Sounds ridiculous? Engineer develops software? wft?
I've been using commercial blasting software for years. They work—don't get me wrong—but there's always this nagging thing: they're built to sell you their detonators, their explosives, their timing systems. Makes sense from a business standpoint. Still sucks when you just want to plug in your own numbers and see what happens. So I started building something for horizontal tunneling that doesn't care whose product you're using.
visit to experience underground blasting design tool
What's wrong with what's out there
Paid licenses? Fine. What gets me is that even after you pay, you're stuck. Can't really tweak things for your project. Can't easily swap in different brands. You draw your patterns in AutoCAD, then jump over to Excel to run the numbers. I've done it. Everyone has. It's tedious.
Blasting is messy in reality. Rock doesn't read the textbook. When I train operators, the designs on paper never quite match what's actually drilled underground. If people only learn to follow a static drawing, they freeze when things go off-script—and they always do. You need something that can handle real-world chaos and let rock engineers, designers, and PMs all poke at it at once.
Why I thought I could pull this off
Honestly? Blasting software isn't rocket science. The math is well-established. The hard part of most software is auth, concurrency, multi-user stuff—for a niche tool like this, that's manageable. I've worked with data long enough that PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch feel comfortable. Low cost to experiment, plenty of headroom. Picked those and ran with it.
The front-end was the steep part. React and friends are heavy for what I need—maybe even get in the way of some ideas I have. Went vanilla JS + Bootstrap instead. Keeps things light. I can shape the UI for how blasting engineers actually work. Algorithms? Those I know. UX is the thing I'll have to refine as people use it.
Where it's going
Open. Flexible. Not locked to any vendor's ecosystem. That's the idea. Drawing and calc in one place, real collaboration, no bullshit. Still early—lots to do. If you're in mining and have opinions on what a blasting tool should actually do, I'd like to hear them.