Engineers like watching movies about other engineers solving problems that seem impossible — as in “Apollo 13” or “The Martian.”
A young Madison County engineer has created a website with dozens of resources for other engineers, such as scholarships, lists of professional organizations and continuing education opportunities. Just for fun, it includes links to more than 80 movies showing dramatic feats of engineering. Who knew there were so many?
Maxwell R. Carter, of Huntsville, launched the website engineeringresource.org about a year ago. He is a professional engineer licensed in Alabama and Tennessee and a certified floodplain manager who began his civil engineering career after graduating from The University of Tennessee in 2018.
The 31-year-old works on his website at night and on weekends.
Its mission, he explains, “is to help engineering professionals, students or the general public find the best information sources for whatever engineering-related topic they are searching the internet for — whether they are seeking something technical, educational or even inspirational.
“I have become familiar with different government agencies and their engineering associations” through college and career, Carter explains during a coffee shop chat. “I’m a PE, so I have to do professional development. I’ve been on their websites and looking at different training options and found there’s free resources out there.”
Resources for engineering students include lists of free and discounted professional association memberships, plus scholarships and fellowships. The site has information for educators, too, and a dedicated link for women in engineering.
Professional engineers will find links on conferences, licenses, certifications, training and webinars, as well as more than 100 job boards from engineering organizations. State and government job links also are included. Other resources are helpful podcasts, magazines, news sites, books and software.
The site covers multiple types of engineering, including aerospace, bioengineering, chemical, civil, electrical, industrial, material science, mechanical, nuclear and software.
“There’s over a hundred engineering job boards and then fields of engineering where I’ve linked to all the organizations for different disciplines,” he explains.
Site analysis tells Carter what topics inspire the most clicks. Webinars with certificates, nuclear engineering scholarships, fellowships and software are popular.
He sees bumps in views from time to time. When Amazon announced a layoff of 14,000 employees, a conversation on the social media site Reddit mentioned Carter’s website as a resource.
“It got upvoted, so it got shared,” Carter says. “I have seen Seattle popping up on the Google analytics.”
Carter launched the site in December 2024 after working on it for a couple of months. In just a year, Carter had more than 190 web page references to include.
“I found a bunch of really useful things, and I thought, I want to tell people about this one or that one,” he says. “I’m just trying to help people find the best sources for content.”
If such a resource existed when Carter was in college, he wasn’t aware of it. In the early days of his personal research, he came across a list of engineering organizations on the Department of Labor website and figured “maybe I should just combine everything” in a central location.
“I wasn’t really looking too far down the road. I just started making it and had the idea from things I had learned about just while in school and through working the last seven years.”
Carter isn’t necessarily interested in providing his own original content other than a few blog observations. He sees himself as more of an aggregator of the useful material already out there.
“The website is going to be mainly focused on trying to help people find experts instead of being the expert,” he says.
“I just wanted it to be really hands off,” he adds. “This stuff’s just there for them to find. I feel like it’s going to be a continuous work in progress and so I just keep adding things as I go.”
Carter finds many links through professional organizations like the Federal Highway Administration or American Concrete Institute.
“Those are organizations that I’m familiar with,” he says, so the information is likely to be reliable.
“The only businesses I would say I’ve linked to would be educational products and software.”
Carter did add two of his own blog posts aimed at students. One addresses the differences between the college experience and reality.
“It’s a lot about how I don’t use very much math anymore” in his job with an area municipality. “I use a lot of software,” he says.
Like many professionals, Carter uses AI tools like Chat GPT to provide at least some basic information for reference. While advanced in many areas, artificial intelligence is still an imperfect tool, he finds.
“I’m wanting to make a blog post about just my experience using AI and the pitfalls,” he says.
Carter’s website does not include advertisements. Any users moved to donate are directed to the Grant Hill Memorial Fund, which supports mental health care for foster and special needs families. Hill and Carter were friends.
“I don’t receive any money from anything that is on it. It seems like people like it, but it’s not commercialized,” he says. “I’m thinking about just keeping it that way. I kind of like that it’s just really simple. I don’t have to have employees.”
His annual budget of $20 pays for the domain name.
Carter would love to see engineering firms link to his site. He’s had some success through affiliation with university career centers.
Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the University of Tennessee and the University of Florida have website links to engineeringresource.org.
“Harvard was the first to link to my website,” he says. “I was really surprised. I thought they would be the last one.”
A career coach at Santa Fe College called Carter’s site “the best organized and most thorough engineering resource that I have seen.” The University of Florida calls the site’s links to jobs “a great place to start.”
The site’s homepage features a large picture of Carter’s grandfather, who was an engineer and built runways in World War II. He was a construction project estimator in the facilities department at Redstone Arsenal.
In the photo, the man pinning a service award on the elder Carter is none other than one of the most famous engineers in history — space pioneer Dr. Wernher von Braun.
Deborah Storey is a Huntsville-based freelance contributor to Business Alabama.
This article appears in the February 2026 issue of Business Alabama.
