Twenty-five years on site. Fifteen writing Ruby.

I spent about twenty-five years as a Baumeister in Austria (German). There is no clean English word for it: roughly a master builder, a licensed trade that covers designing a building, calculating it and running the site it goes up on. Drawings, structure, detailing, the people on the scaffold ... all of it.

Then I changed careers and spent the last fifteen years writing software, mostly Ruby. I never left the first trade behind. Since 2009 I have worked with Revit, and out of that came revit-content.com — families, content and tooling for myself, architects and engineers doing the same work I used to do with Revit.

About a year ago I moved to SketchUp. I enjoy it far more than Revit. It is fast, direct and forgiving in a way BIM packages are not, and it stays out of the way while you think.

What I miss is everything underneath the geometry. After seventeen years of BIM I keep reaching for things that are not there: a wall that knows its build-up, an opening that knows its head, jambs and sill, a model that can be scheduled rather than counted by hand. With the Ruby background, I discovered what Sketchup allows me to do, which is far beyond what I could have done with Revit.

To be honest, I am probably still thinking too much like Revit. I have a year in SketchUp, not a decade, and some of what I consider missing may just be something I have not discovered or learned yet, or something SketchUp is right to do differently. That is part of why I am building Aplo in the open, and why I would rather be corrected early than ship a Revit impression of BIM.