180: Campfire Series - ‘The Dynamo Story’, with Ian Keough - TRXL

Episode Transcript
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(00:07):
Welcome back to the TRXL Podcast.
I'm Evan Troxel, and in this episodeI have a really fun conversation
with Ian Keough about theincredible origin story of Dynamo.
If you weren't aware, Ian isthe original creator of Dynamo.
He's also widely known as the fatherof Dynamo, and today he takes us
on a journey through its evolutionfrom a simple idea to becoming an

(00:30):
essential tool in computational design.
What began as a project to bridge thegap between Revit and visual programming
grew into something much bigger.
In this conversation, Ian shares storiesabout Dynamo's development, including
the challenges of transitioning froman independent project to becoming
part of Autodesk, the technical hurdlesthey faced, and how the community

(00:53):
played a crucial role in its success.
We also discuss how Dynamo hastransformed careers, created a new
class of computational designersand helped countless architects
and designers learn programming.
It's a story of innovation, perseverance,and the unexpected impact one tool
can have on an entire industry.

(01:15):
I.
Before we jump in, I have a bit ofhousekeeping to cover regarding the
current state of social media's,algorithmic feeds, and so-called
followers on these platforms.
For those of you not already subscribedto the TRXL podcast itself or to my email
newsletter, I rely heavily on LinkedIn'splatform and therefore their algorithm to
share episodes and attract new listeners.

(01:37):
It's still the best social media platformfor me to post on and try to connect with
people who haven't yet heard of the show.
But there's a startling factabout social media and a creator's
ability to connect with an audience.
It's being referred to right now inthe media sphere as the death of the
follower, because only one to 5% ofpeople who have actually opted into

(01:59):
quote unquote following me on socialmedia platforms even see my posts.
And the crazy thing is that thebigger the company and the number
of followers, the smaller engagementgets, the current average is 3.8%.
So in other words, forevery 1000 followers I have,
only about 38 see my posts.
So why is this?

(02:21):
You see, social media is now beingoptimized for discovery, which means
they're putting short form new contentlike shorts or reels, for example,
in front of their users on theirplatform Instead of the content from
creators they've explicitly followed.
And of course, this is all being driven bythe need for them to place ads into their
feed, which is their main business model.

(02:41):
The goal is to keep you scrollingand therefore seeing more ads.
So posts like mine that includea link off of their platform
don't play well with their goals.
So if you weren't aware of this.
Now, you know, so whyam I talking about this?
Because I would love it if we couldjust skip the algorithm entirely.
How?
There's two ways.

(03:02):
First, subscribe to TRXLwherever you watch or listen.
And second on my website found at TRXL.Co
so that we can directlyconnect over email.
That's it.
Let's get on with the episode at hand.
I had a great time talking with Ian, andas usual, there's an extensive amount
of additional information in the shownotes, so be sure to check them out.

(03:22):
You can find them in your podcast appif you're a paid member , and if you're
a free member, you can find them on thewebsite, which is once again, TRXL.Co.
All right, we have arrived.
It's time to crack open your favoritebeverage, find a comfortable seat
around the campfire, and settlein and enjoy listening to Ian
Keough tell the Dynamo story.

Evan Troxel (03:52):
Welcome back, Ian.
You were just on the podcastto talk about the latest and
greatest stuff with Hypar, right?
And are you calling, do youhave an official name for that?
Like this new version?
I don't know what you could even

Ian Keough (04:02):
um, we, we're,
we've been referring to it as version 2.
0,

Okay.

Ian Keough (04:08):
I suppose we need something.
Internally, maybe this is too muchinside baseball, but internally we
call it Pringle, because the shape ofPringle chip is a Hyparbolic paraboloid.
which is where Hypar comes from.
but externally we justrefer to it as Hypar 2.
0.

Sounds like a great prompt for some AI video thing where
it's like, I want to see me openinga can of Pringles and the idea forms
right there that that's what we'regoing to base our startup off of.
This is Hyparbolic

Ian Keough (04:36):
you eat

power

Ian Keough (04:37):
can as one does with, in one sitting, with a

as.

Ian Keough (04:41):
and you feel bad about yourself for the rest of the day.

As one does.
Yes.
All right.
So you were recently on theshow talking about Hypar 2.
0.
And this today, I want totalk about the story of Dynamo
because that came before Hypar.
And this is really, I think,where, I mean, one of your
first marks that you made in theuniverse of AEC software for sure.
Right.

Ian Keough (05:03):
Yes, I think that's, I think that's probably safe to say.
I'm trying to think if there was anythingbefore Dynamo that was like, of note.
No, there was not.
That was kind of like the first thing.

well, let's go back to the beginning.
let's talk about where.
this came from.
I mean, and maybe you want to go evenback, like right before it started,
where were you and what were you workingon that kind of led into that project?

Ian Keough (05:26):
I might get this history a little bit wrong.
I'm going to try to be very careful here.
Um, I was working at Buro HappoldConsulting Engineers in New York City.
So I actually have a, I have aMaster's in Architecture, but I,
but I saw some presentations by GregOtto about Buro Happold stuff, and

(05:47):
I was like, I want to go work there.
And so I like knocked on his door.
And went to work at, at Buro Happold,like right out of graduate school.
Cause they were doing all this likecrazy, cool, complicated buildings.
And that'll actually, that's actuallyan important part of the Dynamo story
because like Buro Happold didn'thire a lot of architects at the time.
And when they hired me, the way the storygoes is that Craig Schwitter, who was in

(06:10):
charge of the New York office, told GregOtto, like, we don't hire architects.
Why are you hiring this guy?
And he's like, if you can'tfigure out what to do with
this guy, you have to fire him.
So, so Greg just loaded everything on me.
I was like, I was doing models inRhino and renderings for people
and like Adobe Illustrator, likelayouts for project presentations.

(06:31):
I was just kind of doing everything.
one of the things that the that BuroHappold needed because it, it worked
on these like super complicatedprojects was they needed a lot of help
like getting data from one piece ofsoftware to another piece of software.
They'd have like an analysis softwarewhere they were doing, you know, crazy
load, cases on these, these shellstructures that they were building and

(06:53):
there's, um, you know, complex geometryand stuff, and they would have to transfer
that stuff after they did that analysisover to some other application, and
then they need to take some geometryand transfer it to another application.
So I actually started writing code, justkind of like teaching myself to write
code as a way of like, helping to do that.
So, fast forward a few years, I'm likein Buro Happold, uh, in the New York

(07:16):
office, And now the Revit API, man,I'm trying to remember how this works.
The Revit API is like wellestablished at this point.
We had started banging on theRevit API when it first came out.
Like I was making Revit API stuff andsending it to this guy named Wei Chu, who
was like the head of the implementationof the API at Autodesk the time, for

(07:37):
these crazy Buro Happold like structures.
And he was like, the Revit API is notbuilt for this, like this is not going
to work, and, so, I had this likegood relationship with the people who
were working on the API and they werealways looking at stuff that we were
doing because it was really, reallypushing the, the, the frontier of
what the sort of Revit API could do.

(07:58):
And there was a very specific problemthat kind of led to the geometry
library or the utility librarythat would go on to become Dynamo.
And it was that, you know, people whomodel in Revit know that if you have,
we did a lot of stuff with beams, right?
was mostly seconded to the, to thestructural team at Buro Happold.

(08:24):
And so, um, everything they did waslike beams in space, beams in space.
And it was all about like thesecomplex structures that were made up
of these linear elements and like, um,and, and then some nominal geometry.
which those things were basedwould change and you would have

(08:44):
to like update the whole thing.
And, and there's this problemin Revit that like nothing
at the time worked like that.
There wasn't an idea of like twolinear elements that you connected them
together and like when some underlyingshape changed like those linear
elements would just change together.
And so, um, the first thing I did wasactually make this like point object.

(09:07):
I made a point objectin this utility library.
And it was like a little, it waslike a little gumball, you know, like
with the axes and everything else.
And what you could do is youcould like, know, associate linear
elements in Dynamo by IDs something.
I can't remember exactly how itworked, with a point that they
would, they would associate with.
And then all you had to do was movethe points in like a marionette.

(09:29):
It would move all theattached beams and stuff.
So then I wrote a whole suite ofutilities around that were all just
about like moving points in space.
We started to use this.
We had this hilarious, like,I think it was called the Buro
Happold Tool Set or something.
We had this like, know, uh, peoplewho remember like the ribbon, when
the ribbon first came out and you madeadd ins in Revit and they would like

(09:51):
drop down and then you could have dropdowns on the drop downs and you could
have drop downs on the drop downs.
This thing, it was like, you know,

You could go deep

Ian Keough (09:58):
level tools that like resulted in 400 like nested, it was crazy.
And so.

and, and you are very organized.
Let's just say it that way.
You, you, you wanna make sure thatthe things are in the right place,

Ian Keough (10:11):
Yeah, it was like so bad that, you know, it's like those, those,
uh, those, those things that are sonested that as they fly out, you're
worried about, like, dragging your mouseoff just a little bit, cause you'll

because you're gonna, you get to start over, right?

Ian Keough (10:23):
So that was, like, the interface to use all
of these tools, and we were

Mm.

Ian Keough (10:28):
these projects, so, like, engineers would engineer a, they'd
create a geometry, and they'd use thesetools to transfer data to analysis
tools and back and forth, and itwas, it was kind of cool, but it was,
But it was very clunky, and I think,think around this time, I remember,
um, maybe, maybe Explicit Historywas becoming a thing, but certainly

(10:54):
generative components had been a thing.

Right.

Ian Keough (10:59):
and so, and actually the little gumball point that I made was very
akin to like the points, I mean this islike really dating me because anybody
who watches this thing and remembersor listens to this thing and remembers
generative components and the pointsand everything else, um, it was very
akin to what points, how you did stuffin generative components, in generative
components you wrote these scripts to likecreate these points and then you connected

(11:22):
the points with these laced sort ofthings, so, so this whole utility library
for the geometry side of things was verymuch like Like generative components.
Um, and I remember I went to, um, Smart
maybe?
The Smart Geometry Conference,speaking of generative components.

(11:42):
think I went to the Smart GeometryConference in New York City, and for some
reason I think I was at Cooper Union.
something.
So it was at, I was at Cooper unit andI remember I had been communicating with
the, the Revit API team, I had met thisguy, Matt Jeek, uh, my friend Matt Jeek,
who, who, uh, at the time was just like,he was hanging out in the forums and

(12:07):
stuff, and he was doing this cool stuff.
And I knew he was a guy wholike worked at Autodesk.
And I was like, oh yeah,he knows what he's doing.
And, and he would go to these events.
And I, I remember pulling him asideat one of these events and saying, Hey
Matt, I want to show you this library.
And the library was literally like, itwas just like scripts for making these

(12:31):
points and connecting things to them.
And then like editing the pointsand having the connected stuff,
like update everything else.

Inside of Revit.
Right.
And so obviously there's, is that theconnection with Matt at that point?

Ian Keough (12:44):
Yeah, so, so, yeah, because it was connected to the Revit API,
but the, but the library itself wasbuilt in a way that it didn't have
to be attached to Revit, it's just

Okay.

Ian Keough (12:53):
where it, it, it did its thing.
So, um, and, and I think even atthat point I had started calling it
the Dynamo library, or something,and I, I, I can't remember exactly,
but, so I show this thing to him,and then, Um, and then I moved to LA.
My wife gets a job in LA, and Imove out here, and Buro Happold had

(13:19):
an office in Culver City, which iswhere I live now, and, um, Otto,
who had started that office, and whohad hired me into New York, said,
Yeah, just, you know, come out.
So, I came out, and I sat with the, um,There was this mezzanine in our office,
the first Buro Happold office in LA,which was here in Culver City, it's now

(13:40):
downtown, but, was this kind of mezzaninewhere the computational design people sat.
now at this point Buro Happold has likea lot of architects working for it across
the global practice It has you know, therewere probably ten people sitting up on
this little mezzanine here Who were doingcomputational design stuff most of them
with backgrounds in architecture Um, ornon, non engineering backgrounds at least.

(14:04):
And then across all the officesaround the world, they started to
have a lot of like, architects.
Because, you know, projects weregetting more and more complicated.
Every project that BuroHappled was workingon was some complex geometry craziness.
And architects ended up beingreally, really useful for,
for working in that way.
And, um, and so I had this littlelibrary, and I had the, I had the

(14:26):
BuroHappled tool, tools, and I had thislittle other library, but we weren't
really using the other little libraryyet, um, uh, Oh, there's one other.
Yeah, right.
Okay.
I'm remembering now.
Sorry.
And I'm, I'm, I'm going toremember this stuff in real time.
One project that I did right beforeI left for LA, there was a project we

(14:48):
were doing with Moshe Safdie's office.
Moshe Safdie was working on um, museum inNorthwest Arkansas for the Walton family.
And I can't, um,

Well I'll look it up for the show notes.
I'll look it up and I'll, I'llinclude it in the show notes.

Ian Keough (15:09):
the name of the museum, but it had all of these, um, it had
all of these timber roofs, thesereally cool like glue laminated beams
that would span like 40, 50, 60 feet.
on top of those glue laminated beamswere these, um, were these like adaptable
plates and the adaptable plates eachhad like metal tie rods coming into

(15:31):
them, making this kind of diaphragmof a diagrid of these metal tie rods.
And so you can imagine you've gotthese like swoopy sort of timbers.
You've got little plates on topof them that are sticking off
normal to the swoopy timbers.
And then you've got tie rods coming in.
on a set of diagram patternas this swoop thing.
So those adjustable plates likehave all these angles and they

(15:51):
have to like move around and stuff.
And that was like the first applicationof that library that I had built.
So what I did was I embedded, you know,instances of these points inside of family
that represented the kind of tie plate.
then I associated all the strut connectorswith the points on this tie plate.
So you could literally like updatethe underlying geometry of the whole

(16:12):
roof and all of these, like, The gluelamps would update, the tie plates
would update, the struts would move,and everything would stay connected.
And you wouldn't have to change anyof your drawings, you wouldn't have
to like, you know, Cause they were,at that point, they were tweaking the

Of course.

Ian Keough (16:28):
of this

Yeah.
Mm-hmm

Ian Keough (16:29):
the time, you know?

Parametric.

Ian Keough (16:33):
at that and be like, oh, that's kind of cool.
It's like, it's actually like, it'sactually like, um, it's parametric.

Yeah.

Ian Keough (16:41):
and, right, like fully parametric.
It's not just like

Right.

Ian Keough (16:44):
parametric.
And, and we had done that.
Um, one of the reasons we had donethat was because they also wanted to
evaluate using, digital components,digital components, the Gary product,

Digital project.

Ian Keough (17:00):
digital

Right.

Ian Keough (17:01):
They wanted to use, I was also like a Katia guy and I was
like, well, we could do it in digitalproject, but I have this little software
library over here that basically ifwe use that We could do this without
all of the like 20, 000 add ons tolike digital project to make it work.
And it ended up working.
That's the craziest thing.

(17:22):
I basically told them, I was like,I think we just turned like your 5,
000 Revit or whatever it costs at thetime, your 3, 000 Revit into a 20, 000
piece of software with this like onelittle software library, know, that
gave it this kind of adaptability.
Again, before adaptive components, beforeany of this stuff was like a thing.
So.

I, I wanna, I wanna break in right here because I,
I wanna get back to the, theconversation you had with Matt, too.
I, like, we'll pick up there, but,like, where did that name come from?
You said you, you think you werecalling it the Dynamo Library
at that point, so where did thatname, where'd that come from?

Ian Keough (17:57):
I, I literally plucked it out of thin air.
I was like, it's dynamic.
Dynamo.

It's a superhero.

Ian Keough (18:05):
like a little engine.

Right?

Ian Keough (18:07):
a magician.
And there's a funny story about howI sat behind him on a plane one time.
But, um, that's, that was it.
It was, and I looked around, I waslike, are there other software?
I mean, also, remember, this is 2010?
I
mean, I think I was still,like, I was working on this
software library, like, 2002.
2008, 2009, something like that.

(18:29):
I can't remember.
So this is before there's likea zillion startups out there.
I mean, sure, I'm sure the name Dynamois now like, you know, some startup
has already like raised a hundredmillion dollars, called itself Dynamo
and flamed out, you know, but like

Right.

Ian Keough (18:43):
the time, you know, there was nothing else out there.
So

So, so where did you get this proclivity to code yourself, to do
things yourself, to make your own tools

Ian Keough (18:54):
that was like, that was literally like that from the top down at
that like, if he couldn't keep me busy.
he'd have to fire me.
So, I had, I had written a little bit of,at the previous firm that I had worked
for way back in the days, um, throughgraduate school, I worked at this firm

(19:15):
called ESI Design, which is an exhibitdesign company, um, uh, that's run by Ed
Schlossberg, and it was super, super fun.
We did interactive museum exhibitsand all this kind of crazy stuff.
They were a Vectorworks shop, I had taughtmyself VectorScript, which is the built
in scripting language inside Vectorworks,to help lay out stuff we were doing there.

(19:37):
But it was, you know,kind of scripty of stuff.
And then through, throughgraduate school, I dabbled a
little bit in Mel script on Maya,

Maya?
Yeah.

Ian Keough (19:47):
but I didn't really start programming until Buro Happold.
Um, and the, and the joke I alwaystell there is, Like I tell kids who
are like learning how to program today,you have no idea how well you have it.
Like

Right.
Light years.

Ian Keough (20:04):
endless hours of YouTube videos

Right.

Ian Keough (20:07):
coding tutorials.
And now like AI is writing code for you.
in the day, there were books.
Like, you

And if you messed up one, yeah.
And you would be there scouringit, looking for where you
screwed up that one character.
Right.

Ian Keough (20:22):
now imagine on top of that, you, not only do you have
these books, you gotta read, like,learn how to write code from a book.
So I would like, go down tothe Barnes and Noble below Buro
Happold and sit in the aisles.
I never bought the books,that was too cheap.
I would just like, read the coding books,

Right.

Ian Keough (20:36):
And then, um, uh, and then on top of that, when the Revit
API first came out, there was noway to, like, interactively debug.
Anything you were making.
So like you would have to, you wouldhave to throw up message boxes.
Like you'd say, you'd throwup a message box that says I
got here in the code or the

So you knew, so you knew where to look.

Ian Keough (20:59):
so

Yeah.

Ian Keough (21:00):
to look, you knew what the values were.
or if there was like, I certainly didn'tknow how to do it cause I wasn't a
sophisticated programmer in any way.
So yeah, to your questionthough, is really just about,
I had to keep myself busy.
So I kind of like went looking around.
For things to, know, that were valuable topeople that needed to be done with code.

(21:20):
And also because theengineers couldn't do it.
The engineers were like super,super smart, but none of them like
knew how to do any scripting, or

Sure.

Ian Keough (21:29):
or anything else.
So, um, and all the toolsthat they were using had APIs.
we were using Robot forstructural analysis, and it
had an API way back in the day.
Like a beautiful API, youcould do anything with that

Wow.

Ian Keough (21:40):
And the, and the engineers didn't really know how to use it.
You know?

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Learn more at arcol.io/TRXL
That's ARCOL.IO/TRXL
My thanks to Arcol for supportingthis episode of the podcast And now,
let's get back to the conversation
about some of the otherplatforms that were out there.
You mentioned generative components,obviously Rhino was around, there

(22:52):
was RhinoScript, obviously there wasAutoCAD for 2D stuff and some 3D, right?
And they had their own programminglanguage, like Lisp or whatever
it was called, AutoLisp.
And then there was, I mean, Iremember applications like Gem.
Do you remember that one?
That was like a three dimensional,um, you know, it was kind of this idea
of having parametric, you know, youwould have voxels and those voxels

(23:15):
would basically get filled, stretched,

Ian Keough (23:17):
was based on AutoCAD?

I don't know what it was based,

Ian Keough (23:20):
AutoCAD, on Excel?
There was one that you like, filledin tables in Excel, and it would
generate geometry that was, but itcould only do basically like, facades?

that, I thought that was probably it, and then, and then there
was like panel tools inside of Rhino,even the, I think at that date, like
2009 ish, and so where did Grasshoppereven come onto the scene at that point?
Because,

Ian Keough (23:41):
not on the scene yet.
Like, like now, the, the,the, the new hotness is still
like, generative components.
are also kind of playingaround with Maya, Melscript,

right.

Ian Keough (23:53):
had come on the scene for Maya at the time, so
people were still doing that.
Some people were trying to automate3D Studio Max and everything else,
but that never really caught on.
and so, so you were either scripting inRhino, which had a pretty good scripting
interface, and it's Rhino script stuff.
Or VBA, I think you couldwrite stuff in VBA at the time.

I think it was based on, on that, yeah.

Ian Keough (24:14):
generative components, or this was when digital project was a
thing and Gary was like trying to getdigital project to become a thing.
So the people right out of thebleeding edge were like to evaluate
whether or not we were all going tobe working in CATIA in the future.
So like I taught a CATIA class, I cotaught a CATIA class at Columbia for
architects using power copies and theselike crazy stuff that's been around

(24:38):
forever on CATIA, but is, Extraordinarilyexpensive and no architect would ever
buy and, um, also incredibly complicatedto use, which is probably why digital
project, you know, doesn't exist anymore.
So that's kind of the, thelandscape and also like, and Revit
is, Revit is just starting tokind of find its traction, right?

(24:59):
Revit came out, think Revitarchitecture came out in 2001.
joinBuroeau Happold in 2005 andliterally like day one, Revit.
On my chair was a boxedcopy of Revit's structure.
like, there's this new thing, it'scalled Revit, we're building this cricket
stadium, and you're gonna build it inRevit, it's gonna be the first project

(25:22):
that Buro Happold globally has everdone in this software called Revit.
And by the way, all the drawingshave to look exactly like all the
drawings have looked for 20 years.

Yeah, good luck.

Ian Keough (25:30):
I was so screwed,

Yeah,

Ian Keough (25:34):
Um, yeah, we had this like really, really ornery
CAD guy, who's great, Simon.
He was fantastic, incredible CAD guy.
he was like just riding meabout line weights, and like,

always.

Ian Keough (25:50):
couldn't Revit to look like your drawings had always looked, and
it was, it was a lot of all nighters.
Um

Remember just the transition, like he worked in AutoCAD and he had,
you know, however many colors and he wasreading drawings through color, right?
And then Revit comes alongand it's black and white.
And it was like, you had this graphicalrepresentation with line weights and
stuff, but you're like, it's a differentlanguage for people who are operating.
And who are these techniciansoperating these things?

(26:18):
Like you actually learned how to decode.
the, the drawing through color because youdidn't see the line weight on the screen.
And now you could.

Ian Keough (26:26):
so frustrated that you had to build a model of a
building to get the drawing.
They were just like,just move that line over.
And I'm like, well thatline is a slab edge.
me to change the shape of the slab?
They were like, whatever, just moveit over so that the slab edge line on
the drawings is in the right place.
Like, was probably, you know, therewas a, Happold where we literally,

(26:48):
we had a floor in New York.
of drafters and the engineerswould like do their work and sketch
out, sketch out what they wanted.
Then they'd carry it down to thedrafters and that's how they'd
operated forever and ever.
And the drafters would do thething and the drafters were
incredibly skilled people.
But when the, when BIM came on the scene,very few of them made the transition

Hmm.

Ian Keough (27:10):
to, somebody from BuroHab could probably call me out on that, but
it seemed to me like we had a lot ofdrafters and like a small percentage
of them actually made the transitionto BIM because you had to learn.

Start over.

Ian Keough (27:23):
just didn't know how buildings went together,

It's not starting over, but it's a huge learning curve at that point
with, with all that muscle memory thatyou have built into the platform that
you've been using for a long time, right?
Then, then to say, you have toactually think about this differently.
Like you said, you build the model andyou extract the drawings rather than
building, just creating the drawings andmoving something and then coordinating
all the drawings that that affected.

Ian Keough (27:44):
and you're, and you're reminding me when I say
that Buro Happold had now at somepoint by the time I got to L.
A.
hired a lot of architects, one of thereasons they had hired a lot of architects
was because young architects Who weren'tso interested in going out and working in
like proper design architecture firms andwanted to know more about how buildings
go together up coming in droves to BuroHappold and they were great at BIM.

(28:08):
They were really hungry about thenew tools They wanted to learn Revit.
They wanted to learn howbuildings went together.
So they were really interested in buildingmodels of buildings and That was a
benefit for all the engineering firms.
They started to hire architects to helpMake the models of their buildings.
Um, so that was a kind of aninteresting, an interesting dynamic.

(28:29):
Yeah.
I remember at one point in New York,you know, I was working, all the people
who were doing BIM at that point, lotof them had architectural backgrounds.
They were going to NJIT or otherschools and coming out with
like, you know, BIM proficiencywas starting to become a thing.
Um, so, uh, so, so that is to say,like the landscape was still very much

(28:51):
like, It's funny, the landscape lookedoddly similar to how it is today.

Mm hmm.

Ian Keough (28:58):
had come out too, but like, that wasn't even in our domain.
That was, I think SketchUp had comeout, got really, sort of, widely
used, uh, got acquired by Google fora completely different purpose than
like, Architectural concept and thengot spun out of Google again to, and
got eaten up by Trimble at some point.
We just weren't even tracking SketchUpcause it kind of wasn't in our orbit, but

(29:21):
I know it was, I know it was out thereand it was contemporary with that stuff.
Um, but yeah, landscape very similarto today, Revit, Rhino, you know?
Um, so, uh, so, so we do that project,we do the Moshi D'Safi project with the,
with the cool roofs and everything else.
We kind of prove that like withthis, layer on top of Revit, could

(29:44):
seriously upgrade Revit, know?
Um, and I think that got a lot of peoplethinking like, whoa, we can like, and
we started doing, then at that point, westarted doing crazy projects in Revit.
We, we did this, um, for Morphosis,which is the Cooper Union, the
new building of the Cooper Union.
If you've ever been in New York City,there's a, there's a, a Morphosis

(30:05):
project that has this, Lightwellthat kind of goes up through the
entire center of the building.

It's a beautiful stare.
Yeah.

Ian Keough (30:13):
yeah, it's this, it's a stair that goes up a few stories, and then
it's this, um, this like cage sculpturething, structural sculpture thing that

Right.

Ian Keough (30:22):
That was all done in Revit.

That's crazy.

Ian Keough (30:25):
People go back and look at the models and stuff we did
of that, and they're like, what?
But it was because we had these,like, points in space with all this
association stuff, and like, uh, thatwe were, that we were able to do that.
And I presented at tons ofconferences and stuff about, like,
this bleeding edge kind of stuff wewere doing in, in Revit at the time.
And that was about the time when,when I showed Matt kind of library of

(30:49):
dynamic points and lines kind of tools.
And that's, it really just didpoints lines, points lines.
and transforms of stuff.
And it had a little, it hada pretty high level API for,
for doing that kind of stuff.
Um, so yeah, so then I move out to L.
A.
and um, we, I don't, you know, Ihonestly don't know how long I was

(31:09):
in, I think I started working init, on it right away, because if you
look, this is 2010, I moved to L.
A.
and some of the first tweets aboutDynamo are from the very first
house that I rented in Culver City.
So I know for a fact that I wasworking on what is Dynamo now, 2010.

(31:35):
Uh, um,

was around, right?
So there's another,

Ian Keough (31:39):
was around

I started on Twitter in 2006, I want to say.
So it'd been around fora while at that point.

Ian Keough (31:46):
right

I was there when it was transitioning off of cell phones,
literally SMS for tweets to, you know,like the iPhone came out in 2007, right?
So

Ian Keough (31:55):
so I was like, I, I was, I had a blog for some time and I was
writing little things in this blog, butthen Twitter came out and I was like, oh
cool, I can post like little updates here.
if anybody, I'm, I'm not reallyon Twitter anymore, but if anybody
wants to, my history is still there.
If you want to go back and look atthe history, like very, very early
on, you'll see, I think, you'll seescreenshots of like very old posts.

nice.

Ian Keough (32:20):
um, and, and at the time it, it was the orange nodes period, um,
which, which people who have been aroundDynamo for a long time know that the
nodes were orange for a very long time.
And this is, um, it must have been,
um, Explicit History was definitely outat this point because I remember thinking

(32:44):
like, oh, I want my nodes to look glassyand bubbly that guy David's nodes.
So there

And explain what Explicit History is real quick,
just for those who don't.

Ian Keough (32:55):
is the precursor to Grasshopper.
It was what Grasshopper was called, andI don't know, maybe you'll get David
Rutten on this show one of these days,and he can tell you if this is true or
not, but my recollection is that ExplicitHistory was what Grasshopper was called
before it was called Grasshopper, know?
So when architects were firstplaying with this thing, and it
was very, very kind of like beta,

It was a plug in.
It was a plug in for Rhino at that point.
It was not bundled.
They were not one and the same company.

Ian Keough (33:21):
yeah,

It was just David, right, as far as I know.
It was just David creating that.

Ian Keough (33:25):
have had a UI because I remember thinking like, Oh, I
like the way that they do that.
And, and, but I did all kindsof like other stuff too.
Like I'd never built a UI,like a software UI before.
So it is just like hilariously bad.
You go back and look atthose like orange nodes.
At one point I surrounded each, I madethe node, I made the ports on the nodes

(33:49):
kind of stick halfway off the node.
And so they had these like, I don't know,they, they, they looked like nipples.
On the sides of the nodes.
Um, and, and I was like,Oh, this is really cool.
Then like tact, it felt like very tactileand, you know, kind of skeuomorphic.
Like these were at one point I madethe texture behind them look like
a, like an actual workbench and I

This was the days of skeuomorphic design,
like, for sure, right?
I mean, iPhones, 2007, like,remember the fine Corinthian
leather in the calendar app?
And there was all ofthose kinds of things.

Ian Keough (34:23):
Thank you.
Thank you for that recollection becausethat is like totally in my defense.
It was of the moment.
It

Right.

Ian Keough (34:29):
me

It wasn't just you.
We wanted rich textures oneverything, on website backgrounds.
Like, finding seamlesstextures was, was like

Ian Keough (34:38):
Yes.

art.
back then it was difficult.
Yep.

Ian Keough (34:41):
and I was using, um, I was using WPF, which is the
Windows Presentation Framework.
So this is going to like, I'msorry, like people in your audience
are going to be like, Oh my God,Windows Presentation Framework.
WPF.
WPF is actually awesome.
It's been around for a really long time,and, and, and now it's, it's pretty great.
I think they have versions of it youcan do cross platform development,

(35:02):
mobile devices, everything else.
But at the time, it was kind of like theirnew, Their new interface they had had this
other interface that they made for theweb, which was supposed to place this was
also the time when everybody was gettingrid of flash Plugins or flash Steve

(35:23):
Jobs Steve Apple basically killed flash

Yep.

Ian Keough (35:26):
saying like it's

Thoughts on Flash.
Thoughts on Flash wasthe letter that he wrote.
Yep.

Ian Keough (35:31):
Exactly, right.
So like this is several years into thatright before the first iPad comes out
everybody's trying to like, throw Flashoverboard, and Microsoft had built
this thing called Silverlight, whichwas the precursor to WPF, and they
were, was like, around for a coupleyears, and they were shutting that
down, and WPF was like, the recommendedway to build new UIs for Flash.

(35:53):
stuff.

Hmm.

Ian Keough (35:55):
And so, um, and so I was programming this thing in WPF and it,
until a couple years into it, I had noidea how to do things correctly in WPF.
If you were to go back, and by theway, all of this code, I think, if, if
you have any, like, codey people wholisten to this thing, I'm sure you do.

(36:15):
You can go to the GitHub repositoryfor Dynamo right now and go back
to day one, like the first commit.
You can probably find, like, thisoriginal, terrible WPF code that I was

Nice.

Ian Keough (36:31):
Um, like, 12 years ago, like, 2010, 2011, whenever that was.
Um,

So did you start publishing there immediately
when you started this project?
Or was this something you went backand kind of like backfilled at some
point for the GitHub repository?
Yeah.
Mm hmm.

Ian Keough (36:53):
I can't remember, maybe like the first beginnings
of, I don't remember when GitHubstarted, or when I started using it.
I do remember, um, that at some pointI started pushing stuff to GitHub.
And I had another kid right after Imoved to LA, I had my son also got

(37:17):
for another piece of technologythat I had bought, got acquired by
this startup out of Boston, whichsubsequently got acquired by Autodesk.
But that whole process of that gettingacquired and me getting acquired with
it, me going to work for that companyout of Boston, and then me getting
acquired by Autodesk was like a twoyear period, maybe where I didn't
have a lot of time to work on Dynamo.

(37:39):
And I open sourced it, and Matt Jezik,again, was one of the first people that
I told, I was like, Matt, I'm, like,I don't have time to work on this with
this acquisition happening and likeeverything else, so like, I, I'm gonna
open source it, cause I thought, evenback then, I thought, this thing needs
to exist in the kind of public domain.

(38:03):
Um, There was just this, this was, thispoint it must have been that GitHub was
kind of picking up steam and the ideaof open source was picking up steam.
And, and the thing that I haddefinitely seen inside Buro Happold
was that were just doing stuffover and over and over again.
And my, my joke about this isalways the stadium bowl generator.

(38:27):
Every firm that I ever worked withat Buro Apple did stadiums, and
we've worked with a lot of them.
I've probably worked on four orfive World Cup soccer stadiums.
Like every one of the firms thatwe worked with on that stuff had
their own little script to generate,you know, stadium bowl layouts.
And they'd be like, Hey, youwant to see our special script
for generating the bowl layouts?
And I'm like, Oh, so lame.

(38:50):
so I think at that time Ijust like started to think
like, this should, is not.
IP, right?
Like this should just be out there assomething that we all contribute to.
we all sort of vet that.

Because you actually know what it takes to create one of those,
and you see it happening copy after copy,and they're all from scratch, right?
And so you see the waste, literally,

Ian Keough (39:13):
maintain, you know, um, it's worth noting that two or so years after
I got acquired by this other companyand left Buro Happold, um, I talked to
somebody who was working in Buro Happold,literally sitting in my old chair.
And I said, Oh yeah, you guysstill using the Buro Happold tools?
He's like, yeah.
Uh, no.

(39:34):
I mean, those things, like, I mean,the installer broke at some point,
and then we couldn't figure out howto, like, you know, YEARS of work,

gone.

Ian Keough (39:44):
into these tools.
Just basically, like, Disappeared,you know, and it was because
it's because software is hard.
Like, like software is a, it's like agarden and if you've ever gardened and
you leave your garden for the littlestamount of time and the weeds start
popping up, it's pretty soon you'vegot this garden full of weeds and it
just becomes like totally unmanageable.

(40:04):
You got to like burn itdown and start over again.
Um, that is software.
Like, like, so, so, if, if any ofyou out there are like, in the midst
of writing a mean comment on a, on aGitHub repository to an open source repo
maintainer, stop what you're doing andconsider for a moment that that person
is thanklessly, like, developing thisthing, updating this thing, maintaining

(40:28):
it, deploying it, making sure thatit doesn't break, like, they're doing
this on their nights and weekendsbecause it's not their primary job.
You know, there's a lot of likelove that goes into these projects,
um, and, and, um, it takes a lot.
So like, these organizations arenot constitutionally set up to
like, build software, maintainsoftware, deploy software.

No, they're working on projects.
Yeah.

Ian Keough (40:52):
They're working on a project, right?
Um, so, so yeah, so I, I think at thatvery early time I had this thought
like, okay, this stuff is just goingto have to be, and it wasn't like I was
making money from it or anything else.
There was no market at the timefor Revit add ins or anything.
And I think people hadstarted to play with it.
Like, cause from day one, I hadstarted to put, I think on my blog,

(41:13):
I started to put like installers,or maybe not even installers.
It was just like a zipfile full of all the files.
I was like, put these in a directorysomewhere in your rabbit hole.
And, um, and so people had accessto the code and they were actually
responding to me and emailing it.
They're like, wow, this is really cool.
And like, starting to like, the kindsof workflows and at the time it had a

(41:36):
very limited set of things that it coulddo like I could do all the things that
that little library could do before verysimple geometry stuff because I didn't
have a proper geometry kernel And thenI think I started latching into more
geometry functionality inside Revit Soit was kind of Revit's Geometry Kernel
in the same way that Explicit Historywas using Rhino's Geometry Kernel.

Mm hmm.

Ian Keough (42:01):
Geometry Kernel still wasn't great.
It wasn't doing crazy,NURBS y kind of stuff.
It was still like, you know, conics and,you know, but it was, it was good enough.
Um, so, uh, and so, yeah,that's where it was at the time.
It was like Orange Nodes on Twitterand everything else, and then I, and
then I open sourced this thing and Itell Matt, and he's like, you know,
that's actually pretty cool becausewe have this, Autodesk has this great

(42:25):
summer internship program where theybring people in from the universities
and stuff to work for the summer.
had this guy, Stephen Elliott, from,I think Stephen went to Northeastern?
and I think Stephenstill works for Google.
Um, but he, um, at the time hewas a student and he came in and
Matt said, We've got this guyStephen, we're really interested in

(42:49):
contributing to the Dynamo project.
Um, could I have him take a look?
And, Stephen starts in the summer,looks at the like, the mess of
things that I had built, and

this is during the time when you basically were saying you had to pause
from this because you were doing thisother two year long acquisition period.
Okay.

Ian Keough (43:09):
this was never my job.
Like, this, doing this was like anights and weekends kind of thing, and
so now I have like, a, I have a yearold, or a three year old and a baby.
And a full time job at Buro Happold, whichwas in and of itself, like, pretty hard.
And, um, and so they have thisguy, Steven Elliott, start

(43:30):
to contribute to this thing.
Now, this is where the time, I'm gonnaget the times, like, all messed up, cause
I can't remember the exact sequence.
Before I left, I will say this much,um, about like how this started to
land in Buro Happold on projects.
Before I left Buro Happold, there was aproject that we were working on with HOK.
It was called the, uh, it was calledARTIC, A R T I C, the Anaheim Regional

Oh, I remember.

Ian Keough (43:56):
Intermodal Center.

Well, I used to live in Southern California.
I know exactly the buildingyou're talking about.
Yeah.

Ian Keough (44:01):
the big E T F E

Right.

Ian Keough (44:03):
and so Greg Otto, So, HOK's office used to be
right across the street from us.
He literally marched over toHOK and stole the facade package
from Thornton Tomassetti.

Wow.

Ian Keough (44:18):
I'm gonna get like, I might get in trouble for saying this,
but like I think Thornton Tomassetti,they weren't happy with Thornton
Tomassetti's work for whatever reason.
was like, we're right next, we'reright across the street, we should
absolutely have this project.
It was ETFE, it was a complexroom with this diagrid, sort of,
steel tubular structure and these,

Yeah,

Ian Keough (44:34):
and so, he was like, we should, this is 100
percent a Buro Hatfield project.
So to his credit, he just likewalked over there and like,
gave us that scope of work.

we'll take that.

Ian Keough (44:44):
yeah, and the building was like, um, was like a toroid
that had been like, chopped at

Like shunted.
Yes, at both ends.
Right.

Ian Keough (44:57):
and, and, and the roof is like this section of a, of a,
of a toroid, and they were creatingthat shape in Grasshopper, Explicit
History, Grasshopper, whatever it wasat the time, and constantly updating
that shape and everything else.
Well, the structural engineers hadto respond to that by like laying
out the entire diagrid structure.

(45:19):
And then laying out these like ETFEcapture channels that ran along the steel
structure and making sure that all thecapture channels were exactly normal to
the surface to capture the ETFE cushions.
And then the shape of these inflatedETFE cushions, all super complex.
And I was like, let's do it in Revit.
of course, everybody'slike a hundred percent.
No, we can't do this in Revit.

(45:39):
It's like.
But, but they, the thing was, at the endof the day, they needed the building model
to be in Revit because they wanted touse Revit to do the drawings and stuff.
So I was like, we can do it in Revit.
And I come to, I come to learn afterthe fact, after we had, had finished
this project, HOK had actually takenthat project to Autodesk and said, we

(46:02):
really want to deliver this in Revit.
Here it is.
This like super complicated buildingwith the ETFE roof and everything else.
And, uh, can we do it in Revit?
And Autodesk told them, no, they werelike, don't, you're not going to be
happy if you try and do this building.
Um,

of them to say that, actually.

Ian Keough (46:23):
yeah, I think, well, every once in a while they have
like a very reasonable, like, take.
And at the time, like, this kind ofgeometry, like, yeah, 100 percent Revit
was not the right tool for the job.
But that's, I've neverlet that stop me before.
So,

Yeah,

Ian Keough (46:38):
I, this was where Dynamo really kind of started, was trying
to figure out how I could recreatesome of the geometry that the
architect was doing in Grasshopper.
At least enough layout geometry.
That I could then lay out thediagrid kind of structure.
And then I could lay out thelittle things that stuck normal.
And this is very much likethe Moshe Safdie project.

(47:00):
That's why I kind of looked atit and I squinted and I was like,
that's like the Moshe Safdie project.

no problem.

Ian Keough (47:05):
Vastly more complicated than the web specific project.
Um, but, but we ended up doing it, andit ended up working, and to Revit's
credit too, like, the geometry APIs hadgotten good enough at this point that you
could do, like, you know, shapes, like,subtly twisting through space, and you
could do all this kind of crazy stuff.
So, um, we, we did that project,and that was really, that was when

(47:27):
Matt and I talked about, Oh, okay,I'm, I'm, I'm being acquired by this
other thing, I gotta go open sources.
So, Stephen Elliott gets involved onthis project, and he, um, he builds a
library, so he builds a library of nodes,I don't think I had a library of nodes,
I don't know how you got nodes into thegraph, like, oh, there was like a search

(47:49):
thing, search was, yeah, so there waslike a, you could only get libraries,
nodes in the graph by searching, therewas a little search bar, you had to
know what they were called, but ifyou found them, you like, press enter,
and it would, boop, drop it into your

If you found them right.

Ian Keough (48:02):
There weren't that many, right?
It's not like Dynamo now,it's like thousands of nodes.

But you're basically saying the UI was a search field.
I mean, it was like, Google

Ian Keough (48:12):
Yeah, because that was like the thing at the time.
We were like, oh, everything, the world'sinformation is going to be indexed, and

Look where we've come back to like, like look at a, look at ai, right?

Ian Keough (48:22):
Dynamo is just going to be a chat interface at

right?

Ian Keough (48:25):
in the near future.

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Ian Keough (49:25):
so I think he built this library where you could drag
and drop the nodes out and then,and then he proposed to completely
rebuild the engine of Dynamo.
It's not fair to say that the firstversion of Dynamo actually had an engine.
It was event based.
It was, um, for the programmersout there, it would mean that, you
know, you'd do something with thisnode, it would calculate something,
and it would trigger an event.

(49:46):
the downstream nodes would listen for thatevent, and they would take the data from
that node, and they would propagate that,they would do their calculation based
on that data, and send it downstream.
The beautiful thing about the event basedsystem is that it was incredibly simple.
Like, you could reason aboutit just by looking at the code,
and then you could debug it.
You could debug through a graph byjust saying, like, okay, it does this.

(50:07):
Where's that event received?
Okay, it does this.
You could check values andeverything as a, as a programmer,
figure out what was going on.
So, so when they came to me and theywere like, we want to replace the,
the Dynamo engine with this variantof scheme that Steven is working on.
I was too young to really thinkabout the implications of this.

(50:30):
I was really too young to thinklike, wow, it seems like it's going
to be vastly more complicated.
Then the thing that exists right now,but Steven was a really really smart guy
And he was studying computer science,and I'd never studied computer science,
and I was just like okay He must he mustbe smarter than me So he goes off and
he writes this engine based on Scheme.

(50:52):
We can put it in the show notes whatScheme is But it's a language and and also
based on F sharp which was a new languagethat Microsoft had started building which
was a Functional programming language, andso he called this the Scheme This thing
that he had built, F SCHEME, and, um,for a time, while we had this engine in

(51:16):
Dynamo, You could actually print a Dynamograph as a giant algebraic expression.
Um, I won't go into it here, but likethis gets into Lisp and everything else.
And you could, you could literally likeprint, you know, if you had 500 nodes
in your graph, imagine printing that aslike an embedded algebraic expression.

(51:38):
That's like a mile long.
And that's kind of cool, because ina way, like, All the computation is
like laid out right there for you.
And it's super uncool becauseit's 100 percent unintelligible,

Mm-hmm

Ian Keough (51:50):
you know.
Um, and so, at that moment in time,like, you know, now with hindsight, just
got infinitely harder to interact with.
Not like from a UI standpoint,but from a coding standpoint.
So now we had to write, you were alwayslike, shoveling data into a form that

(52:10):
the F scheme thing could process,and then you were popping that data
back out of the F scheme form intoa process that's like the of manage.
net thing could process, and it was,it was just super complicated, but
it was kind of neat, and it stillworked, it still worked really well,
so like anybody who used Dynamofor the first couple of years, that
Autodesk was contributing to it, wasusing it this version of the engine.

(52:36):
Um, and uh, and then I think, you know,that kind of planted the seed, then
people started to really use it, like,um, Autodesk was now contributing to
this thing, and I will say, to theircredit, Autodesk has allowed that
project to maintain, to be open sourcelong after I've been involved with it.
Like from day one, the Dynamoproject was open source.

(53:00):
And now it obviously has closedsource components in the form of
its kernel and everything else.
at the time, it was dependent onRevit for its geometry kernel.
So like it, was a very, very shortwindow at the very beginning when
it had its own geometry kernel.
It was with like points and lines.
And then it becameRevit's geometry kernel.
So That enabled a new kindof conversation with users.

Hmm.

Ian Keough (53:26):
literally there was a shift at that moment.
There was a shift in howAutodesk talk to its customers.
Prior to that, you know, if you've beenusing an Autodesk product for a really
long time, and this is not the faultof Autodesk, this is like all software
at the time, there was some forum

Right,

Ian Keough (53:46):
you go and post a question

right.

Ian Keough (53:49):
and, and maybe somebody from the company would like.
respond to your forum post.
And maybe it would get elevatedto some place where it got into
somebody's backlog and everything else.
But Revit was like,developing really quickly.
It had this sprawling multiyear long backlog of stuff that
they were going to work on.
Chances of your thing you know, getting

Noticed

Ian Keough (54:09):
noticed

even noticed

Ian Keough (54:12):
yeah, let

Mm-hmm

Ian Keough (54:13):
up um, were very, very small.
And it engendered this relationshipbetween the software company and everybody
else that was like, software company'sgoing to do the thing that it does on its
own schedule You can ask for stuff, butit was like throwing darts at the side
of a battleship or something, you know?
It's just like, everything's justgonna bounce off, and people felt,
you know, frustrated by that.

(54:35):
Suddenly, there's this little projectthat rides on top of one of those big
projects, going a mile a minute, andyou can talk directly to the dev team.
And you can like go to the open sourcerepository and start putting issues in
there and saying oh when I did this thisbroke and like a fix will be issued and
a new installer will be built and it'slike the next day that thing and I think

(55:00):
some of this vibe was also happening withGrasshopper at the time you know it was
like just fixing super quickly evolvingreally quickly and that built that
community it built people who are likewow I really want to be part of this like

Mm-hmm

Ian Keough (55:16):
thing, engaging with this company in this new way.
Um, so that, that was fantastic.
And, um, just kind of feeling thatand being at a moment when, and
starting to see the first projectsthat people were doing with the thing.
And I think at some point in here,adaptive components comes on the
scene and that became like a forcemultiplier because, um, You know,

(55:43):
Dynamo up until then there was like.
There were families, which werekind of smart, but they couldn't
really talk to each other.
Like, they could do smartthings internally, but they
couldn't talk to each other.
And that was about it.
And thing that Dynamo solved really,really well was that it made families

(56:03):
be able to talk to each other.
the value of this family, when it changesover here, could be piped into this other

Mm-hmm

Ian Keough (56:09):
you could have these responsive kind of workflows.
And you could even use, like, Youcould even use stuff in your Revit
family, or in your Revit model, asinputs, because Dynamo could respond.
Like, I could go change a parameteron this family over here, and if there
was a Dynamo graph, like, piping valuesfrom that to some other place, when I

(56:30):
change that parameter over here, justmanually in the Revit interface, the
thing would magically update over here.
So it was like action at a distance.
Kind of thing.
And, and, Adaptive Components took thatto the next level, because now Adaptive
Components were much smarter, you couldembed much more smarts in them, they were
much more flexible, so there's like ayear of like, there's a year where every

(56:51):
single Dynamo example that anybody madewas basically like some crazy facade.
Because that's what, Nate

Yep.

Ian Keough (56:58):
a fantastic, it was like, the Revit splat, or it was the Dynamo splash
screen at some point because it was thisfantastic, like, stadium bowl roof that
he took the geometry and turned it intopoints and turned, made it an adaptive
component for this, like, louver shade.
And then made some Dynamo script thatwould not only lay those things out, but
then change the value of the aperture,the size of the aperture based on.

(57:20):
It's very of the time,

Right.

Ian Keough (57:23):
know.

Totally.

Ian Keough (57:27):
um, and so, um, so yeah, so Stephen, uh, builds
this new version of the engine.
And then they brought on thisguy, full time, named Peter Boyer.
Um, Peter Boyer is, um, He's probablyone of the smartest people I've ever met.
Super, super smart guy.

(57:47):
And also, incredibly nice.
He now works, he's one ofthe co founders of HighArk.
So if you guys follow the startup scene,um, residential home building, the
automation of residential home building,

Mm-hmm

Ian Keough (57:58):
cool startup.
And, um, Peter was the authorof the package manager.
So, so Peter, um, uh, we were talkingabout this problem of people being
able to sort of bottle up their Dynamoscripts and share them with one another.
And Peter built, basically byhimself, the first version of

(58:20):
the Dynamo Package Manager.
And, funny conversation aroundthat was that, I think, I haven't
been to Dynamo Packages in so long.
But like, hey wait, actually,I'm gonna do this live,

Do it live, yeah.

Ian Keough (58:32):
this Dynamo Packages, I think it's dynamopackages.
If it's still there.
Okay, right.
So I remember it looks almost exactlylike it did on day one when it came out.
So that's either, that either means thatnobody has wanted to work on this UI or
that this UI just works incredibly well.

It was good enough, yeah.

Ian Keough (58:51):
Package Manager shows you, like, how many
people have installed something.
Um, and it shows you the most activepackages, and it shows you the most
popular packages, and everything else.
But there's that one number at thetop that is the number of installs.
And I remember Peter had made it,you know, it only had like three
digits or five digits or something.
And I was like, give it more digits.

(59:11):
Give it more space.
Because at some point, like,imagine when this is a million.

Right.

Ian Keough (59:16):
looked at me like, right, like, a million Dynamo packages,
like, or a million installs,like, when's that going to be?
So right now it's 6.
9 million installs.
And the way that I always talk aboutthat number is, like, that means 6.
9 million instances, somebody chose touse something that was built by somebody

(59:41):
else, than rebuild it themselves.

Nice.

Ian Keough (59:47):
You know,

That's pretty, pretty, pretty cool.

Ian Keough (59:51):
you know, I hope, I hope what that represents is like some time savings.
I hope it represents people getting hometo hang out with their families at 5 p.
m.
instead of 10 p.
m.
Um,

Evan Troxel (01:00:02):
also represents this idea of like, making.
Like, like the craft of architectureand actually tinkering with things.
You know, I kind of think ofit like, You're in a workshop,
except it's at a computer, right?
And you're actually tinkering with stuff.
And you're, you're, you're openingthe hood and you're looking underneath
and you're doing those things and,and you're learning by doing that.
And to me, like, how many, how manyneurons have you fired off with 6.

(01:00:26):
9 million installs?
It's just gotta be like alogarithmic compared to that number.
Right.

Ian Keough (01:00:31):
think that to your point, I think architects are
fundamentally tool makers.
Um, and there's a very rich historyof that right up until we start
doing everything in the computer.

Hmm.
Mm

Um, there's even a future right when we start using
computers of like imagining whatwe were going to do vis a vis

hmm.
Hmm.
Mm

of computation.
And that future is stilltotally unrecognized.
You know, like, like, we're, we're, we'redoing the most surface level kind of
thing with these supercomputers that wehave, which is basically use them as like
a digital version of a drafting board.

hmm.

There's a whole other, maybe our third conversation, Evan,
which is like, why Hypar exists, whichis to solve this problem, but it's
like, like, we don't use computationto design buildings right now.
We use humans to design buildings,we use computation to just
turn that stuff into bits.
You know, so we can representit ultimately as drawings.

Abstract it, right?

Yeah,

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My thanks to Confluence for supportingthis episode of the TRXL podcast.
And now, let's get backto the conversation.
It makes me think of Steve Jobssaying, you know, like the computer
is a bicycle for the mind, right?
Because that was all based on this ideaof this graph where it talked about
different animals and their speed, right?
And man was like way down herein the corner and the cheetah

(01:02:48):
was up into the right, right?
And then there was a human witha bicycle, which was like this
outlier, you know, edge conditionthat just was like incredible.
And so like the story that heput to that was the computer
is the bicycle for the mind.
Back to your point, like, what canyou do with this tool, and, and what
is possible, it, it is absolutelyincredible, the potential there.

and he was imagining the force multiplier of like, you know,
If you, if you go back to the timewhen he was giving that speech, he was
thinking about, like, VisiCalc, you know,

Mm hmm.
Right?

my god, you know how long it takes to, like, can people
even do these kind of computations?
Yes, they do them all by hand,or with a calculator, and this
big, like, tables of stuff.
Like, the force multiplierwas 100x for the person who
was doing that, maybe 1000x.
don't think we've ever achieved that

Mm.

tools.

Mm.

You could argue that there's buildings that we can build now that
we just simply didn't build beforebecause we can represent them now.
But in terms of the actual mechanicalact of like producing a building,
know that we've had a hundred X.

Right.
I mean, you look at, there'slike a meme out there, right?
It's like a dude with a pencil andthen like all this computation and
digital everything technology andit's like Sagrada Familia and the, the
transportation hub in Anaheim, right?
Like whatever those two examples are,but it's like, those aren't a hundred X.
It's not, it's not even 10 X.

Yeah, um, and even for day to day buildings, right?
The 99.
9 percent of all the buildings that wewill ever inhabit, know, which are the
sort of run of the mill, what Daniel Daviscalls the fat middle of buildings, right?
Like, why are we not justlike generating those?
Why are people still manuallymoving stuff around on the

Mm hmm.
Mm hmm.
Mm

but like you can consider Dynamo was like a step on
a trajectory that's pointing towardwhat we're eventually doing at Hypar.
hmm.

Mm hmm.

a lot of that started with also this idea of like the package
manager, and, and people being ableto bottle up the code that they were
working on, and, um, and, and share it.
And, and I, at this point, I thinkwe were also still just aping a lot
of what was happening in the nascentsort of grasshopper community.
It was now fully grasshopper.

(01:05:02):
didn't have a package manager, butthey had food for rhino or whatever
it was called back in the day.

Still there.
Yeah.

were like, people definitely have to be able to do this on Dynamo.
So, um, so that's, so, so thenthere's some period where I get
acquired, the company that I'mat gets acquired into Autodesk.
And that was Vela Systems,and Vela's product would go
on to become BIM 360 Field.
So I worked a full year and ahalf, probably, inside Autodesk

(01:05:27):
on a totally different project.
Like, not involving Dynamo at all.
And, um, it was like, AU, twoyears into my time at Autodesk.
I don't even know whenthat would have been.
2014?
2013?
2014?
I don't know.
Couple years into my time at Autodesk,this guy comes barreling towards me.

(01:05:51):
And I'm actually, I'm still goingto AU and I'm like sitting in the
back of the classrooms as MattJezik and Zach Krohn present Dynamo.

Right.

And those were the first classes that like suddenly, like so the
first year they did it, they had uh,I think one of the classes was called
Energetic Supermodels with Dynamo.
Or something this kind oflike in cheek sort of thing.
And I think Zach and Matt led that classand there was like one classroom full of
dynamo stuff, like a smallish classroom.

(01:06:25):
And I sat in the very, veryback and I was just like, oh
man, this thing's gonna crash.
It's like not ready for this.
Matt

Live, live demos, really guys?

Yeah.
Matt had asked, he's like, canwe lead a a thing at AU on this?
And I happened to be going to AUbecause now was, I was, think I was in
Autodesk at that point or like maybeI was going to, no, actually that
first one I was still going to au forthis other company for Vela Systems.
'cause we were pre, we were presentingVela and I was working Velas

You were just going to catch up on what they had been working on,
on Dynamo so you could actually see it.

And, and yeah, and I'm like in the back of the room, just
like, Oh my God, this is really bad.
There's, there were maybe 30people in the room and I'm
thinking, you know, Oh my God.
Um, and, uh, so that was the first class.
And then the second year, I remember.
The second year they had, like, a line toget into the classroom, and I was like,

(01:07:18):
why is there a line to get in have theynot opened the door yet, or something?
But there was a line to get inthe classroom to learn about this
thing called Dynamo that peoplelargely, like, still didn't know of.
But there was, like, at least aclassroom plus a little bit of overflow
worth of people who, like, Had heardabout this thing and were like,
they were members of that community.

The early adopters, yeah, for sure.

I'm like, I'm going to, I'm going to be the first person in
my area who knows how to do this.
And it's going to, it's goingto increase my value to my firm.
And I'm going to bepart of this community.
So that's when you kind of get thesense that it's like an exciting thing.
So at that AU, I think this guy comesbarreling towards me and he's like,
Starts talking a mile a minute aboutDynamo and how incredible it's going to

(01:08:02):
be and what we're going to do and we'regoing to build this and we're going to
have a team and we're going to do this.
And I was like, the guy talksfor like three minutes, like
without taking a breath.
And I'm like, I'm sorry,

You're like, who are you?

And it turns out it's this guy Abhijit Oak.
Abhijit, um, had been an AutoCADguy inside Autodesk for a long time.
Um, and then he was put incharge of the Dynamo team.
I can't remember what the org structureof Autodesk looked like at the time.
It was always changing, but like Abhijitwas somehow put in charge of Dynamo.
And so he was like really excitedabout this, and he found me.

(01:08:39):
And he comes charging at me, tellingme all these things we're gonna do, and
I'm like, Oh, okay, but you know I'mnot on, like, the Dynamo team, right?
I'm working on BIM 360 Fieldin the construction thing.
he's like, Yeah, yeah, let's,you're gonna be on the Dynamo team.

Let's fix that.

What is the Dynamo team?
And he's like, Oh, we've got,like, we're gonna make a team.
So, they, they make a team.
They make a, like a, it's like,Peter Boyer, and maybe Steven Elliott
was still there for a little while.
And it's Zac Krohn, um, is,is kind of coming over from
the Revit team, and myself.
And Matt Jezik was kind of peripheralto it, but like, he was kind of
shepherding this thing along, but Idon't think he was ever like a full

(01:09:17):
time member of the, the, that team.
And then, they started pulling in, thisguy, like actual Revit developers, who
had gotten fed up with developing Revit.
They, they were like, hey, I wantto go work on that Dynamo thing.
Cause like, Dynamo was now likethe cool Revit at that point
was kind of just like, it was

Yeah,

going to be.

were looking for a reason to want to go to work the next day.
Right.

so, I mean, there's a whole other podcast about this
guy, Lev Lipkin, who is incredible.
Lev was like an original Revitdeveloper, super, super smart guy.
I mean, just a brilliant guy.
He came over and, and, um, we were, wewere dreaming up all kinds of crazy stuff.
Like at one point.

(01:10:01):
We were going to embed the Dynamoruntime inside families that
families could have their own onboardcomputational logic, know, and it was

Nice.

Like imagine like now,

Right.

logic, like you could put any kind of Dynamo logic inside a family.
And then you could also, on topof that, use Dynamo to, like,

Right.

those

Hmm.
Mm

crazy.
So, we built this team aroundit, and, and, um, that, then it
was really, then it was becoming,like, a corporate kind of thing.
Now it was like, thisis an Autodesk project.
And, and, um, you know, I had towork, at some points I had to work

(01:10:45):
make sure that they understoodthat it was still open source.
there was still enough, open sourcewas still unfamiliar enough that
people inside Autodesk didn't like getthe, get the idea that Autodesk was
contributing to this open source project.
In other words, like they didn't own it.

hmm.

That was confusing to them.
So

It would be the Is that the only thing like that in
Autodesk at that time, probably?

probably, I don't, I don't know for sure, but it's certainly like, it
was certainly the only one that I knew of,

Yeah.

and so Matt was always like having to defend.
The open source thing and talk about howlike it was a different way of engaging
with customers And that's why it waslike going in this way And I think he
also although he never said this tome But I think he also like was much
more connected to the higher levels ofAutodesk I think he also sold up the
idea that like this thing was valuableto Revit It was there to sell more Revit.

Yeah.

could help them sell more Revit, you know?
that was really the thing thatthey were concerned about.
They, they, Autodesk wants to sellyou more Revit, and so having this
thing that could be of a flywheelfor that, even though it was like
a small thing at the beginning,

of the funnel, ultimately, right?
And you're talking about the thingthat people are excited about using to
alongside Revit, or on top of Revit.
I mean, that's You have tocapitalize on that excitement, right?

Yeah, and so that, and one, one unfortunate consequence of that is
And I, and I say all this with a bigasterisk because I'm, I'm, I have a
very soft spot in my heart for Autodesk.
I worked there for a number ofyears, I have a lot of great
friends who, who work at Autodesk.
Um, so, that's a big caveat toa lot of what I'm going to say.

(01:12:37):
They, um, Autodesk sometimes has thismentality of like, We're gonna go into
the market and make a product thatfeature for feature like competes and
we're gonna win Because we own thechannel or whatever, you know, you saw
this with things like Formit Sketchup.
They were like we're gonna kill Sketchup.

(01:12:58):
Let's make something that does allthe things SketchUp does and they
actually made a beautiful productand I know the team who worked
on it was kind of brilliant inmany ways But like I don't know.
It's a troubling thing to try and competelike that, know instead of like really
Differentiating on some other Vectorof value you just say like we're gonna

(01:13:20):
do exactly the same thing that youdo But because we do it, anybody who
uses Teams Microsoft Teams understandswhat this feels like in a product.
Meh You

Premium, premium, mediocre.
Yeah.

know, but it's just like, meh.
And, and so one of the thingsthat they tried to do, I think,
they're still trying to do it.
It's like, they were lookingat Grasshopper, and they were
like, this has to be Grasshopper.

I was going to ask you, like, where did that
excitement internally come from?
Uh, it was it, was it, I mean, it, maybeit's a combination of things, right?
But the excitement from the user baseand the poten the raw potential of,
of this layer sitting on top of Revit,and the way that it can now interact
with, uh, Other packages or platforms.
Maybe they didn't care about that at all.
Like I know Autodesk really likesto focus on, on themselves and what

(01:14:10):
you can build inside their tools.
But then also there are thesecompeting pressures in the
industry, a la Grasshopper, right?
And so I was just wondering if youhad, I'm sure you have thoughts, but
that's kind of where you're going.

two things.
One, it turned a 4, 000 software,whatever it cost at the time,
into a 20, 000 piece of software.
Honestly, to this

Value wise.
Yeah.

they're incredible.
Um, this thing gave Revit capabilitiesThat it couldn't do, and, and in the way
that it was implemented, just, I guessby chance, managed to up level Revit.
and, that was not only just likethe geometry stuff, the adaptive

(01:14:57):
components, all the stuff I've talkedabout, it was actually much more of
the like, mundane, day to day stuff.
Like, people don't remember that backin the day, if you were working on a
project that was 30 stories tall, andyou were like, oh, we put a mechanical
level in here, now we gotta rename allour levels, Like, you had to manually
go and rename like 30, so a lot of theearly years of Dynamo was like people

(01:15:19):
automating sheet numbering, levelrenaming, just this really, but tag
placement, like scripts for placing tagson pages in certain ways and stuff, like
really, really run of the mill kind ofstuff, and they were doing it themselves.
And that was the critical thing, likethey weren't waiting for Autodesk or

(01:15:40):
waiting for some other script provideror whatever, so like that kind of motion
that when you see that happening, you'relike, oh, wow, this thing could take
off, because now you've turned, you'veturned every one of your users, not every
one of your users, let's say of all thepeople using, Revit at the time, let's
say there were 10%, percent at a maximum,

Right.

Dynamo users.
Well, I don't know how many people thatis, it's a fair number though, tens
of thousands, hundreds of thousands ofpeople, um, at the time it was probably
100, 000 people, who are now developers.
Building tools on top of your software.
That's an incredible

Yeah, totally.
Yep.

Um, that's one.
And number two, which is a little bit
less nice that, you know, when you'rea publicly traded company, you need
to represent that the products thatyou're putting into the market are,
are continuing to deliver value ifyou are going to raise the price
and when you have an ecosystem likeDynamo provided, creating more value

(01:16:45):
in the, in, in the ecosystem ofpeople, you know, working on Revit.
You could represent thatRevit was worth more.
Because it wasn't, youweren't selling Dynamo.
Dynamo was free.
You were selling Revit.
And on top of it was this thing thatlike added all this extra value.
And the value in that thingwas growing, growing, growing,
growing, growing all the time.
It's still growing to this day, you know.

(01:17:06):
So you could represent that youcould actually charge more for Revit.
this community was buildingall this extra stuff that

It's crazy, right?
Because you also have these peoplebuilding tools that are in the, show
up in the package manager, right?
That are adding value to that ecosystemand not getting compensated for it, right?
So like, that's, those are,that, that's crazy, right?

We had a whole, we had a whole, we had lots of discussions Going
back to the beginning of Dynamo whenAutodesk first started contributing to
it Like, could we get these people paid?
Like, could the, could the, the

Create a marketplace or something.
Yeah.

whose, whose, whose tools have been on Dynamo Since basically the
Package Manager existed And might stillbe on the front page of the Package
Manager As one of the most, you know,popular tool sets over all time Has never
gained a cent From any of that stuff andI think Nate should be a millionaire,

Yeah.

if he

Yeah.

for every time somebody downloaded or a nickel for every time
somebody downloaded his package like

Or Conrad or John Pearson or like, there's so, there's
many, many, there's, there's many.
Yeah.

And and and so that's always been one of the vexing things
about like that motion Yeah, we hadall these people and they contributed
all this stuff and it never changed theway that value flows through a you see

Right,

Everybody's still compensated in the same way for their hours, you know.
This, yet again, dovetails intowhat Hypar is trying to do, but, um.
So, the last big part of the storyof Dynamo is when we, when we mashed
it together with DesignScript.
So, um, you remember that I, I, Iwas working on Generative Components

(01:18:47):
at the very beginning of my career.

right,

Components was made by this, this brilliant guy named Robert Aish.
And some of your older users, yourlisteners will remember Robert Aish.
Robert Aish was the father ofgenerative components, which was a,
which was another plug in, um, likeDynamo, like Grasshopper, but it
ran on top of Bentley microstations.

(01:19:10):
And, or Triforma, uh, Microstation, Ithink, right on top of Microstation.

I believe, yeah.

And, SMART, the SMART Geometry Conference, at least in
the very early days, was, was agenerative components conference.
It was the conference where, whereRobert Aish would run around with
like a USB key on a lanyard around hisneck that had the latest build on it.
he would like plug it into yourcomputer and give you the new bits.

Give me the juice, man.

he was sitting in the corner like fixing problems with
generative components in real life.

Wow,

so a lot of us have Robert Aish to thank for, for a lot of his stuff.
But one of the things that Roberthad done to, at some point Autodesk
convinced him to come over to Autodesk.
Uh, um, I can't remember where he was,but like they, they were like, You gotta
come to Autodesk and we'll, we'll, we'llallow you to work on all these projects

(01:20:01):
that you're interested in and everything.
Well, Robert, since GenerativeComponents, you should probably
get Robert on the show.

yeah.

Components had this idea for DesignScript, which was a language,
a textual programming language.
That had affordances in it for thekinds of programming that Archonneks
need to do a lot of like I've got afacade It's made up of all these panels.
Those panels generally look like anarray and programming terminology I
want to index into like this row thispanel this mullion on that panel and

(01:20:31):
do this specific thing And so the thedesign script language, which is still
the language that's in code blocks inin Dynamo It was it had these things
called replication guides You Thatallowed you to do all that stuff.
So it was pretty cool.
And it was also this associative language.
So it had forward and backwardsassociativity, which I won't go into

(01:20:52):
here, but if you've seen like very earlydemos of design script, was like kind of
mind bendy when you watched it work, youwere like, how was, how would that work?
Um, and so Robert was inside Autodeskworking on this design script project
and he had this team in Singaporededicated to him building the design
scripts, interpreter, the design script.

(01:21:15):
Uh, Virtual Machine.
A virtual machine is like the brain thatruns, uh, uh, uh, this, uh, language
gets compiled into a, uh, code that the,the virtual machine can read and run.
it runs that code, um, anda design script environment.
Because Robert started going aroundand telling people about design script.

(01:21:36):
Um, be like, yeah, you knowwhat this really needs?
a visual programming interface.
And he hated that because he was likedesigning this programming language.
This was going to be so easy to use andhave all these affordances for architects.
And every single person who had nowseen Grasshopper, who had now seen
Dynamo, they were like, yeah, you needto put an interface on this thing.

(01:21:56):
So he had this team in Singapore startbuilding an interface for it, and they
called it the DesignScript Studio.
And there was this guy, Luke Church,who might still be at Google today.
He, uh, he was put in charge ofbuilding the DesignScript Studio.
Luke was another really, reallyinteresting and smart guy, um, and
DesignScript Studio was, was very pretty.

(01:22:18):
It was like, you could, you could, nodesand wires, and then you could get like
previews when you hovered over a node.
You could get a preview of likethe compute at that exact moment.
You'd get this like little visualpreview of what was flowing
through the system at that point.
So they did all these like kind of cleverthings, but now Autodesk has two projects.
DesignScript, and Dynamo, whichare basically doing the same thing.

(01:22:40):
And, and, Dynamo was further ahead inits visual programming language, and
it interfaced very deeply with Revit.
Because that was the otherthing that people asked for.
They were like, this needs avisual programming interface, and
it also needs to talk to Revit.
So Abhijit, who was the guy who oversawboth of these projects, was like, we're

(01:23:00):
going to bring these projects together.
And he told us this, he told theDynamo team this, and we were like,
we're like, what do we,what do we need that for?
Um, and know, I was justkind of like, Oh man, like.
I had gone through the whole, like,F scheme thing with Stephen Elliott,

(01:23:21):
and I was like, I really don't want tomake, like, another, cause I knew this
was gonna turn into some, like, bigarchitectural, software architectural,
like, thing that we would need to do.
Um, so I kind of rejected it at first.
And I think Matt and Zach probablycalmed me down and we're like,
look, we kind of got to do this.
It doesn't make any sense that Autodeskhas these two visual programming

(01:23:42):
languages that are being developedby two teams trying to like, what,
beat each other or something.
we started to sketch out likehow this would even work.
And the core piece of thatto use the design script
virtual machine as the engine.
So we're going to rip out thestuff that Stephen Elliot had done.

(01:24:05):
a third version of the Dynamo engine basedon the, the DesignScript virtual machine.
And, um, that would give us acouple of really cool things.
thing that the DesignScriptvirtual machine did was it ran
on DesignScript, the language.
So we could have programminginterfaces in nodes inside HypeBar

(01:24:26):
that you could type DesignScript into.

Dynamo.
He said Hypar.

did I say Hybar?
Oh, sorry.

Yeah.

there's no design script in Hybar.
Um, inside Dynamo.
Um,

Right.

and, um, that was cool because then you could use replication
guides and all this stuff, and ifyou really were into design script,
you could, you could do that.
And, um, the second cool thing is theyhad built an interface called ZeroTouch.
ZeroTouch enabled them to take anyNET um, managed class library library.

(01:25:02):
gonna say technical stuff, butlike, library full of like,
methods and functions and stuff.
And emit, well you could drop that ontoDesign Script and it would, um, uh, it
could read all of the public methods,

Mm hmm,

and, and essentially create nodes for you that expose those things.
So people who use Dynamo tothis day still understand the
concept of zero touch nodes.
You can literally like, grab a, an offthe shelf, like, C sharp library from
someplace, And drop it on Dynamo, andprovided that it has public methods
with certain types of signatures,it will just show up as notes.

(01:25:40):
I actually don't know if this is stilltrue, because I haven't played with
Dynamo in a while, but that was the idea.
And, it made development of externallibraries, for creating nodes really,
really easy and straight forward.
So that was cool too, but whatwasn't cool about it was that we
now owned a programming language.
Like, I don't, I have subsequentlylearned a lot about programming languages.

(01:26:04):
Programming language implementations, Howto make virtual machines, compilers, uh,
all this stuff that I never ever thoughtwhen I went to art school I would ever
have to learn about but I had to learnabout because it's like design script
and getting like very very deeply intoThere but the problem is you make a core
technology like that that is so arcane Youkind of put a can't a hard shell around

mm hmm.

very hard for other developers to get in there and change things adapt
things You know that the the story thatkind of And I don't know if it's, if it's,
um, if it's actually true, but they sayabout, like, the Excel, the core of Excel.
They've tried over the years to, like,touch that thing and edit it to do other

(01:26:52):
stuff, and it's blown up on Microsoftand they've just, like, backed away.
And so there's, like, a core inExcel that, like, was written by
some of the original developers.
And like new developers just kind oflike work outside of that shell and
that's kind of what the design scriptvirtual machine is like There's like

Well, it kind of reminds me of your story about Burrow Happold, right?
Where, where it's like, whathappened with the Dynamo library?
And it's like, uh, you know,like, it's too hard to maintain.
Like we, we couldn't even like, thismaybe is still being used, but it's the
same kind of a thing where it's justlike, well, we couldn't figure out how
to get in there and what to do with it.
So we just, we don't touch it.

people do the same thing to each other.
You know, it's not just like we know howlike any software like, developer can
get in and mess with any kind of code.
And there's two pieces of code insideDynamo that basically function like that.
There's DesignScript Virtual Machine,and there's the Geometry Library.
The Geometry Library is now theGeometry Library that sits at the
heart of a bunch of Autodesk products.
And that was another bigpart of this upgrade.

(01:27:50):
gonna switch off the RevitGeometry Library and go to ASM.

Mm.

is the Geometry Library.
And it gave us all kinds of,like, really sweet geometry.
That we couldn't make before because Revitjust couldn't make that kind of geometry
and it has compatibility with Revit.
Um, so these things, the geometry librarywas definitely beneficial, but that's
also another one of these things thatlike, Very few people get down inside

(01:28:18):
that thing and muck around with it.
Because like, geometry libraries are,There's like a whole team of PhDs in
like Oxford or somebody that work forAutodesk who, that's all they do is like
work on the geometry kernels, right?
And so, um, you had these piecesnow that were like central to the
architecture of Dynamo that, coreteam, there were like one person per

(01:28:43):
that could like work on this stuff.
So it caused a little bit of,you know, a challenge, but we
did, we brought this thing out.
There was a, there was a period ofinstability, which people will remember
like yellow nodes with band aids onthem and stuff, or yellow warning
messages with band aids on them, alittle cartoon drawings of, because
things were breaking all the time.
Like.
We'd made all these giantarchitectural changes.

(01:29:04):
And so, people were reallykind of pissed, like, cause we
were breaking their workflows.
You know, there was like stuff thatjust wasn't backwards compatible.
Geometry libraries were different.
So geometry didn't work quite thesame way, but you know, to Autodesk's
credit, they weren't backing down.
Like they were like, Theonly way out is through,

Mm hmm.
Mm hmm.

we just like over six months or something we just like worked down like
of these things until we got to a placewhere we were relatively stable, you know,
and, and, um, back on, back in a placewhere this thing was, you know, part of
people's production kind of workflows.
Um, and that was the last bigtransition and that happened

(01:29:48):
probably two years before I left.
And then at some point I,I transitioned off the.
The Dynamo team to go work withAnthony, my co founder at Hypar, to
go work with Anthony, on a Dynamobased project, um, which was called
Fractal, but which would go on tobecome, uh, Autodesk Generative Design.

(01:30:09):
which I think still exists, andyou can use it on top of Revit.
Um, to use Dynamo scriptsbasically as the language

hmm.

to run in that thing.
Um, so honestly, I mean that, and thatwas 20, I probably haven't been involved
with the Dynamo project since about 2017?
20, maybe 2017?
So, so take everything I say here,listener, a huge grain of salt, because

(01:30:37):
that team has worked incredibly hard Sincethen, and have maintained that community
and probably grown that community.

Right.

knew like a few years after I even left Autodesk, I knew that this
thing had reached a different level.
When I started to see job postingsthat had Dynamo it's like,
what?
Like,

Yeah.

like by name, like a software that you worked on, like
is, is like a nice to have for,for somebody who's getting a job at
an architecture firm, that seems.
Insane to me,

Yeah.
And, and there, and then afterthat, like you, you search Dynamo.
I mean, it was like 2016, maybe2015, probably 2016 AU, right?
Autodesk University.
You search for any course with Dynamothat you could find in the title.
And they were awful.
Every single one of them, allthe labs, all the courses.
Yep.

yeah, I couldn't, I remember Zach laughed at me one time because
like, other funny story about Zach isthat he um, he makes his own moonshine.
Zach Krohn, the product manager of, uh,

a listener of this podcast.
Yeah.

is incredible.
He makes his own moonshine.
He grows all his own grapes, likeon these trellises around his house.
And then he, he makes, I don't knowthat it's fair to call it moonshine.
It's this very clear, very strong liquor.
he brings it to AutodeskUniversity in these Mason jars.
And we would sit in the back of theseDynamo workshops, which at one point

(01:32:11):
we're no longer run by Autodesk people.
Like this was the community straight

Right.

Pearson, guys like that, like running these classes.
And he'd pour us cups of this, like.
Crazy alcohol.
And we'd sit back there and justlike toast to the success of Dynamo.
And he

A job well done.

like, couldn't get into one of the classes.
Like I, so I went outside, like it wasso packed and there was an overflow
line and I went outside and stoodat the back of this overflow line.
some point, somebody who wasin front of me in the overflow
line, like turned around and waslike, Shouldn't you be in there?
I was like, I didn'tsign up for the class.
I, I can't go in.

(01:32:49):
I think I eventually made it in, butlike, yeah, now it's like, it's crazy.
Like the number of Dynamo classesand like, I, and I will say that,
I mean, one of the most gratifyingthings, there's really two gratifying
things that I still hear to this day.
It's like, when I talk to people abouttheir Dynamo experience, they'll say
things like Dynamo completely changedmy career, like it enabled me to grow.

(01:33:14):
do things and level up and providevalue, um, to my organization that I
wouldn't have been able to do without it.
And like, that just, it putme on a different trajectory.
Like the whole thing about, I'm notgoing to attribute this all to Dynamo.
There's, there's been a lot of motionin computational design over the last
couple of years, but like the wholething that there are computational
designers now, that's Grasshopper at work.

(01:33:36):
That's Dynamo at work.
That, the fact that that's a title,there were no computational designers.

Right.

Before Grasshopper and Dynamo and everything else.
So that's like a new class of, sothat's really incredible to hear.
I, I still think there's a lot of workto be done there, um, to change things.
But, um, and the second one is peoplewill tell me that Dynamo is how they
learned how to program a computer,

Mm hmm.

which blows my mind

Mm hmm.
Mm

and in a way,
They did it because they started withDynamo Visual Programming, and then they
got really frustrated that their graphswere like, so big and messy spaghetti.
So they would start programmingin code blocks, and they'd
probably start with design script.
And then they were like, ah, butthere's all these like, really cool,
Mostafa makes this really cool like,Python library that I can connect in,
so I'm gonna use a Python node instead.

(01:34:26):
So they'd put a Python node in there.
start reading up on like, how toprogram in Python, and over time,
more and more of their code, theirvisual program, started to disappear

hmm.

these Python nodes.
And then at some point they werelike, I want to go like, as fast
as I can possibly go, I'm going towrite my own C sharp library that
I import as a zero touch node.
And then, once they've done that,they're like, well, I want to build
my own like, stand alone software now.
And so they like, or I want tobuild my own Revit plugin that
just does this one specific thing.

(01:34:57):
So the thing startedas like a DynamoGraph.
And evolved into it's own standalone kind of thing, and the person
who worked on that went from knowingnothing about programming to like,

Yeah,

That's,

now, and you employ people, you employ people literally who, who
have been on that journey, right there.

mind.
Yeah, like I, like Hyparis a lot of architects.
Like it's a lot of people, AndrewHeumann who's on my team is
like the pro to, the, the, the,

I was, I was directly thinking of Andrew.
Yep.

you know, he is beyond in terms of examples of, of this.
A lot of people look at Andrew andthey're like, I want to be that guy.

Mm hmm,

you know, he didn't start knowing how to program

right,

Now his trajectory went Grasshopper.

right.

Grasshopper community, but I think you have very much
the same thing, you know, andnow he's like our lead developer.
So

Incredible story.
Thank you so much for taking thetime to tell it, and to tell it here.
You never have to tell this story again.

I'm I'm looking at the time now and I'm recognizing how long
it took to tell and maybe that's whyI've never told the whole Thing from
start to end because you never haveenough time at the bar, you know to tell

Well, I truly, truly appreciate it, and I think the
listeners will enjoy it very much,so they appreciate it as well.
So, thanks Ian.

I appreciate the opportunity of it always a always a pleasure to chat

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180: Campfire Series - ‘The Dynamo Story’, with Ian Keough

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}180: Campfire Series - ‘The Dynamo Story’, with Ian Keough