"Well that was harder than I thought it would be"

Some time ago, Derek Cheng from CyDesign approached me about working together to create a quick reference card that could be distributed at events. I thought this was an interesting idea so I started compiling information that I thought would be useful.

Well, it turned out to be quite a bit of information to collect and organize. I wasn't sure how to make this into a "reference card" or "cheatsheet". But as I started to work with the information, I had an idea for how to present it. Instead of limiting myself to "paper" as a medium, I thought about how to capitalize on technology to capture the information.

I got started on organizing all this stuff and it turned out to be a lot of work to organize. But I've finally got something reasonable to show for all my efforts:

Modelica Web Reference

Here are a couple of interesting things to point out about the material:

• I focused on stuff that I would like to have at my fingertips rather than having to wade through the specification to find.
• I wanted to try and make everything accessible with just a single click (i.e. no deeply nested tree structures).
• I did my best to cover common use cases. But, when there was more information to cover than I had space for, I included a link back to the exact page in the specification where the material could be found. So even if you didn't find what you needed, at least you should be able to find it in the specification quickly.

Every time I look at this, I think of a million cool and interesting ways to improve on it. Unfortunately, I've sunk a fair amount of time into it at so far so I'm going to have to throttle back. However, I have posted everything on GitHub so those who want to try and improve things can feel free to send me a pull request. You can find more details under the "Feedback" button on the bottom right side of the page. While you are there, be sure to check out the "Acknowledgments" section as well.