It's been a while since my last post on this blog. I was lucky enough to be involved in very interesting projects with Autodesk Consulting customers all around the World, especially around automating workflows using Dynamo with other Autodesk software such as Revit or Civil 3D.
Over the past few years I've been doing a lot of these engagements and I started to collect some material to support Dynamo workshops. I didn't do this alone of course, I've referenced a lot of the amazing work that the Dynamo team put into documenting the tool on Dynamo Primer and GitHub, and I'm also very thankful to other colleagues such as Dieter and Daniel who contributed directly to improve the content of this material.
Since 2015 I've been developing an approach to implement Dynamo inside a large organization at a global level (from a few hundredths to tenths of thousands users to give you an idea), the processes to control standards and consistency of the graphs to make it easy for the users and organizations that want to harness the power of automation. This is what I call a "Dynamo Foundation".
In this context I've developed a Dynamo standard for Autodesk that I've partially published on this blog right when the node groups were introduced in 0.8.1 (link).
I just recently had the pleasure to meet Vladimir Ondejcik, who about a year later than me published one of the most used standards for Dynamo. I was really happy that he liked some of my suggestions to improve his own template.
It's impressive how many resources around Dynamo are available nowadays! I cannot possibly list them all in this post but just a couple to give you an idea of what an amazing work the people in the Dynamo community has been doing: Danny Bentley, John Pierson, and so many more! (you are more than welcome to add them in the comments if you like).
Well sometimes information is too much and all over the place, I found myself in situations in which people were under the impression that Dynamo is some kind of magic wand that can do everything a user wants. Some others have a legitimate preference to continue creating their "secret automation weapons" developing using traditional scripting and coding and don't even want to start to understand how to use visual programming. Others they are just confused and overwhelmed by all this abundance.
I think the more you know the better. If there is an effective way to achieve the result you need, with the tools you have, with the knowledge you have, you should go for it.
And if you don't know enough: well, congratulations, that's the perfect day to start learning something new. I do understand those who need some support, some guidance to have a sound internal compass when it comes to approach a mindset shift.
That's what I like to do in Autodesk Consulting: help our Customers in being successful in their journey towards automation, with their own pace, to fulfill their vision.
We add value to make the difference.
A few days ago a colleague, Toshiaki Isezaki, reached out internally to have some clarifications around what are the differences between Revit API and Dynamo. He had a brilliant idea of creating a comparison table and it quickly became a very interesting discussion with a lot of insights from very knowledgeable colleagues around Autodesk such as Jeremy Tammik, Miro Schonauer and Seth Edwards. I gave my contribution too and I also shared the presentation I usually use in workshops to help Toshiaki in his endeavor.
Today Jeremy told me he liked my presentation very much and he suggested I'd publish it, so here it is, I hope someone can find it useful (link).
