastran had the strangest plaintext output of a program I've ever seen. It was like a book, with a title page, table of contents, page numbers, etc. It was clearly a relic of years past). Then I would the Nastran and gcode into the script, and it would increase extrusion where the stresses were high while reducing it where the stresses were low.

Even though it was fairly rudimentary and I never formally tested anything, it seemed to work well enough.