You made it this far, so why not introduce yourself? Tell us a little bit about what you do and what you’re into! And since you’re there, why not adding a profile picture, it’s good etiquette!
I’ll start
I’m Matteo, co-founder of Speckle and currently based in London. I have previously worked in the industry developing new technologies for automation, BIM, open standards etc.
I studied Architecture&Engineering in Italy and self taught programming, one of my first languages was Actionscript and Macromedia Flash (good old times)!
When I’m not adding new bugs to the Speckle codebase you might find me in the mountains or baking some bread…
I’ll jump in as well! I’m Izzy – the newest software engineer at Speckle. I recently earned my degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Edinburgh where I spent more time building race cars than actually studying
I initially started teaching myself to code so I could go for extra long coffee breaks while I got IES to automatically run all my simulations and output formatted excel sheets for me. This spiralled into a stint developing automation tools for other engineers and fuelled a drive to find better ways for us to work.
If I’m not staring at VS code, I’m probably weight lifting, pole dancing, petting my bunnies, or playing video games on my PC.
Evening y’all. @teocomi and @izzylys are pestering me to introduce myself, so I’ll play nice to get them off my back.
As you can tell, I’m the grumpy dude. I made Speckle some time ago, and since late 2015 it’s been my #1 love child, most annoying thing ever, and everything in between. The story behind is worth a whole post by itself (maybe sometime we’ll gather around a virtual campfire and go through it). Some accused me of being a bit of a BDFL, to which I say it’s not my fault: I’d happily stop writing code and take a break if only I could.
I primarily feel obliged to apologise for inflicting it on you (though the two above have it worse: they decided to work on it full time ). Somehow roped @teocomi into founding a company around it because… against all odds, people kept on using Speckle, and we thought it’s a good idea to shake up the AEC industry!
For the rest, you can always stalk me in the usual places
Geez I am not sure I have a super cool description of myself. Let’s say my communication skills is not my best feature, but I do it anyway (damm books I didn’t read when I was younger). At least I try.
I am an I-do-all-sorts-of-things-type-of-person that graduated in Architecture in Brazil and Integrated Building Systems (master) in CH. Currently I live and work in CH (if the country doesn’t decide otherwise with my visa ). I consider myself, unfortunately, an eternal noob. I know about a thousand things but not in a proper deepness. Hopefully I start to change this with Speckle (where should I start if I want to write plugins to it, btw?)
Currently I am pushing the company to use Speckle, just as a very brave-new-random-non-european-lady that doesn’t even speak properly the company languages (damm communication skills again). Somehow it seems to be working though… Ah, I deal with parametric design, just in case someone was curious.
When I am not at working I wish I would be doing also a thousand different cool things (like windsurfing, paragliding) but the truth is you are most likely to find me taking care of plants! That’s it, something I am not noob with! \o/
my name is Max, currently working on and in ModuGen, where we are developing a new way to work with 3D timber building models for structural analysis. I am currently using Speckle as a detached viewer to our backend (which reads IFC and simplifies it to our own geometry/semantic model.
I’ve been inspired by the simplicity and versatility of speckle as compared to the rigid IFC format. Also I really like how everyone here is thinking in developer-terms, not construction terms.
I am excited to see where V2 will go and how that product might become applicable in our own workflow.
Let’s take this opportunity to introduce myself.
My name is Dirk, graduated Civil Engineer working at Royal HaskoningDHV for about 2 years now in both The Netherlands and Vietnam.
What I’m trying to achieve is using (visual) programming to make the engineers’ life better and clients happier. This is also one of the reasons I’m interested in Speckle, I believe this initiative could be the basis for many digital developments in the future. I think it provides us the platform for more and better use of engineering data.
When I’m not sitting in my home office I like , !
Nice to meet you Dirk and Max Thanks for introducing yourselves!
Love that philosophy @dirksliepenbeek – totally one of the things that got me into Speckle as well!
@maxmodugen super slick parkour and video editing! Looking forward to see ModuGen grow and hopefully make your life a bit easier with 2.0
Would love to see how you’re using the Speckle viewer, could be a great post to launch #general:made-with-speckle
I’m Chris, I run a small team of computational designers out of Wellington, New Zealand, working on projects across Australia and NZ in the transport/land infrastructure space. Bridges and tunnels and stuff are really fun to work on because they are so linear, and you can get a lot of mileage out of procedural tools, as you can probably imagine!
In my spare time I make procedurally generated worlds in Unity, desperately try to get my dream house built, and play with my cartoon dog Gupp’n.
Hi everyone!
I’m Luis. I live in Barcelona with my partner and two little humans.
I’ve pretended to be a musician and an architect in former lives. Currently, I work at McNeel EU helping developers make things with our APIs. Lately I’ve been helping out with Rhino.Inside, Rhino.Compute, and rhino3dm. I’ve also just written a 3DMLoader for three.js.
My main languages for development are csharp and javascript.
I got involved with Speckle because for better or for worse, I know @dimitrie. We met in Barcelona in 2009ish (?) and have kept in touch / bumped into each other from time to time. McNeel was involved in the Innochain project which gave us the opportunity to help out in Speckle. You might know my work from the infamous inclusion of CEFSharp into the code base (congratulations on getting rid of that dependency!) and some commits here and there… mostly in the Rhino plugin.
I had the pleasure of meeting @teocomi along the way and look forward to meeting @izzylys at the next Speckle meetup!
@luis can’t wait for the next time we can have drinks IRL.
@chris.welch definitely remember you among the other presenters, it was indeed an eternity ago! Would love to see the procedurally generated worlds you mention, it’s maybe time for an off-topic category…
Hi everyone I’m Jak! My background is a little different. I’m a hobbyist game developer working on the Unity and Unreal Engine plugins for speckle. Currently I’m working with AKT II and helping shift the focus from our internal legacy object model to prefering using Speckle and contributing to that work. We even have some preliminary connections to software Speckle currently doesn’t have public kits for and we hope to slap an MIT licence on that work this year (no promises though)!
I studied computer science with games development and ended up working in Arup with @teocomi and @dimitrie where they introduced me to Speckle and gave me general guidance in the early days of my career. I’m continuing to follow Speckle and work on the plugins as a means of broadening my skills as a software engineer and also because I really admire where Speckle came from and how far its come.
I typically spend my time making games or playing them. The dream is to publish a game and make a fiver in profit so I can buy a big mac.
Hey everyone, John Pierson here.
I have been watching speckle from a distance for a little while now and admire the work you all have done.
I started out doing development when I learned Dynamo, moved to some python, and now make Revit add-ins in C# primarily. I also publish a few okay dynamo packages, (Rhythm, Bang, Monocle). Before that, I was the “Revit power user” for an architecture firm, which oftentimes meant translating data from one platform to another.
I believe we have some pretty neat use-cases for Speckle coming up soon, some for our use at Parallax, and some for clients. Specifically, I have clients looking for self-hosting options for data that do not use the thing that starts with F and rhymes with Gorge.
Looking forward to diving into this more here soon!
I recently graduated with my structural engineering degree from the University of Toronto. I previously interned at Arup for around a year where I had the privilege of working on building projects as well as developing various automation tools. This led me to be involved with Speckle, namely giving birth to the GSA connector (and the absolute privilege of working beside @dimitrie and @teocomi).
I’ll be starting my PhD studies at the University of Cambridge this October on a topic more rooted on structural mechanics and robotics which I suspect will have little opportunities to integrate Speckle, but I’m excited to see where Speckle 2.0 goes and follow along its development!
When I’m not working, I’m usually either looking for the next food place to try out, playing video games, or fiddling around on my cello.
Hey @mishaelnuh! I remember you did a weekend trip to Edinborough(?) while on placement in London, and you came back with a Nintendo Switch, which you proceeded to carry every day to the office IIRC. As impressive as you hammering that GSA connector. For the record, Mish also
re-wrote and re-structured three quarters of the documentation
We’d be totally happy to help you out with those if we can. It’s a bit of a weird moment for us right now - pushing 2.0 out in its larval stage, but totally down to still flex 1.0 (but not enhance).
*Those funky robots were introduced to me by the one and only @antoine (who is busy working for the ladybug tools). Here’s the source: https://robohash.org
Hi everyone, I’m Nic Burgers (yes you say that like the food)
I’m currently working for Arup as a Design Automation Developer and currently maintain three repositories started by the talented @mishaelnuh - SpeckleGSA, SpeckleStructural and one within Arup for a fledgling SpeckleETABS plugin.
I actually have an engineering degree - in software though - and a science degree (majoring in applied mathematics, which I’ve completely forgotten by now). What I most enjoy though is working directly with “real” engineers on real projects - and Arup is supporting the use of Speckle on many great projects.
On the side I design & assemble CNC-cut plywood furniture (like this), mostly for my own place so far. I’ve been working on Rhino/GH automation tools to make myself more efficient in doing this, which I’ll soon use for some custom kitchen cabinets.
In other news, if you want to know how to up your daily intake of vegetables, I’m your man. If you want to learn to eat well without added sugar, I’m your man.
And lastly, I’ll mention for no reason that I eat homemade scones (with reduced strawberries instead of sugary jam) gratuitously on my own DIY deck.
hey fam David here! Happy to be hanging with this crew!
Similar story as most. Graduated from architecture school a couple of years ago and found my interests for fabrication leading me into everything vr. I strung together some half baked ideas about vr + architecture for my thesis which most likely has more grammar issues than cohesive thoughts.
I showed some peeps at Sasaki this nonsense and found myself joining the Strategies team to keep poking at this research. Since then I’ve been absorbing all things virtual in hopes to learn the in’s and outs of creating digital content. I mainly swimming around the Unity + Rhino waters with the occasional dip into Touchdesigner and AfterEffects.
At the moment I’ve been digging into Speckle to help streamline workflows for tools that we develop. Our lil’ team has been focused on exploring ways to connect typical spatial/environmental analysis to our designers toolkit in hopes to have the analysis influence the design rather than diagrammatic after thought.
As someone that depends on StackOverflow and Youtube for learning code/dev stuff, I’m really excited to learn from the crew here! Oh, and when I’m not battling against Unity I might be gaming on the switch/PC, hiking, or trying to get my cat to show love.
(good old times)!
). Somehow roped 
). I consider myself, unfortunately, an eternal noob. I know about a thousand things but not in a proper deepness. Hopefully I start to change this with Speckle (where should I start if I want to write plugins to it, btw?)
Ah, I deal with parametric design, just in case someone was curious.
, 
!
