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

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

[00:00:00] Welcome back to the TRXL Podcast. I'm Evan Troxel, and in this episode I have a really fun conversation with Ian Keough about the incredible origin story of Dynamo. If you weren't aware, Ian is the original creator of Dynamo. He's also widely known as the father of Dynamo, and today he takes us on a journey through its evolution from a simple idea to becoming an essential tool in computational design. What began as a project to bridge the gap between Revit and visual programming grew into something much bigger.

In this conversation, Ian shares stories about Dynamo's development, including the challenges of transitioning from an independent project to becoming part of Autodesk, the technical hurdles they faced, and how the community played a crucial role in its success. We also discuss how Dynamo has transformed careers, created a new class of computational designers and helped countless architects and designers learn [00:01:00] programming. It's a story of innovation, perseverance, and the unexpected impact one tool can have on an entire industry. I.

Before we jump in, I have a bit of housekeeping 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 subscribed to the TRXL podcast itself or to my email newsletter, I rely heavily on LinkedIn's platform and therefore their algorithm to share episodes and attract new listeners. It's still the best social media platform for me to post on and try to connect with people who haven't yet heard of the show.

But there's a startling fact about social media and a creator's ability to connect with an audience. It's being referred to right now in the media sphere as the death of the follower, because only one to 5% of people who have actually opted into quote unquote following me on social media platforms even see my posts. And the crazy thing is that the bigger the [00:02:00] company and the number of followers, the smaller engagement gets, the current average is 3.8%. So in other words, for every 1000 followers I have, only about 38 see my posts. So why is this? You see, social media is now being optimized for discovery, which means they're putting short form new content like shorts or reels, for example, in front of their users on their platform Instead of the content from creators they've explicitly followed. And of course, this is all being driven by the need for them to place ads into their feed, which is their main business model. The goal is to keep you scrolling and therefore seeing more ads.

So posts like mine that include a link off of their platform don't play well with their goals. So if you weren't aware of this. Now, you know, so why am I talking about this? Because I would love it if we could just skip the algorithm entirely. How? There's two ways. First, subscribe to TRXL wherever you watch or listen.

And second on my [00:03:00] website found at TRXL.Co so that we can directly connect over email. That's it. Let's get on with the episode at hand. I had a great time talking with Ian, and as usual, there's an extensive amount of additional information in the show notes, so be sure to check them out.

You can find them in your podcast app if you're a paid member , and if you're a free member, you can find them on the website, which is once again, TRXL.Co. All right, we have arrived. It's time to crack open your favorite beverage, find a comfortable seat around the campfire, and settle in and enjoy listening to Ian Keough tell the Dynamo story.

​

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

Ian Keough: um, we, we're,

we've been referring to it as version [00:04:00] 2. 0,

Evan Troxel: Okay.

Ian Keough: I suppose we need something. Internally, maybe this is too much inside baseball, but internally we call it Pringle, because the shape of Pringle chip is a Hyparbolic paraboloid. which is where Hypar comes from. but externally we just refer to it as Hypar 2. 0.

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

Ian Keough: you eat

Evan Troxel: power

Ian Keough: can as one does with, in one sitting, with a

Evan Troxel: as.

Ian Keough: and you feel bad about yourself for the rest of the day.

Evan Troxel: As one does. Yes. All right. So you were recently on the show talking about Hypar 2. 0. And this today, I want to talk 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 the universe of AEC software for sure.

Right.

Ian Keough: Yes, I think that's, I think that's probably safe to say. I'm [00:05:00] trying to think if there was anything before Dynamo that was like, of note. No, there was not. That was kind of like the first thing.

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

Ian Keough: 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 Happold Consulting Engineers in New York City. So I actually have a, I have a Master's in Architecture, but I, but I saw some presentations by Greg Otto about Buro Happold stuff, and 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 like crazy, cool, complicated buildings. And that'll actually, that's actually an important part of the Dynamo story because like Buro Happold didn't hire a lot of architects at the time. And when they hired [00:06:00] me, the way the story goes is that Craig Schwitter, who was in charge of the New York office, told Greg Otto, like, we don't hire architects. Why are you hiring this guy? And he's like, if you can't figure 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 in Rhino and renderings for people and like Adobe Illustrator, like layouts for project presentations. I was just kind of doing everything. one of the things that the that Buro Happold needed because it, it worked on these like super complicated projects was they needed a lot of help like getting data from one piece of software to another piece of software.

They'd have like an analysis software where they were doing, you know, crazy load, cases on these, these shell structures that they were building and there's, um, you know, complex geometry and stuff, and they would have to transfer that stuff after they did that analysis over to some other application, and then they need to take some geometry and transfer it to another application. So I actually started writing code, just kind of like teaching [00:07:00] myself to write code as a way of like, helping to do that. So, fast forward a few years, I'm like in Buro Happold, uh, in the New York office, And now the Revit API, man, I'm trying to remember how this works. The Revit API is like well established at this point.

We had started banging on the Revit API when it first came out. Like I was making Revit API stuff and sending it to this guy named Wei Chu, who was like the head of the implementation of the API at Autodesk the time, for these crazy Buro Happold like structures. And he was like, the Revit API is not built for this, like this is not going to work, and, so, I had this like good relationship with the people who were working on the API and they were always looking at stuff that we were doing because it was really, really pushing the, the, the frontier of what the sort of Revit API could do. And there was a very specific problem that kind of led to the geometry library or the [00:08:00] utility library that would go on to become Dynamo. And it was that, you know, people who model in Revit know that if you have, we did a lot of stuff with beams, right? was mostly seconded to the, to the structural team at Buro Happold. And so, um, everything they did was like beams in space, beams in space. And it was all about like these complex structures that were made up of these linear elements and like, um, and, and then some nominal geometry. which those things were based would change and you would have to like update the whole thing. And, and there's this problem in Revit that like nothing at the time worked like that. There wasn't an idea of like two linear elements that you connected them together and like when some underlying shape changed like those linear elements would just change together.

And so, um, the first thing I did was actually make this like point object. [00:09:00] I made a point object in this utility library. And it was like a little, it was like a little gumball, you know, like with the axes and everything else. And what you could do is you could like, know, associate linear elements in Dynamo by IDs something.

I can't remember exactly how it worked, with a point that they would, they would associate with. And then all you had to do was move the points in like a marionette. It would move all the attached beams and stuff. So then I wrote a whole suite of utilities 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, people who remember like the ribbon, when the ribbon first came out and you made add ins in Revit and they would like drop down and then you could have drop downs on the drop downs and you could have drop downs on the drop downs. This thing, it was like, you know,

Evan Troxel: You could go deep

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

Evan Troxel: and, and you are [00:10:00] very organized. Let's just say it that way. You, you, you wanna make sure that the things are in the right place,

Ian Keough: Yeah, it was like so bad that, you know, it's like those, those, uh, those, those things that are so nested that as they fly out, you're worried about, like, dragging your mouse off just a little bit, cause you'll

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

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

Evan Troxel: Mm.

Ian Keough: these projects, so, like, engineers would engineer a, they'd create a geometry, and they'd use these tools to transfer data to analysis tools and back and forth, and it was, 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 History was becoming a thing, but certainly generative components had been a thing.

Evan Troxel: Right.

Ian Keough: and so, and actually the little gumball point that I made was very akin to like the points, I mean this is like [00:11:00] really dating me because anybody who watches this thing and remembers or listens to this thing and remembers generative components and the points and everything else, um, it was very akin to what points, how you did stuff in generative components, in generative components you wrote these scripts to like create these points and then you connected the points with these laced sort of things, so, so this whole utility library for the geometry side of things was very much like Like generative components.

Um, and I remember I went to, um, Smart maybe? The Smart Geometry Conference, speaking of generative components. think I went to the Smart Geometry Conference 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 and I remember I had been communicating with the, the Revit API team, I had met this guy, Matt Jeek, uh, my friend Matt Jeek, who, who, uh, at the time was just like, he was hanging out in the [00:12:00] forums and stuff, and he was doing this cool stuff.

And I knew he was a guy who like 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 aside at one of these events and saying, Hey Matt, I want to show you this library. And the library was literally like, it was just like scripts for making these points and connecting things to them. And then like editing the points and having the connected stuff, like update everything else.

Evan Troxel: Inside of Revit. Right. And so obviously there's, is that the connection with Matt at that point?

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

Evan Troxel: Okay.

Ian Keough: where it, it, it did its thing. So, um, and, and I think even at that 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 [00:13:00] to him, and then, Um, and then I moved to LA. My wife gets a job in LA, and I move out here, and Buro Happold had an office in Culver City, which is where I live now, and, um, Otto, who had started that office, and who had 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 downtown, but, was this kind of mezzanine where the computational design people sat. now at this point Buro Happold has like a lot of architects working for it across the global practice It has you know, there were probably ten people sitting up on this little mezzanine here Who were doing computational design stuff most of them with backgrounds in architecture Um, or non, non engineering backgrounds at least. And then across all the offices around the world, [00:14:00] they started to have a lot of like, architects. Because, you know, projects were getting more and more complicated. Every project that BuroHappled was working on was some complex geometry craziness. And architects ended up being really, really useful for, for working in that way. And, um, and so I had this little library, and I had the, I had the BuroHappled tool, tools, and I had this little other library, but we weren't really using the other little library yet, um, uh, Oh, there's one other. Yeah, right. Okay. I'm remembering now. Sorry. And I'm, I'm, I'm going to remember this stuff in real time. One project that I did right before I left for LA, there was a project we were doing with Moshe Safdie's office. Moshe Safdie was working on um, museum in Northwest Arkansas for the Walton family. And I can't, um,

Evan Troxel: Well I'll look it up for the show [00:15:00] notes. I'll look it up and I'll, I'll include it in the show notes.

Ian Keough: the name of the museum, but it had all of these, um, it had all of these timber roofs, these really cool like glue laminated beams that would span like 40, 50, 60 feet. on top of those glue laminated beams were these, um, were these like adaptable plates and the adaptable plates each had like metal tie rods coming into them, making this kind of diaphragm of a diagrid of these metal tie rods. And so you can imagine you've got these like swoopy sort of timbers.

You've got little plates on top of them that are sticking off normal to the swoopy timbers. And then you've got tie rods coming in. on a set of diagram pattern as this swoop thing. So those adjustable plates like have all these angles and they have to like move around and stuff. And that was like the first application of 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 connectors [00:16:00] with the points on this tie plate. So you could literally like update the underlying geometry of the whole roof and all of these, like, The glue lamps would update, the tie plates would update, the struts would move, and everything would stay connected.

And you wouldn't have to change any of your drawings, you wouldn't have to like, you know, Cause they were, at that point, they were tweaking the

Evan Troxel: Of course.

Ian Keough: of this

Evan Troxel: Yeah. Mm-hmm

Ian Keough: the time, you know?

Evan Troxel: Parametric.

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

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Ian Keough: and, right, like fully parametric. It's not just like

Evan Troxel: Right.

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

Evan Troxel: Digital project.

Ian Keough: digital

Evan Troxel: Right.

Ian Keough: They wanted to use, I was also like a Katia guy and I was like, well, we could do it in digital [00:17:00] project, but I have this little software library over here that basically if we use that We could do this without all of the like 20, 000 add ons to like digital project to make it work. And it ended up working. That's the craziest thing. I basically told them, I was like, I think we just turned like your 5, 000 Revit or whatever it costs at the time, your 3, 000 Revit into a 20, 000 piece of software with this like one little software library, know, that gave it this kind of adaptability.

Again, before adaptive components, before any of this stuff was like a thing. So.

Evan Troxel: I, I wanna, I wanna break in right here because I, I wanna get back to the, the conversation 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 were calling it the Dynamo Library at that point, so where did that name, where'd that come from?

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

Evan Troxel: It's a superhero.

Ian Keough: like a little [00:18:00] engine.

Evan Troxel: Right?

Ian Keough: a magician. And there's a funny story about how I sat behind him on a plane one time. But, um, that's, that was it. It was, and I looked around, I was like, 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. I can't remember. So this is before there's like a zillion startups out there. I mean, sure, I'm sure the name Dynamo is now like, you know, some startup has already like raised a hundred million dollars, called itself Dynamo and flamed out, you know, but like

Evan Troxel: Right.

Ian Keough: the time, you know, there was nothing else out there. So

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

Ian Keough: that was like, that was literally like that from the top down at that like, if he couldn't keep me busy. he'd [00:19:00] 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, through graduate school, I worked at this firm called ESI Design, which is an exhibit design company, um, uh, that's run by Ed Schlossberg, and it was super, super fun.

We did interactive museum exhibits and all this kind of crazy stuff. They were a Vectorworks shop, I had taught myself VectorScript, which is the built in scripting language inside Vectorworks, to help lay out stuff we were doing there. But it was, you know, kind of scripty of stuff. And then through, through graduate school, I dabbled a little bit in Mel script on Maya,

Evan Troxel: Maya? Yeah.

Ian Keough: but I didn't really start programming until Buro Happold.

Um, and the, and the joke I always tell there is, Like I tell kids who are like learning how to program today, you have no idea how well you have it. Like

Evan Troxel: Right. Light years.

Ian Keough: endless hours of YouTube videos

Evan Troxel: [00:20:00] Right.

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

Evan Troxel: And if you messed up one, yeah. And you would be there scouring it, looking for where you screwed up that one character. Right.

Ian Keough: 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 to the 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,

Evan Troxel: Right.

Ian Keough: And then, um, uh, and then on top of that, when the Revit API first came out, there was no way to, like, interactively debug. Anything you were making. So like you would have to, you would have to throw up message boxes. Like you'd say, you'd throw up a message box that says I got here in the code or the

Evan Troxel: So you knew, so you knew where to look.

Ian Keough: so

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Ian Keough: to look, you knew what the values were. or if there was like, I certainly didn't know how to do it cause I wasn't a sophisticated programmer in any way. So [00:21:00] yeah, to your question though, 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 to people that needed to be done with code.

And also because the engineers couldn't do it. The engineers were like super, super smart, but none of them like knew how to do any scripting, or

Evan Troxel: Sure.

Ian Keough: or anything else. So, um, and all the tools that they were using had APIs. we were using Robot for structural analysis, and it had an API way back in the day.

Like a beautiful API, you could do anything with that

Evan Troxel: Wow.

Ian Keough: And the, and the engineers didn't really know how to use it. You know? Let's take a break from the conversation to tell you about Arcol, who is helping make this episode possible.

Evan Troxel: Architects should demand more out of their design tools. Imagine working on a project where architects, owners and contractors are truly in sync. No miscommunication, no back and forth chaos, just seamless collaboration. That's what Arcol makes possible. Arcol [00:22:00] believes teams shouldn't have to waste time switching between apps and navigating endless email threads. Your tools should work for you, not the other way around.

With Arcol, you can validate ideas as you iterate your designs while keeping all your documents and people aligned. No more silos. No more guesswork. Just better results.

Ready to upgrade your team's design workflow? Learn more at arcol.io/TRXL That's ARCOL.IO/TRXL

My thanks to Arcol for supporting this episode of the podcast And now, let's get back to the conversation

about some of the other platforms that were out there. You mentioned generative components, obviously Rhino was around, there was RhinoScript, obviously there was AutoCAD for 2D stuff and some 3D, right? And they had their own programming language, like Lisp or whatever it was called, AutoLisp. And then there was, I mean, I remember applications like Gem.

Do you remember that [00:23:00] one? That was like a three dimensional, um, you know, it was kind of this idea of having parametric, you know, you would have voxels and those voxels would basically get filled, stretched,

Ian Keough: was based on AutoCAD?

Evan Troxel: I don't know what it was based,

Ian Keough: AutoCAD, on Excel? There was one that you like, filled in tables in Excel, and it would generate geometry that was, but it could only do basically like, facades?

Evan Troxel: 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 Grasshopper even come onto the scene at that point? Because,

Ian Keough: not on the scene yet. Like, like now, the, the, the, the new hotness is still like, generative components. are also kind of playing around with Maya, Melscript,

Evan Troxel: right.

Ian Keough: had come on the scene for Maya at the time, so people were still doing that. Some people were trying to automate 3D Studio Max and everything else, but that never really caught on. and so, so you were either scripting in Rhino, which had a pretty good scripting [00:24:00] interface, and it's Rhino script stuff. Or VBA, I think you could write stuff in VBA at the time.

Evan Troxel: I think it was based on, on that, yeah.

Ian Keough: generative components, or this was when digital project was a thing and Gary was like trying to get digital project to become a thing.

So the people right out of the bleeding edge were like to evaluate whether or not we were all going to be working in CATIA in the future. So like I taught a CATIA class, I co taught a CATIA class at Columbia for architects using power copies and these like crazy stuff that's been around forever on CATIA, but is, Extraordinarily expensive and no architect would ever buy and, um, also incredibly complicated to use, which is probably why digital project, you know, doesn't exist anymore. So that's kind of the, the landscape and also like, and Revit is, Revit is just starting to kind of find its traction, right? Revit came out, think Revit architecture came out in 2001. joinBuroeau Happold in [00:25:00] 2005 and literally like day one, Revit. On my chair was a boxed copy of Revit's structure. like, there's this new thing, it's called Revit, we're building this cricket stadium, and you're gonna build it in Revit, it's gonna be the first project that Buro Happold globally has ever done in this software called Revit.

And by the way, all the drawings have to look exactly like all the drawings have looked for 20 years.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, good luck.

Ian Keough: I was so screwed,

Evan Troxel: Yeah,

Ian Keough: 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 me about line weights, and like,

Evan Troxel: always.

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

Um

Evan Troxel: Remember just the transition, like he worked in AutoCAD and he had, you know, however many colors and he was reading drawings through color, right? And then Revit comes along [00:26:00] and it's black and white. And it was like, you had this graphical representation with line weights and stuff, but you're like, it's a different language for people who are operating.

And who are these technicians operating these things? Like you actually learned how to decode. the, the drawing through color because you didn't see the line weight on the screen. And now you could.

Ian Keough: 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 that line is a slab edge. me to change the shape of the slab? They were like, whatever, just move it over so that the slab edge line on the drawings is in the right place.

Like, was probably, you know, there was a, Happold where we literally, we had a floor in New York. of drafters and the engineers would like do their work and sketch out, sketch out what they wanted. Then they'd carry it down to the drafters and that's how they'd operated forever and ever. And the drafters would do the thing and the drafters were incredibly skilled people.

But when the, when BIM came on the scene, [00:27:00] very few of them made the transition

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

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

Evan Troxel: Start over.

Ian Keough: just didn't know how buildings went together,

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

Ian Keough: and you're, and you're reminding me when I say that Buro Happold had now at some point by the time I got to L. A. hired a lot of architects, one of the reasons they had hired a lot of architects was because young architects Who weren't so interested in going out and working in like proper design architecture firms and wanted to know more about how buildings go together up coming in droves to Buro Happold [00:28:00] and they were great at BIM. They were really hungry about the new tools They wanted to learn Revit. They wanted to learn how buildings went together. So they were really interested in building models of buildings and That was a benefit for all the engineering firms. They started to hire architects to help Make the models of their buildings. Um, so that was a kind of an interesting, an interesting dynamic. Yeah. I remember at one point in New York, you know, I was working, all the people who were doing BIM at that point, lot of them had architectural backgrounds. They were going to NJIT or other schools and coming out with like, you know, BIM proficiency was starting to become a thing. Um, so, uh, so, so that is to say, like the landscape was still very much like, It's funny, the landscape looked oddly similar to how it is today.

Evan Troxel: Mm hmm.

Ian Keough: had come out too, but like, that wasn't even in our domain. That was, I think SketchUp had come out, got really, sort of, widely used, [00:29:00] uh, got acquired by Google for a completely different purpose than like, Architectural concept and then got spun out of Google again to, and got eaten up by Trimble at some point. We just weren't even tracking SketchUp cause it kind of wasn't in our orbit, but I know it was, I know it was out there and it was contemporary with that stuff. Um, but yeah, landscape very similar to 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 with this, layer on top of Revit, could seriously upgrade Revit, know? Um, and I think that got a lot of people thinking like, whoa, we can like, and we started doing, then at that point, we started 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 project that has this, [00:30:00] Lightwell that kind of goes up through the entire center of the building.

Evan Troxel: It's a beautiful stare. Yeah.

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

Evan Troxel: Right.

Ian Keough: That was all done in Revit.

Evan Troxel: That's crazy.

Ian Keough: 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, that we were, that we were able to do that. And I presented at tons of conferences and stuff about, like, this bleeding edge kind of stuff we were doing in, in Revit at the time.

And that was about the time when, when I showed Matt kind of library of dynamic points and lines kind of tools. And that's, it really just did points lines, points lines. and transforms of stuff. And it had a little, it had a 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, I [00:31:00] honestly don't know how long I was in, I think I started working in it, on it right away, because if you look, this is 2010, I moved to L. A. and some of the first tweets about Dynamo are from the very first house that I rented in Culver City. So I know for a fact that I was working on what is Dynamo now, 2010. Uh, um,

Evan Troxel: was around, right? So there's another,

Ian Keough: was around

Evan Troxel: I started on Twitter in 2006, I want to say. So it'd been around for a while at that point.

Ian Keough: right

Evan Troxel: 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: so I was like, I, I was, I had a blog for some time and I was writing little things in this blog, but then Twitter came out and I was like, oh cool, I can post like little updates here. if anybody, I'm, I'm not really [00:32:00] on Twitter anymore, but if anybody wants to, my history is still there. If you want to go back and look at the history, like very, very early on, you'll see, I think, you'll see screenshots of like very old posts.

Evan Troxel: nice.

Ian Keough: um, and, and at the time it, it was the orange nodes period, um, which, which people who have been around Dynamo 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 out at this point because I remember thinking like, oh, I want my nodes to look glassy and bubbly that guy David's nodes. So there

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

Ian Keough: is the precursor to Grasshopper. It was what Grasshopper was called, and I 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 Explicit History was [00:33:00] what Grasshopper was called before it was called Grasshopper, know?

So when architects were first playing with this thing, and it was very, very kind of like beta,

Evan Troxel: 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: yeah,

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

Ian Keough: have had a UI because I remember thinking like, Oh, I like the way that they do that. And, and, but I did all kinds of 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 at those like orange nodes. At one point I surrounded each, I made the node, I made the ports on the nodes 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 tactile and, you know, kind of skeuomorphic. Like these were at one point I [00:34:00] made the texture behind them look like a, like an actual workbench and I

Evan Troxel: 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 of those kinds of things.

Ian Keough: Thank you. Thank you for that recollection because that is like totally in my defense. It was of the moment. It

Evan Troxel: Right.

Ian Keough: me

Evan Troxel: It wasn't just you. We wanted rich textures on everything, on website backgrounds. Like, finding seamless textures was, was like

Ian Keough: Yes.

Evan Troxel: art. back then it was difficult. Yep.

Ian Keough: and I was using, um, I was using WPF, which is the Windows Presentation Framework. So this is going to like, I'm sorry, 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 you can do cross platform development, mobile devices, everything else. But at the time, it was kind of like their new, [00:35:00] Their new interface they had had this other interface that they made for the web, which was supposed to place this was also the time when everybody was getting rid of flash Plugins or flash Steve Jobs Steve Apple basically killed flash

Evan Troxel: Yep.

Ian Keough: saying like it's

Evan Troxel: Thoughts on Flash. Thoughts on Flash was the letter that he wrote. Yep.

Ian Keough: Exactly, right.

So like this is several years into that right before the first iPad comes out everybody's trying to like, throw Flash overboard, and Microsoft had built this thing called Silverlight, which was the precursor to WPF, and they were, was like, around for a couple years, and they were shutting that down, and WPF was like, the recommended way to build new UIs for Flash. stuff.

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Ian Keough: And so, um, and so I was programming this thing in WPF and it, until a couple years into it, I had no idea how to do things correctly in WPF. If you were to go back, and by the [00:36:00] way, all of this code, I think, if, if you have any, like, codey people who listen to this thing, I'm sure you do. You can go to the GitHub repository for Dynamo right now and go back to day one, like the first commit. You can probably find, like, this original, terrible WPF code that I was

Evan Troxel: Nice.

Ian Keough: Um, like, 12 years ago, like, 2010, 2011, whenever that was. Um,

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

Ian Keough: I can't remember, maybe like the first beginnings of, I don't remember when GitHub started, or when I started using it. I do remember, um, that at some point I started pushing stuff to GitHub. [00:37:00] And I had another kid right after I moved to LA, I had my son also got for another piece of technology that I had bought, got acquired by this startup out of Boston, which subsequently got acquired by Autodesk.

But that whole process of that getting acquired and me getting acquired with it, me going to work for that company out of Boston, and then me getting acquired by Autodesk was like a two year period, maybe where I didn't have a lot of time to work on Dynamo. 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 like everything else, so like, I, I'm gonna open source it, cause I thought, even back then, I thought, this thing needs to exist in the kind of public domain. Um, There was just this, this was, this point it [00:38:00] must have been that GitHub was kind of picking up steam and the idea of open source was picking up steam. And, and the thing that I had definitely seen inside Buro Happold was that were just doing stuff over and over and over again. And my, my joke about this is always the stadium bowl generator. Every firm that I ever worked with at Buro Apple did stadiums, and we've worked with a lot of them. I've probably worked on four or five World Cup soccer stadiums. Like every one of the firms that we worked with on that stuff had their own little script to generate, you know, stadium bowl layouts. And they'd be like, Hey, you want to see our special script for generating the bowl layouts? And I'm like, Oh, so lame. so I think at that time I just like started to think like, this should, is not. IP, right? Like this should just be out there as something that we all contribute to. we all sort of vet that.

Evan Troxel: Because you actually know what it takes to create one of those, and you see [00:39:00] it happening copy after copy, and they're all from scratch, right? And so you see the waste, literally,

Ian Keough: maintain, you know, um, it's worth noting that two or so years after I got acquired by this other company and 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 guys still using the Buro Happold tools? He's like, yeah. Uh, no. I mean, those things, like, I mean, the installer broke at some point, and then we couldn't figure out how to, like, you know, YEARS of work,

Evan Troxel: gone.

Ian Keough: 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 a garden and if you've ever gardened and you leave your garden for the littlest amount of time and the weeds start popping up, it's pretty soon you've got this garden full of weeds and it just becomes like totally unmanageable.

You got to like burn it down and start over again. [00:40:00] Um, that is software. Like, like, so, so, if, if any of you out there are like, in the midst of writing a mean comment on a, on a GitHub repository to an open source repo maintainer, stop what you're doing and consider for a moment that that person is thanklessly, like, developing this thing, updating this thing, maintaining it, deploying it, making sure that it doesn't break, like, they're doing this on their nights and weekends because it's not their primary job. You know, there's a lot of like love that goes into these projects, um, and, and, um, it takes a lot. So like, these organizations are not constitutionally set up to like, build software, maintain software, deploy software.

Evan Troxel: No, they're working on projects. Yeah.

Ian Keough: They're working on a project, right? Um, so, so yeah, so I, I think at that very early time I had this thought like, okay, this stuff is just going to have to be, and it wasn't like I was making money from it or anything else.

There was no market at the time for Revit add ins or [00:41:00] anything. And I think people had started to play with it. Like, cause from day one, I had started to put, I think on my blog, I started to put like installers, or maybe not even installers. It was just like a zip file full of all the files. I was like, put these in a directory somewhere in your rabbit hole. And, um, and so people had access to 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 kinds of workflows and at the time it had a very limited set of things that it could do like I could do all the things that that little library could do before very simple geometry stuff because I didn't have a proper geometry kernel And then I think I started latching into more geometry functionality inside Revit So it was kind of Revit's Geometry Kernel in the same way that Explicit History was using Rhino's Geometry Kernel.

Evan Troxel: Mm hmm.

Ian Keough: Geometry Kernel still wasn't great. It wasn't doing crazy, NURBS y kind of stuff. It was still like, you know, [00:42:00] 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 Twitter and everything else, and then I, and then I open sourced this thing and I tell Matt, and he's like, you know, that's actually pretty cool because we have this, Autodesk has this great summer internship program where they bring 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 Stephen still works for Google. Um, but he, um, at the time he was a student and he came in and Matt said, We've got this guy Stephen, we're really interested in 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

Evan Troxel: this is during the time when you basically were saying you had to pause from this because you were doing this other [00:43:00] two year long acquisition period. Okay.

Ian Keough: this was never my job. Like, this, doing this was like a nights and weekends kind of thing, and so now I have like, a, I have a year old, or a three year old and a baby. And a full time job at Buro Happold, which was in and of itself, like, pretty hard. And, um, and so they have this guy, Steven Elliott, start to contribute to this thing.

Now, this is where the time, I'm gonna get 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 a project that we were working on with HOK. It was called the, uh, it was called ARTIC, A R T I C, the Anaheim Regional

Evan Troxel: Oh, I remember.

Ian Keough: Intermodal Center.

Evan Troxel: Well, I used to live in Southern California. I know exactly the building you're talking about. Yeah.

Ian Keough: the big E T F E

Evan Troxel: Right.

Ian Keough: and so Greg Otto, So, HOK's office [00:44:00] used to be right across the street from us. He literally marched over to HOK and stole the facade package from Thornton Tomassetti.

Evan Troxel: Wow.

Ian Keough: 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're right across the street, we should absolutely have this project. It was ETFE, it was a complex room with this diagrid, sort of, steel tubular structure and these,

Evan Troxel: Yeah,

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

Evan Troxel: we'll take that.

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

Evan Troxel: Like shunted. Yes, at both ends. Right.

Ian Keough: and, and, and the roof is like this section of a, of a, of a toroid, and they were creating that shape in [00:45:00] Grasshopper, Explicit History, Grasshopper, whatever it was at the time, and constantly updating that shape and everything else. Well, the structural engineers had to respond to that by like laying out the entire diagrid structure. And then laying out these like ETFE capture channels that ran along the steel structure and making sure that all the capture channels were exactly normal to the surface to capture the ETFE cushions.

And then the shape of these inflated ETFE cushions, all super complex. And I was like, let's do it in Revit. of course, everybody's like a hundred percent. No, we can't do this in Revit. It's like. But, but they, the thing was, at the end of the day, they needed the building model to be in Revit because they wanted to use 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 after the fact, after we had, had finished this project, HOK had actually taken that project to Autodesk and said, we really want to deliver this in Revit. Here it is. This like [00:46:00] super complicated building with the ETFE roof and everything else. And, uh, can we do it in Revit? And Autodesk told them, no, they were like, don't, you're not going to be happy if you try and do this building. Um,

Evan Troxel: of them to say that, actually.

Ian Keough: yeah, I think, well, every once in a while they have like a very reasonable, like, take. And at the time, like, this kind of geometry, like, yeah, 100 percent Revit was not the right tool for the job. But that's, I've never let that stop me before. So,

Evan Troxel: Yeah,

Ian Keough: I, this was where Dynamo really kind of started, was trying to figure out how I could recreate some of the geometry that the architect was doing in Grasshopper. At least enough layout geometry. That I could then lay out the diagrid kind of structure. And then I could lay out the little things that stuck normal. And this is very much like the Moshe Safdie project. That's why I kind of looked at it and I squinted and I was like, that's like the Moshe Safdie project.

Evan Troxel: no problem.

Ian Keough: Vastly more complicated than the [00:47:00] web specific project. Um, but, but we ended up doing it, and it ended up working, and to Revit's credit too, like, the geometry APIs had gotten 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 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 on this 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 the graph, like, oh, there was like a search thing, search was, yeah, so there was like a, you could only get libraries, nodes in the graph by searching, there was a little search bar, you had to know what they were called, but if you found them, you like, press enter, and it would, boop, drop it into your

Evan Troxel: If you found them right.

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

Evan Troxel: But you're basically [00:48:00] saying the UI was a search field. I mean, it was like, Google

Ian Keough: Yeah, because that was like the thing at the time. We were like, oh, everything, the world's information is going to be indexed, and

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

Ian Keough: Dynamo is just going to be a chat interface at

Evan Troxel: right?

Ian Keough: in the near future.

Let's take a quick break from the conversation to tell you about Avail. Is your team struggling to find the BIM assets they need? Avail's content management system simplifies access to all of your firm's content in one easy to use platform. No matter where your files live, or what type of files they are, you can easily search and access them from Avail.

Evan Troxel: Now, designers can consistently find and reuse all types of content. So what does that mean? Well, standards compliant models and drawings are easier to create. The documentation process is less chaotic, new hires are easier to onboard, projects are delivered faster with fewer errors. [00:49:00] You get the idea.

Visit getavail. com to try Avail for free and request a free demo. That's getavail. com, G E T A V A I L dot com. My thanks to Avail for supporting this episode of the TRXL podcast. And now let's get back to the conversation.

Ian Keough: 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 first version of Dynamo actually had an engine.

It was event based. It was, um, for the programmers out there, it would mean that, you know, you'd do something with this node, it would calculate something, and it would trigger an event. the downstream nodes would listen for that event, 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 based system is that it was incredibly simple. Like, you could reason about it just by looking at the code, and then you could debug it. You could debug through a graph by just saying, like, okay, it [00:50:00] does this. Where's that event received? Okay, it does this. You could check values and everything as a, as a programmer, figure out what was going on. So, so when they came to me and they were like, we want to replace the, the Dynamo engine with this variant of scheme that Steven is working on. I was too young to really think about the implications of this. I was really too young to think like, 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 must be smarter than me So he goes off and he writes this engine based on Scheme. We can put it in the show notes what Scheme is But it's a language and and also based on F sharp which was a new language that Microsoft had started building which was a Functional programming language, and so he called this the Scheme This thing that he had built, F [00:51:00] SCHEME, and, um, for a time, while we had this engine in Dynamo, You could actually print a Dynamo graph as a giant algebraic expression. Um, I won't go into it here, but like this gets into Lisp and everything else. And you could, you could literally like print, you know, if you had 500 nodes in your graph, imagine printing that as like an embedded algebraic expression. That's like a mile long. And that's kind of cool, because in a way, like, All the computation is like laid out right there for you.

And it's super uncool because it's 100 percent unintelligible,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm

Ian Keough: 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 [00:52:00] had to write, you were always like, shoveling data into a form that the F scheme thing could process, and then you were popping that data back out of the F scheme form into a 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 still worked, it still worked really well, so like anybody who used Dynamo for the first couple of years, that Autodesk was contributing to it, was using it this version of the engine. 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 their credit, Autodesk has allowed that project to maintain, to be open source long after I've been involved with it. Like from day one, the Dynamo project was open source. And now it obviously has closed source components in the form of its kernel and everything else. at the time, it [00:53:00] was dependent on Revit for its geometry kernel. So like it, was a very, very short window at the very beginning when it had its own geometry kernel.

It was with like points and lines. And then it became Revit's geometry kernel. So That enabled a new kind of conversation with users.

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Ian Keough: literally there was a shift at that moment. There was a shift in how Autodesk talk to its customers. Prior to that, you know, if you've been using an Autodesk product for a really long time, and this is not the fault of Autodesk, this is like all software at the time, there was some forum

Evan Troxel: Right,

Ian Keough: you go and post a question

Evan Troxel: right.

Ian Keough: and, and maybe somebody from the company would like. respond to your forum post. And maybe it would get elevated to some place where it got into somebody's backlog and everything else. But Revit was like, developing really quickly. It had this sprawling multi year long backlog of stuff that they were going to work on. Chances of your thing you know, [00:54:00] getting

Evan Troxel: Noticed

Ian Keough: noticed

Evan Troxel: even noticed

Ian Keough: yeah, let

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm

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

Suddenly, there's this little project that rides on top of one of those big projects, going a mile a minute, and you can talk directly to the dev team. And you can like go to the open source repository and start putting issues in there and saying oh when I did this this broke and like a fix will be issued and a new installer will be built and it's like the next day that thing and I think some of this vibe was also happening with Grasshopper at the time you know it was like just fixing super [00:55:00] quickly evolving really quickly and that built that community it built people who are like wow I really want to be part of this like

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm

Ian Keough: thing, engaging with this company in this new way. Um, so that, that was fantastic. And, um, just kind of feeling that and being at a moment when, and starting to see the first projects that 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 force multiplier because, um, You know, Dynamo up until then there was like. There were families, which were kind of smart, but they couldn't really talk to each other. Like, they could do smart things 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 be able to talk to each other. the value of this family, when it [00:56:00] changes over here, could be piped into this other

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm

Ian Keough: you could have these responsive kind of workflows. And you could even use, like, You could even use stuff in your Revit family, or in your Revit model, as inputs, because Dynamo could respond. Like, I could go change a parameter on this family over here, and if there was a Dynamo graph, like, piping values from that to some other place, when I change that parameter over here, just manually 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 that to the next level, because now Adaptive Components were much smarter, you could embed much more smarts in them, they were much more flexible, so there's like a year of like, there's a year where every single Dynamo example that anybody made was basically like some crazy facade. Because that's what, Nate

Evan Troxel: Yep.

Ian Keough: a fantastic, it was like, the Revit splat, or it was the Dynamo splash screen at some point because it was this fantastic, like, stadium bowl roof [00:57:00] that he took the geometry and turned it into points and turned, made it an adaptive component for this, like, louver shade. And then made some Dynamo script that would not only lay those things out, but then change the value of the aperture, the size of the aperture based on. It's very of the time,

Evan Troxel: Right.

Ian Keough: know.

Evan Troxel: Totally.

Ian Keough: um, and so, um, so yeah, so Stephen, uh, builds this new version of the engine. And then they brought on this guy, full time, named Peter Boyer. Um, Peter Boyer is, um, He's probably one of the smartest people I've ever met. Super, super smart guy. And also, incredibly nice. He now works, he's one of the co founders of HighArk. So if you guys follow the startup scene, um, residential home building, the automation of residential home building,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm

Ian Keough: cool startup. And, um, Peter was the author of the package manager. So, [00:58:00] so Peter, um, uh, we were talking about this problem of people being able to sort of bottle up their Dynamo scripts and share them with one another. And Peter built, basically by himself, the first version of the Dynamo Package Manager. And, funny conversation around that 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,

Evan Troxel: Do it live, yeah.

Ian Keough: this Dynamo Packages, I think it's dynamopackages. If it's still there. Okay, right. So I remember it looks almost exactly like it did on day one when it came out. So that's either, that either means that nobody has wanted to work on this UI or that this UI just works incredibly well.

Evan Troxel: It was good enough, yeah.

Ian Keough: Package Manager shows you, like, how many people have installed something. Um, and it shows you the most active packages, and it shows you the most popular packages, and everything else. But there's that one number at the top that is the number of installs. And I remember Peter had made it, you know, it only [00:59:00] had like three digits or five digits or something.

And I was like, give it more digits. Give it more space. Because at some point, like, imagine when this is a million.

Evan Troxel: Right.

Ian Keough: 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 about that number is, like, that means 6.

9 million instances, somebody chose to use something that was built by somebody else, than rebuild it themselves.

Evan Troxel: Nice.

Ian Keough: You know,

Evan Troxel: That's pretty, pretty, pretty cool.

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

Evan Troxel: also represents this idea of like, making. Like, like the [01:00:00] craft of architecture and actually tinkering with things. You know, I kind of think of it 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 opening the 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 many neurons have you fired off with 6. 9 million installs? It's just gotta be like a logarithmic compared to that number. Right.

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

Evan Troxel: Hmm. Mm

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

Evan Troxel: hmm. Hmm. Mm

Ian Keough: of computation. And that future is still totally unrecognized. You know, like, like, we're, we're, [01:01:00] we're doing the most surface level kind of thing with these supercomputers that we have, which is basically use them as like a digital version of a drafting board.

Evan Troxel: hmm.

Ian Keough: There's a whole other, maybe our third conversation, Evan, which is like, why Hypar exists, which is to solve this problem, but it's like, like, we don't use computation to 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 represent it ultimately as drawings.

Evan Troxel: Abstract it, right?

Ian Keough: Yeah, Let's take a short break from the conversation to invite you to join the most influential technology leaders in the AEC industry at Confluence. Composed of in person events and a podcast co hosted by yours truly, Confluence is designed to foster conversations between AEC firms and technology companies so they can learn, share, and engage with each other to support industry innovation.

Evan Troxel: Software company [01:02:00] Avail, which creates content management solutions for the AEC industry, started hosting Confluence events in 2019 to understand what firms are needing, wanting, and thinking around technology. To learn more about Confluence, explore upcoming events, and listen to podcast episodes, go to confluence.

getavail. com. My thanks to Confluence for supporting this episode of the TRXL podcast. And now, let's get back to the conversation.

It makes me think of Steve Jobs saying, you know, like the computer is a bicycle for the mind, right? Because that was all based on this idea of this graph where it talked about different animals and their speed, right? And man was like way down here in the corner and the cheetah was up into the right, right?

And then there was a human with a bicycle, which was like this outlier, you know, edge condition that just was like incredible. And so like the story that he put to that was the computer is the bicycle for the mind. Back to your point, like, what can you do with this tool, and, and what [01:03:00] is possible, it, it is absolutely incredible, the potential there.

Ian Keough: and he was imagining the force multiplier of like, you know, If you, if you go back to the time when he was giving that speech, he was thinking about, like, VisiCalc, you know,

Evan Troxel: Mm hmm. Right?

Ian Keough: 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 multiplier was 100x for the person who was doing that, maybe 1000x. don't think we've ever achieved that

Evan Troxel: Mm.

Ian Keough: tools.

Evan Troxel: Mm.

Ian Keough: You could argue that there's buildings that we can build now that we just simply didn't build before because we can represent them now. But in terms of the actual mechanical act of like producing a building, know that we've had a hundred X.

Evan Troxel: Right. I mean, you look at, there's like a meme out there, right? It's like a dude with a pencil and then like all this computation and digital everything technology and it's like Sagrada Familia and the, the transportation hub in Anaheim, right? Like whatever those two examples [01:04:00] are, but it's like, those aren't a hundred X.

It's not, it's not even 10 X.

Ian Keough: Yeah, um, and even for day to day buildings, right? The 99. 9 percent of all the buildings that we will ever inhabit, know, which are the sort of run of the mill, what Daniel Davis calls the fat middle of buildings, right? Like, why are we not just like generating those? Why are people still manually moving stuff around on the

Evan Troxel: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm

Ian Keough: but like you can consider Dynamo was like a step on a trajectory that's pointing toward what we're eventually doing at Hypar.

hmm.

Evan Troxel: Mm hmm.

Ian Keough: a lot of that started with also this idea of like the package manager, and, and people being able to bottle up the code that they were working on, and, um, and, and share it. And, and I, at this point, I think we were also still just aping a lot of what was happening in the nascent sort of grasshopper community. It was now fully grasshopper. didn't have a package manager, but they had food for rhino or whatever it was called back in the day.

Evan Troxel: Still there. [01:05:00] Yeah.

Ian Keough: were like, people definitely have to be able to do this on Dynamo.

So, um, so that's, so, so then there's some period where I get acquired, the company that I'm at 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 a half, probably, inside Autodesk on a totally different project. Like, not involving Dynamo at all. And, um, it was like, AU, two years into my time at Autodesk. I don't even know when that would have been. 2014? 2013? 2014? I don't know. Couple years into my time at Autodesk, this guy comes barreling towards me. And I'm actually, I'm still going to AU and I'm like sitting in the back of the classrooms as Matt Jezik and Zach Krohn present Dynamo.

Evan Troxel: Right.

Ian Keough: And those were the first classes that like suddenly, like so the first year they did it, [01:06:00] they had uh, I think one of the classes was called Energetic Supermodels with Dynamo. Or something this kind of like in cheek sort of thing. And I think Zach and Matt led that class and there was like one classroom full of dynamo stuff, like a smallish classroom.

And I sat in the very, very back and I was just like, oh man, this thing's gonna crash. It's like not ready for this. Matt

Evan Troxel: Live, live demos, really guys?

Ian Keough: Yeah. Matt had asked, he's like, can we lead a a thing at AU on this? And I happened to be going to AU because now was, I was, think I was in Autodesk at that point or like maybe I was going to, no, actually that first one I was still going to au for this other company for Vela Systems.

'cause we were pre, we were presenting Vela and I was working Velas

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

Ian Keough: 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 30 people in the room and I'm thinking, you know, Oh my God. Um, [01:07:00] and, uh, so that was the first class. And then the second year, I remember. The second year they had, like, a line to get into the classroom, and I was like, why is there a line to get in have they not opened the door yet, or something?

But there was a line to get in the classroom to learn about this thing called Dynamo that people largely, like, still didn't know of. But there was, like, at least a classroom plus a little bit of overflow worth of people who, like, Had heard about this thing and were like, they were members of that community.

Evan Troxel: The early adopters, yeah, for sure.

Ian Keough: 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 going to increase my value to my firm. And I'm going to be part of this community. So that's when you kind of get the sense that it's like an exciting thing.

So at that AU, I think this guy comes barreling towards me and he's like, Starts talking a mile a minute about Dynamo and how incredible it's going to be and what we're going to do and we're going to build this and we're going to have a team and we're going to do this. And I [01:08:00] was like, the guy talks for like three minutes, like without taking a breath. And I'm like, I'm sorry,

Evan Troxel: You're like, who are you?

Ian Keough: And it turns out it's this guy Abhijit Oak. Abhijit, um, had been an AutoCAD guy inside Autodesk for a long time. Um, and then he was put in charge of the Dynamo team. I can't remember what the org structure of Autodesk looked like at the time. It was always changing, but like Abhijit was somehow put in charge of Dynamo.

And so he was like really excited about this, and he found me. And he comes charging at me, telling me all these things we're gonna do, and I'm like, Oh, okay, but you know I'm not on, like, the Dynamo team, right? I'm working on BIM 360 Field in the construction thing. he's like, Yeah, yeah, let's, you're gonna be on the Dynamo team.

Evan Troxel: Let's fix that.

Ian Keough: 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 [01:09:00] Krohn, um, is, is kind of coming over from the Revit team, and myself. And Matt Jezik was kind of peripheral to it, but like, he was kind of shepherding this thing along, but I don't think he was ever like a full time member of the, the, that team. And then, they started pulling in, this guy, like actual Revit developers, who had gotten fed up with developing Revit. They, they were like, hey, I want to go work on that Dynamo thing.

Cause like, Dynamo was now like the cool Revit at that point was kind of just like, it was

Evan Troxel: Yeah,

Ian Keough: going to be.

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

Ian Keough: so, I mean, there's a whole other podcast about this guy, Lev Lipkin, who is incredible. Lev was like an original Revit developer, super, super smart guy. I mean, just a brilliant guy. He came over and, and, um, we were, we were dreaming up all kinds of crazy stuff. Like at one point. We were going to embed the Dynamo runtime inside families that families could [01:10:00] have their own onboard computational logic, know, and it was

Evan Troxel: Nice.

Ian Keough: Like imagine like now,

Evan Troxel: Right.

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

Evan Troxel: Right.

Ian Keough: those

Evan Troxel: Hmm. Mm

Ian Keough: crazy. So, we built this team around it, and, and, um, that, then it was really, then it was becoming, like, a corporate kind of thing. Now it was like, this is an Autodesk project. And, and, um, you know, I had to work, at some points I had to work make sure that they understood that it was still open source. there was still enough, open source was still unfamiliar enough that people inside Autodesk didn't like get the, get the idea that Autodesk was contributing to this open source project. In other words, like they didn't own it.

Evan Troxel: hmm.

Ian Keough: That was confusing to them. [01:11:00] So

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

Ian Keough: 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,

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

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

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

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

Evan Troxel: of the funnel, ultimately, right? And you're talking about the [01:12:00] thing that people are excited about using to alongside Revit, or on top of Revit. I mean, that's You have to capitalize on that excitement, right?

Ian Keough: Yeah, and so that, and one, one unfortunate consequence of that is And I, and I say all this with a big asterisk because I'm, I'm, I have a very soft spot in my heart for Autodesk. I worked there for a number of years, I have a lot of great friends who, who work at Autodesk. Um, so, that's a big caveat to a lot of what I'm going to say. They, um, Autodesk sometimes has this mentality of like, We're gonna go into the market and make a product that feature for feature like competes and we're gonna win Because we own the channel or whatever, you know, you saw this with things like Formit Sketchup. They were like we're gonna kill Sketchup.

Let's make something that does all the things SketchUp does and they actually made a beautiful product and I know the team who worked on it was kind of brilliant in many ways [01:13:00] But like I don't know. It's a troubling thing to try and compete like that, know instead of like really Differentiating on some other Vector of value you just say like we're gonna do exactly the same thing that you do But because we do it, anybody who uses Teams Microsoft Teams understands what this feels like in a product.

Meh You

Evan Troxel: Premium, premium, mediocre. Yeah.

Ian Keough: know, but it's just like, meh. And, and so one of the things that they tried to do, I think, they're still trying to do it. It's like, they were looking at Grasshopper, and they were like, this has to be Grasshopper.

Evan Troxel: I was going to ask you, like, where did that excitement internally come from? Uh, it was it, was it, I mean, it, maybe it's a combination of things, right? But the excitement from the user base and 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 [01:14:00] at all. Like I know Autodesk really likes to focus on, on themselves and what you can build inside their tools. But then also there are these competing pressures in the industry, a la Grasshopper, right? And so I was just wondering if you had, I'm sure you have thoughts, but that's kind of where you're going.

Ian Keough: 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

Evan Troxel: Value wise. Yeah.

Ian Keough: they're incredible. Um, this thing gave Revit capabilities That it couldn't do, and, and in the way that it was implemented, just, I guess by chance, managed to up level Revit. and, that was not only just like the geometry stuff, the adaptive components, all the stuff I've talked about, it was actually much more of the like, mundane, day to day stuff. Like, people don't remember that back in the day, if you were working [01:15:00] on a project that was 30 stories tall, and you were like, oh, we put a mechanical level in here, now we gotta rename all our levels, Like, you had to manually go and rename like 30, so a lot of the early years of Dynamo was like people automating sheet numbering, level renaming, just this really, but tag placement, like scripts for placing tags on pages in certain ways and stuff, like really, really run of the mill kind of stuff, and they were doing it themselves. And that was the critical thing, like they weren't waiting for Autodesk or waiting for some other script provider or whatever, so like that kind of motion that when you see that happening, you're like, oh, wow, this thing could take off, because now you've turned, you've turned every one of your users, not every one of your users, let's say of all the people using, Revit at the time, let's say there were 10%, percent at a maximum,

Evan Troxel: Right.

Ian Keough: Dynamo users.

Well, I don't know how many people that is, it's a fair number though, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, [01:16:00] 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

Evan Troxel: Yeah, totally. Yep.

Ian Keough: Um, that's one. And number two, which is a little bit less nice that, you know, when you're a publicly traded company, you need to represent that the products that you're putting into the market are, are continuing to deliver value if you are going to raise the price and when you have an ecosystem like Dynamo provided, creating more value in the, in, in the ecosystem of people, you know, working on Revit. You could represent that Revit was worth more. Because it wasn't, you weren't selling Dynamo. Dynamo was free. You were selling Revit. And on top of it was this thing that like added all this extra value. And the value in that thing was growing, growing, growing, growing, growing all the time. It's still growing to this day, you know.

So you [01:17:00] could represent that you could actually charge more for Revit. this community was building all this extra stuff that

Evan Troxel: It's crazy, right? Because you also have these people building tools that are in the, show up in the package manager, right? That are adding value to that ecosystem and not getting compensated for it, right? So like, that's, those are, that, that's crazy, right?

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

Evan Troxel: Create a marketplace or something. Yeah.

Ian Keough: whose, whose, whose tools have been on Dynamo Since basically the Package Manager existed And might still be 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 and I think Nate should be a millionaire,

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Ian Keough: if he

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Ian Keough: for every time somebody downloaded or a nickel for every time somebody downloaded his package like

Evan Troxel: Or [01:18:00] Conrad or John Pearson or like, there's so, there's many, many, there's, there's many. Yeah.

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

Evan Troxel: Right,

Ian Keough: Everybody's still compensated in the same way for their hours, you know. This, yet again, dovetails into what Hypar is trying to do, but, um. So, the last big part of the story of Dynamo is when we, when we mashed it together with DesignScript. So, um, you remember that I, I, I was working on Generative Components at the very beginning of my career.

Evan Troxel: right,

Ian Keough: Components was made by this, this brilliant guy named Robert Aish. And some of your older users, your listeners will remember Robert Aish. Robert Aish was the father of generative components, which was a, which was another plug in, um, like Dynamo, like Grasshopper, [01:19:00] but it ran on top of Bentley microstations. And, or Triforma, uh, Microstation, I think, right on top of Microstation.

Evan Troxel: I believe, yeah.

Ian Keough: And, SMART, the SMART Geometry Conference, at least in the very early days, was, was a generative components conference. It was the conference where, where Robert Aish would run around with like a USB key on a lanyard around his neck that had the latest build on it. he would like plug it into your computer and give you the new bits.

Evan Troxel: Give me the juice, man.

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

Evan Troxel: Wow,

Ian Keough: so a lot of us have Robert Aish to thank for, for a lot of his stuff. But one of the things that Robert had 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'll allow you to work on all these projects that you're interested in and everything. Well, Robert, since [01:20:00] Generative Components, you should probably get Robert on the show.

Evan Troxel: yeah.

Ian Keough: Components had this idea for DesignScript, which was a language, a textual programming language. That had affordances in it for the kinds of programming that Archonneks need to do a lot of like I've got a facade It's made up of all these panels.

Those panels generally look like an array and programming terminology I want to index into like this row this panel this mullion on that panel and do this specific thing And so the the design script language, which is still the language that's in code blocks in in Dynamo It was it had these things called replication guides You That allowed you to do all that stuff.

So it was pretty cool. And it was also this associative language. So it had forward and backwards associativity, which I won't go into here, but if you've seen like very early demos of design script, was like kind of mind bendy when you watched it work, you were like, how was, how would that work? Um, and so Robert was inside Autodesk working on this design script project and he had this team in [01:21:00] Singapore dedicated to him building the design scripts, interpreter, the design script. Uh, Virtual Machine. A virtual machine is like the brain that runs, 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, and a design script environment. Because Robert started going around and telling people about design script. Um, be like, yeah, you know what this really needs? a visual programming interface. And he hated that because he was like designing this programming language. This was going to be so easy to use and have all these affordances for architects. And every single person who had now seen Grasshopper, who had now seen Dynamo, they were like, yeah, you need to put an interface on this thing.

So he had this team in Singapore start building 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. [01:22:00] He, uh, he was put in charge of building the DesignScript Studio. Luke was another really, really interesting and smart guy, um, and DesignScript Studio was, was very pretty.

It was like, you could, you could, nodes and wires, and then you could get like previews when you hovered over a node. You could get a preview of like the compute at that exact moment. You'd get this like little visual preview of what was flowing through the system at that point. So they did all these like kind of clever things, but now Autodesk has two projects. DesignScript, and Dynamo, which are basically doing the same thing. And, and, Dynamo was further ahead in its visual programming language, and it interfaced very deeply with Revit. Because that was the other thing that people asked for. They were like, this needs a visual programming interface, and it also needs to talk to Revit. So Abhijit, who was the guy who oversaw both of these projects, was like, we're going to bring these projects together. And he told us this, he told the Dynamo team this, and we were [01:23:00] like, we're like, what do we, what do we need that for? Um, and know, I was just kind of like, Oh man, like. I had gone through the whole, like, F scheme thing with Stephen Elliott, and I was like, I really don't want to make, like, another, cause I knew this was gonna turn into some, like, big architectural, 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 probably calmed me down and we're like, look, we kind of got to do this. It doesn't make any sense that Autodesk has these two visual programming languages that are being developed by two teams trying to like, what, beat each other or something. we started to sketch out like how this would even work. And the core piece of that to use the design script virtual machine as the engine. So we're going to rip out the stuff that Stephen Elliot had done. a third version of the Dynamo engine [01:24:00] based on the, the DesignScript virtual machine. And, um, that would give us a couple of really cool things. thing that the DesignScript virtual machine did was it ran on DesignScript, the language. So we could have programming interfaces in nodes inside HypeBar that you could type DesignScript into.

Evan Troxel: Dynamo. He said Hypar.

Ian Keough: did I say Hybar? Oh, sorry.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

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

Evan Troxel: Right.

Ian Keough: and, um, that was cool because then you could use replication guides and all this stuff, and if you really were into design script, you could, you could do that. And, um, the second cool thing is they had built an interface called ZeroTouch. ZeroTouch enabled them to take any NET um, managed class library library. gonna say technical stuff, but like, library full of like, [01:25:00] methods and functions and stuff. And emit, well you could drop that onto Design Script and it would, um, uh, it could read all of the public methods,

Evan Troxel: Mm hmm,

Ian Keough: and, and essentially create nodes for you that expose those things. So people who use Dynamo to this day still understand the concept of zero touch nodes.

You can literally like, grab a, an off the shelf, like, C sharp library from someplace, And drop it on Dynamo, and provided that it has public methods with certain types of signatures, it will just show up as notes. I actually don't know if this is still true, because I haven't played with Dynamo in a while, but that was the idea. And, it made development of external libraries, for creating nodes really, really easy and straight forward. So that was cool too, but what wasn't cool about it was that we now owned a programming language. Like, I don't, I have subsequently learned a lot about programming languages. Programming language implementations, [01:26:00] How to make virtual machines, compilers, uh, all this stuff that I never ever thought when I went to art school I would ever have to learn about but I had to learn about because it's like design script and getting like very very deeply into There but the problem is you make a core technology like that that is so arcane You kind of put a can't a hard shell around

Evan Troxel: mm hmm.

Ian Keough: very hard for other developers to get in there and change things adapt things You know that the the story that kind of And I don't know if it's, if it's, um, if it's actually true, but they say about, like, the Excel, the core of Excel. They've tried over the years to, like, touch that thing and edit it to do other stuff, and it's blown up on Microsoft and they've just, like, backed away. And so there's, like, a core in Excel that, like, was written by some of the original developers. And like new developers just kind of like work outside of that shell [01:27:00] and that's kind of what the design script virtual machine is like There's like

Evan Troxel: Well, it kind of reminds me of your story about Burrow Happold, right? Where, where it's like, what happened 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, this maybe is still being used, but it's the same kind of a thing where it's just like, 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.

Ian Keough: people do the same thing to each other. You know, it's not just like we know how like any software like, developer can get in and mess with any kind of code. And there's two pieces of code inside Dynamo that basically function like that. There's DesignScript Virtual Machine, and there's the Geometry Library.

The Geometry Library is now the Geometry Library that sits at the heart of a bunch of Autodesk products. And that was another big part of this upgrade. gonna switch off the Revit Geometry Library and go to ASM.

Evan Troxel: Mm.

Ian Keough: is the Geometry Library. And it gave us all kinds of, like, really sweet geometry. That we couldn't make before because Revit just couldn't make that kind of geometry and it has [01:28:00] compatibility with Revit. Um, so these things, the geometry library was definitely beneficial, but that's also another one of these things that like, Very few people get down inside 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 for Autodesk who, that's all they do is like work on the geometry kernels, right? And so, um, you had these pieces now that were like central to the architecture of Dynamo that, core team, there were like one person per 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 of instability, which people will remember like yellow nodes with band aids on them and stuff, or yellow warning messages with band aids on them, a little cartoon drawings of, because things were breaking all the time. Like. We'd made all these giant architectural changes. And so, people were really kind of pissed, [01:29:00] like, cause we were breaking their workflows. You know, there was like stuff that just wasn't backwards compatible. Geometry libraries were different. So geometry didn't work quite the same way, but you know, to Autodesk's credit, they weren't backing down.

Like they were like, The only way out is through,

Evan Troxel: Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

Ian Keough: we just like over six months or something we just like worked down like of these things until we got to a place where we were relatively stable, you know, and, and, um, back on, back in a place where this thing was, you know, part of people's production kind of workflows. Um, and that was the last big transition and that happened probably two years before I left. And then at some point I, I transitioned off the. The Dynamo team to go work with Anthony, my co founder at Hypar, to go work with Anthony, on a Dynamo based project, um, which was called Fractal, but which would go on to become, [01:30:00] uh, Autodesk Generative Design. which I think still exists, and you can use it on top of Revit. Um, to use Dynamo scripts basically as the language

Evan Troxel: hmm.

Ian Keough: to run in that thing. Um, so honestly, I mean that, and that was 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 that team has worked incredibly hard Since then, and have maintained that community and probably grown that community.

Evan Troxel: Right.

Ian Keough: 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 postings that had Dynamo it's like, what? Like,

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Ian Keough: like by name, like [01:31:00] 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,

Evan Troxel: Yeah. And, and there, and then after that, like you, you search Dynamo. I mean, it was like 2016, maybe 2015, probably 2016 AU, right? Autodesk University. You search for any course with Dynamo that you could find in the title. And they were awful. Every single one of them, all the labs, all the courses. Yep.

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

Evan Troxel: a listener of this podcast. Yeah.

Ian Keough: is incredible. He makes his own moonshine. He grows all his own grapes, like on these trellises around his house.

And then he, he makes, I don't know that it's fair to call it moonshine. It's this very clear, very strong liquor. he brings it to Autodesk University in these Mason [01:32:00] jars. And we would sit in the back of these Dynamo workshops, which at one point we're no longer run by Autodesk people. Like this was the community straight

Evan Troxel: Right.

Ian Keough: 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 just like toast to the success of Dynamo. And he

Evan Troxel: A job well done.

Ian Keough: like, couldn't get into one of the classes. Like I, so I went outside, like it was so packed and there was an overflow line and I went outside and stood at the back of this overflow line. some point, somebody who was in front of me in the overflow line, like turned around and was like, Shouldn't you be in there? I was like, I didn't sign up for the class. I, I can't go in. I think I eventually made it in, but like, yeah, now it's like, it's crazy. Like the number of Dynamo classes and like, I, and I will say that, I mean, one of the most gratifying things, there's really two gratifying things that I still hear to this day.

It's like, when I talk to people about their Dynamo experience, they'll [01:33:00] say things like Dynamo completely changed my career, like it enabled me to grow. do things and level up and provide value, um, to my organization that I wouldn't have been able to do without it. And like, that just, it put me on a different trajectory.

Like the whole thing about, I'm not going to attribute this all to Dynamo. There's, there's been a lot of motion in computational design over the last couple of years, but like the whole thing that there are computational designers now, that's Grasshopper at work. That's Dynamo at work. That, the fact that that's a title, there were no computational designers.

Evan Troxel: Right.

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

Evan Troxel: Mm hmm.

Ian Keough: which blows my mind

Evan Troxel: Mm hmm. Mm

Ian Keough: and in a way, [01:34:00] They did it because they started with Dynamo Visual Programming, and then they got really frustrated that their graphs were like, so big and messy spaghetti. So they would start programming in code blocks, and they'd probably start with design script. And then they were like, ah, but there'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. So they'd put a Python node in there. start reading up on like, how to program in Python, and over time, more and more of their code, their visual program, started to disappear

Evan Troxel: hmm.

Ian Keough: these Python nodes. And then at some point they were like, I want to go like, as fast as I can possibly go, I'm going to write 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 to build my own Revit plugin that just does this one specific thing. So the thing started as like a DynamoGraph. And evolved into it's own stand alone kind of thing, and the person who worked on that went from [01:35:00] knowing nothing about programming to like,

Evan Troxel: Yeah,

Ian Keough: That's,

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

Ian Keough: mind. Yeah, like I, like Hypar is a lot of architects. Like it's a lot of people, Andrew Heumann who's on my team is like the pro to, the, the, the,

Evan Troxel: I was, I was directly thinking of Andrew. Yep.

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

Evan Troxel: Mm hmm,

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

Evan Troxel: right,

Ian Keough: Now his trajectory went Grasshopper.

Evan Troxel: right.

Ian Keough: Grasshopper community, but I think you have very much the same thing, you know, and now he's like our lead developer. So

Evan Troxel: Incredible story. Thank you so much for taking the time to tell it, and to tell it here. You never have to tell this story again.

Ian Keough: I'm I'm looking at the time now and I'm recognizing how long it took to tell and maybe that's why I've never told the whole Thing from start to end because you [01:36:00] never have enough time at the bar, you know to tell

Evan Troxel: 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.

Ian Keough: I appreciate the opportunity of it always a always a pleasure to chat

​