D-day is here

I started this blog as a personal archive of thoughts on BIM for MEP, Dynamo for Revit as well as to keep a record of my progress with learning Python and Dynamo for MEP design.

I initially started collecting this kind of information using oneNote, however everything has become very hard to manage. The idea of using a blog for tracking my Pyton/Dynamo learning curve as well as storing other useful information related to BIM came from listening to episode two of CodingNewbie. In this episode Brian Douglas talks about his experience with learning Ruby and the steps he took from being a complete newbie to a professional programmer.

I am a mechanical engineer at Arup. I was first introduced to Revit in September 2011 when I joined Arup as a graduate mechanical engineer. Since then, I feel in love with how Building Information Modelling (BIM) and Revit have revolutionised the buildings industry by ensuring better coordination and management of construction information. My main focus as an engineer and as a BIM enthusiast is finding ways of using the "I" in BIM, that is the information in the models to inform the design process and project deliverables.

I have always been interested in programming and since I was ten I had various attempts to get in the programming world. I started with learning Pascal programming language in school and continued with Visual FoxPro in high school. I wrote a few small programs in Visual Basic and C# along the years, however due to my job I got a bit disconnected coding and never took it further than the basics. With no practice, I can say I forgot most of the syntax but still remember some of the concepts.

Almost one year ago I stumbled across Dynamo, which is a Visual Programming medium that helps create add-ins for Revit. It can also be used for solving problems not related to Revit, however the Revit interface is what it is typically used for. After playing around for a few months and creating small add-ins, in December 2015 I had the opportunity to participate at Autodesk University 2015 as a co-speaker with Andrew Duncan. We presented the An MEP Engineer's Guide to Dynamo to a class of 200 people. This has really opened my appetite for Dynamo and I stated researching more about it.

Dynamo comes with a number of standard nodes which you can use to create the programs. The community also generates loads of new nodes almost everyday. However, sometimes that is not enough or you would like a node that would do what you want instead of using 15 nodes to achieve the same thing. For these kind of situations Dynamo also supports Python script based on the IronPython platform. I decided to use this as an excuse and try to make a comeback in the coding world by learning Python.

With this blog I aim to monitor my progress both with Python and Dynamo, but also keep track of other BIM related topics.