Knowledge and Diderot’s Philosophy

There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge... observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination.
Denis Diderot (French Philosopher)

Knowledge is defined as a familiarity, awareness or understanding of someone or something, for instance the facts, information, descriptions, or skills, which is acquired through experience or education by perceiving, discovering, or learning of a subject.

In the past century technology went through many advances giving knowledge the opportunity to be more accessible to humanity. For drilling technology, literatures, books, computer programs and other sources have been put together by the brightest minds of drilling professionals; however while this technological know-how has notably driven the industry forward, some individuals are at times overwhelmed by the vast amount of information they receive from different sources of media.

The internet is loaded with drilling engineering information, but this information is scattered around in such a way that can lead to generate different answers to just one question.

The demand has been to create an all-in-one type of information and knowledge base software; a digital toolbox that is quick-to-access, reliable, accurate and interactive among other things. For this, PVI has developed a comprehensive collection of drilling engineering tools in a simple-to-learn and easy-to-use software package - Dr. DE.

Dr. DE - Drilling Engineering Toolbox

The software covers more than 180 functions ranging from the fundamentals of drilling engineering to an advanced well path design and 3D visualization of the wellbore; a resource made for every drilling engineer and technician to get the job done right while also making their engineering and sales efforts easy and efficient.

Dr. DE’s engineering features include:

  • Daily used drilling engineering problems and solutions
  • Extensive and expandable tubular, centralizer and fluid database
  • Survey data up to 5000 points
  • 3D wellbore visualization
  • Intelligent 2D well path design
  • Detailed illustrations
  • Support fraction input of tubular sizes

In the beginning of the article we quoted from Dennis Diderot, a person who strongly believed and promoted that all humans have the right to acquire knowledge because it’s in our nature to learn and that the best way of acquiring it, is through experimentation and the exercise of reasoning. With this in mind is how we developed Dr.DE and how our fellow drilling engineers and technicians can benefit from using it to accomplish their daily tasks.

Complaints About Your Job? See This Then!

It’s the last week of September and we are in Calgary, the energy center of Canada. 2 weeks ago a sudden snow struck the city and killed quite a few trees. We can feel that winter is coming slowly into this growing city, both vertical and horizontally.

In 2012, Calgary added to the city its tallest building, “The Bow”, which is 779 feet. From outside, it is a beauty of steel and glass, no sign of concrete whatsoever. This is what we saw the other day when we visited our clients.

From the picture you can see the cleaning crew hanging way up in the air while cleaning the windows. They are probably trying to get the job done before the winter fully arrives. I think there are lots of people that are afraid of heights, so those people must to a certain degree, like such risky jobs, but personally I feel blessed to be able to walk on solid ground and appreciate the job I have.

It is fair to say that none of us have the perfect job. We make tradeoffs here and there and try to have a balance between what we have and what we want. We develop drilling software and this task requires intensive coding. Occasionally, I lose myself in the midst of numerous lines of programming codes and feel like the purpose of the work gets a little fuzzy. Trips like this one help me see how lucky we are and how much we already have and the chance to meet our users is always a plus. Nothing beats to see how our drilling software helps drilling engineers on their daily tasks.

Do I complain about my job? I try not to. Living in a real world, we all have different jobs. The perfect job does not exist because each of us has our own definition of it and even if it does exist, somebody else has it. Maybe the perfect job cannot be found, but is created through a combination of harnessing our potential that not only increases our performance, but brings us more job satisfaction.

We Wear The Watch We Make

I am not just one of our software developers; I am also a user and so is everyone else on our team. Our insatiable curiosity and passion about drilling engineering and problem solving are the driving force behind delivering our products. Our goal is to save drilling professionals’ time and reduce risks, and if we do it right, we also help ourselves – BONUS!

Software development, specially drilling software development, requires collaboration from a pool of talents, ranging from drilling engineers, mathematicians, programmers and quality control personnel. A good software package is measured not only by the accuracy or comprehensiveness, but also by how easy it is to use it. The gaps between users and developers are always there. We try to bridge that gap by utilizing our own software on our consulting projects.

Using our own software transforms us from developers to decision-makers. We become more sensitive to users’ needs and more careful in our interface design.

It is not always easy, but it is a lot of fun. From every interface design we put into the software, we toss aside dozens more. If we are complaining about the number of clicks to accomplish a task, then the users would too.

The results?

The software we use is the software we develop, in other words, we wear the watch we make.