I was given the task to create a report detailing a truss bridge to cross a waterway as part of a group. We needed to develop a design and then calculate all aspects of the truss bridge to determine how safe it would be. First, I researched different truss bridge designs and created a few divergent ideas to potentially pursue. Once through comparison we decided upon a specific design, I created a program in python to help us in the preliminary design process so we could further understand the types of forces our truss bridge design would experience, which my teammate then expanded on. Developing a program for this part of the design sped up our iterative work and allowed us to see that our design was feasible quickly. It can be important to try and develop ways to work more efficiently and smarter so that you can spend more time on other aspects of the design process.