Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1436094
be less likely to say, "Well, it doesn't look like I would have done it, therefore I'm going to do it myself." Brooks: Charles, which CAD tool were you writing soware for? Pfeil: I wasn't writing it. Primarily, I was the architect for Mentor Graphics Xpedition PCB (initially VeriBest PCB and now Siemens' Xpe- dition), and aer that, I worked on Altium Designer. I did a lot of work on XtremePCB, Sketch Router, and Active Route, with a focus on route quality and efficiency. Brooks: at's very cool. e art of glossing new routes to make them look human-created is an intuition thing. When we talk about how an artist has an intuitive mind, they get inspired by something to create art. We get inspired by being able to visualize or see things that haven't yet been created. at part of the artist brain is what we use when we're initially looking at a design and trying to assemble all these various requirements from our customers. As design- ers we have many customers. We have people who build and test it, and who want to make sure it survives in the environment that we are trying to build for. e machines that I work on now have high vibration and things like that, so we need to be able to survive that. Look at space applications. I've done some aerospace design and micro- wave circuits, and each have their own special requirements. Being able to visualize that and compensate or plan for them takes that ability to kind of visualize or see, like we were talking about. I like to say people don't see things until they see them. By the way, I like what you've done with the glossing. I've been using Altium for quite some time and it's improved. It keeps getting better as time goes on. And it takes the excess effort and cleanup aer working on a board and reduces it quite a bit and allows you to go in and make changes on the fly that you can't really plan for. An engineer gives you a