Pushing technological boundaries: our in-house software developers

You’ll often hear about how we like to develop our own tools at Heyne Tillett Steel – bringing these ideas to life is the work of our in-house Senior Software Developers, Vinish Bhan and Somnath Tiwari. Their computer science skills push our technological expertise, in an industry not traditionally known for hiring software developers.

Back in 2021 we realised we needed a software expert. Our most knowledgeable coding engineer was relocating to New Zealand and we didn’t want to lose momentum on the tools he was building, including an embodied carbon counter and some financial reporting tools. So we wrote a rather unique job description, conducted some interviews, and found Vinish Bhan.

Originally from Jammu in northern India, Vinish had lived in Bath since 2019 while completing his master’s in data science. Attracted by the opportunities in tech, the cultural diversity and the lifestyle, he moved to London and joined HTS as our first software developer in 2021.

When Vinish started, I spent his first morning trying to explain what structural engineers do. Vinish had an IT and data science background which, although a long way from structural engineering, has a similar attitude to problem solving. All we needed to teach him were the details.

He seized the challenges, which quickly grew in size and scope as we learned about his capabilities. He was soon reporting straight to Directors on financial tools, creating bespoke add-ons for Revit and helping us deliver the HTS Stockmatcher. As his time became more in demand and new ideas joined a long queue, it became clear we had to hire someone else to help Vinish.

Enter Somnath Tiwari. Somnath grew up in Mumbai, completed a degree in electronics engineering and relocated to London in 2022 for a master’s in computing and technology. He won JP Morgan’s Code for Good hackathon in 2022 and was the runner-up in Google/Imperial College’s AC Hack that same year, which inspired him to seek new challenges in software engineering. Somnath joined us in 2023 to work under Vinish. Since then he’s developed a unique role for himself and was promoted in spring 2026.

Somnath and Vinish work together as a complementary double act. Somnath is bursting with ideas, constantly updating and improving his work. His expertise is front-end and user experience, and he also excels at chess and football (when his knee permits). Vinish is more measured, working ideas through in his mind, and focusing on the back end and underlying functionality, thinking deeply about consequence, security, longevity, and perfect code. Although of course they both know how to do it all and approach each challenge by constantly bouncing ideas off each other, sometimes in rapid-fire Hindi.

Their creations, some of which are listed below, directly improve and streamline the workflow of our structural, civil, geotechnical, and highway and transport engineers. In fact, many of these tools were proposed by engineers in our periodic feedback sessions.

• The HTS Carbon Counter, a flagship tool, reads Revit models to calculate and report structural embodied carbon at all design stages. Somnath and Vinish took key design roles for the third generation of this tool, weaving in analytics, AI, and a highly intuitive user experience.
• The HTS Stockmatcher, a public website that matches steel elements for a new building with a stock of available reused sections, was one of Vinish’s early projects.
• The HTS Site Visit App, a first foray into mobile applications, allows engineers to annotate photos taken on their phones, automatically building formatted reports, which can be exported directly from a phone or laptop.
• Current PDFs, a small tool with a big impact, combs through a project folder to collect and bind the set of latest PDFs, sorted by discipline and phase. It even opens and reads the PDF’s title block if it can’t find what it’s looking for in the file name.

These tools are not necessarily unique, indeed we could probably find versions of each of them on the market. But the market versions are never exactly what we need. Working with Somnath and Vinish means we get to create tools that are 100% bespoke and customisable. They fit into existing workflows, meet a genuine need, and can evolve as requirements change.

After working at HTS for five and three years respectively, people trust Vinish and Somnath and their work continues to show us the art of the possible. People routinely come to them directly with ideas, adding to an ever-growing list. What I love about having them on the team is that whatever we can think of, they can build. They are full of ideas and optimism. And after five years, they can read my mind and often do something before I’ve even asked. It’s rare in our industry to have full time, dedicated software engineers who do not have a civil engineering background, but this makes them more powerful, seeing possibilities we don’t, and HTS is far better for it.