WEBVTT 00:00:00.001 --> 00:00:05.600 At PyCon 2017, Jake Vander Plaats gave a great keynote where he said Python is a mosaic. 00:00:05.600 --> 00:00:10.740 He described how Python is stronger and growing because it's being adopted and used by people 00:00:10.740 --> 00:00:12.500 with diverse technical backgrounds. 00:00:12.500 --> 00:00:18.040 In this episode, we're adding to that mosaic by diving into how Python is being used in 00:00:18.040 --> 00:00:20.640 the architecture, engineering, and construction industry. 00:00:20.640 --> 00:00:25.580 Our guest, Gui Talrico, has worked as an architect who helped automate that world by bringing 00:00:25.580 --> 00:00:29.700 Python to solve problems where others were just using point-and-click tooling. 00:00:30.360 --> 00:00:32.060 I think you'll enjoy this look into that world. 00:00:32.060 --> 00:00:35.980 We also touch on his project, PyAirtable, near the end as well. 00:00:35.980 --> 00:00:42.580 This is Talk Python To Me, episode 342, recorded November 7th, 2021. 00:00:42.580 --> 00:00:58.860 Welcome to Talk Python To Me, a weekly podcast on Python. 00:00:59.140 --> 00:01:00.560 This is your host, Michael Kennedy. 00:01:00.560 --> 00:01:04.780 Follow me on Twitter, where I'm @mkennedy, and keep up with the show and listen to past 00:01:04.780 --> 00:01:06.760 episodes at talkpython.fm. 00:01:06.760 --> 00:01:09.880 And follow the show on Twitter via at Talk Python. 00:01:09.880 --> 00:01:13.400 We've started streaming most of our episodes live on YouTube. 00:01:13.400 --> 00:01:19.180 Subscribe to our YouTube channel over at talkpython.fm/youtube to get notified about upcoming 00:01:19.180 --> 00:01:21.000 shows and be part of that episode. 00:01:21.740 --> 00:01:26.900 This episode is brought to you by Shortcut and Linode, and the transcripts are sponsored 00:01:26.900 --> 00:01:28.200 by Assembly AI. 00:01:28.200 --> 00:01:31.320 Dee, welcome to Talk Python. 00:01:31.320 --> 00:01:31.880 Thanks. 00:01:31.880 --> 00:01:32.740 Happy to be here. 00:01:32.740 --> 00:01:34.340 Yeah, it's fantastic to have you here. 00:01:34.340 --> 00:01:40.160 I'm really excited to talk about buildings and architecture and that kind of stuff just 00:01:40.160 --> 00:01:41.360 permeates our lives, right? 00:01:41.440 --> 00:01:46.420 That's, you walk around, you go to cities, you marvel at the large buildings, go to someone's 00:01:46.420 --> 00:01:48.520 house, and it's this beautiful place. 00:01:48.520 --> 00:01:49.740 Really nice to see. 00:01:49.740 --> 00:01:52.880 All that starts with good architecture and design, right? 00:01:52.880 --> 00:01:53.820 Yeah, that's right. 00:01:53.820 --> 00:01:59.860 Where we live, where we work, pretty much most of our lives we spend inside some sort of structure. 00:02:01.160 --> 00:02:01.560 Exactly. 00:02:01.560 --> 00:02:02.360 Exactly. 00:02:02.360 --> 00:02:02.640 Cool. 00:02:02.640 --> 00:02:03.840 Well, we're going to talk about that. 00:02:03.840 --> 00:02:06.480 Before we get into that, though, let's just start with your story. 00:02:06.480 --> 00:02:07.820 How'd you get into programming in Python? 00:02:07.820 --> 00:02:09.860 Yeah, it was a bit of a long journey to Python. 00:02:09.860 --> 00:02:15.140 I think my first experience with programming was actually with Lego Mindstorm. 00:02:15.140 --> 00:02:16.500 I don't know if you're familiar with it. 00:02:16.500 --> 00:02:16.920 Yeah. 00:02:16.920 --> 00:02:18.480 A little robot thing, right? 00:02:18.480 --> 00:02:18.820 Yeah. 00:02:18.820 --> 00:02:20.240 You can program those with Python, can't you? 00:02:20.240 --> 00:02:20.600 Yeah. 00:02:20.600 --> 00:02:22.200 I don't know what it looks like these days. 00:02:22.200 --> 00:02:26.340 I guess when I got it, I was maybe, yeah, in my early teenage years or something. 00:02:26.500 --> 00:02:32.220 And at the time, they had something that was similar to MIT's Scratch kind of block, plug and play. 00:02:32.220 --> 00:02:33.540 So I did a little bit of that. 00:02:33.540 --> 00:02:40.300 And then later, I tried to learn Visual Basic 6, I think also in my early teenage years. 00:02:40.300 --> 00:02:42.040 And that was fun. 00:02:42.040 --> 00:02:44.560 I built a couple little personal projects. 00:02:44.560 --> 00:02:49.320 I feel like we still don't have something to take the place of Visual Basic 6. 00:02:49.320 --> 00:02:49.620 Yeah. 00:02:49.620 --> 00:02:50.200 Yeah. 00:02:50.200 --> 00:02:51.020 Do you think so? 00:02:51.120 --> 00:02:56.800 I mean, I look around at all the different UI platforms, whether that's the stuff we have 00:02:56.800 --> 00:03:03.860 in Python or whether that's Swift or whether that's .NET with WPF or whatever else you want 00:03:03.860 --> 00:03:04.280 to talk about. 00:03:04.280 --> 00:03:09.700 Nothing is as easy as, I want these buttons here in a text box and a list and I double click 00:03:09.700 --> 00:03:12.360 it and I write three lines of code and that happens, right? 00:03:12.360 --> 00:03:12.620 Yeah. 00:03:12.620 --> 00:03:14.160 The environment has changed, right? 00:03:14.160 --> 00:03:16.440 Because before they were just desktop apps, right? 00:03:16.440 --> 00:03:18.080 You would build it and that's it. 00:03:18.080 --> 00:03:21.100 And now you have to think about, even if. 00:03:21.100 --> 00:03:25.420 React has made it as easy to build front end app, you still have to deal with something 00:03:25.420 --> 00:03:29.660 else for styling and then you have to figure out how you're going to serve the data or are 00:03:29.660 --> 00:03:30.580 going to deploy it to you. 00:03:30.580 --> 00:03:31.440 Yeah. 00:03:31.440 --> 00:03:32.200 I think you're right. 00:03:32.200 --> 00:03:36.500 I mean, I'm not saying VV6 is the pinnacle of what we could design, right? 00:03:36.500 --> 00:03:39.740 It's not going to win massive design awards, but wow. 00:03:39.740 --> 00:03:42.640 Could people get stuff done quickly with that framework? 00:03:42.640 --> 00:03:42.980 Yeah. 00:03:42.980 --> 00:03:44.560 So you did a little bit there, huh? 00:03:44.560 --> 00:03:44.740 Yeah. 00:03:44.740 --> 00:03:47.980 I never got too deep, but it was an extension of a robotics course that I was taking. 00:03:47.980 --> 00:03:52.700 So we were building these little UIs and then clicking around and having the robot move or 00:03:52.700 --> 00:03:53.000 something. 00:03:53.000 --> 00:03:55.580 So it was very basic UI. 00:03:55.580 --> 00:04:00.040 But what was interesting is at the time I grew up in Brazil and at the time it was still there 00:04:00.040 --> 00:04:03.760 and I wanted to get really deep, but there was this, there was a bit of a language barrier, 00:04:03.760 --> 00:04:04.320 I think. 00:04:04.320 --> 00:04:05.960 This was also, you know, pre-Google. 00:04:05.960 --> 00:04:11.700 So trying to learn how to program while also not knowing how to speak English, I actually 00:04:11.700 --> 00:04:13.960 feel like it slowed me down a bit. 00:04:13.960 --> 00:04:14.280 Yeah. 00:04:14.280 --> 00:04:15.040 I can imagine. 00:04:15.040 --> 00:04:20.700 I've always had a lot of both respect and I guess a little bit of sympathy for people 00:04:20.700 --> 00:04:26.500 who are non-native English speakers, especially people who didn't particularly speak English 00:04:26.500 --> 00:04:32.480 super well, but then had to program with for loops and while loops and true and false and 00:04:32.480 --> 00:04:32.900 ints. 00:04:33.000 --> 00:04:38.400 And it's just like, if, you know, maybe if you're with a language that's not that different, 00:04:38.400 --> 00:04:43.960 it's not that hard, but you know, if you're like Chinese or even Portuguese, it's, you know, 00:04:43.960 --> 00:04:45.760 why do you have to program all these foreign words? 00:04:45.760 --> 00:04:49.180 It just seems crazy to me that that's how it has been, right? 00:04:49.180 --> 00:04:49.460 Yeah. 00:04:49.460 --> 00:04:56.320 And also the resources even today with post-Google era or during the Google era, you can, if you 00:04:56.320 --> 00:05:01.200 search for some sort of engineer problem in English or in Portuguese, I can guarantee you're 00:05:01.200 --> 00:05:05.400 going to get a much bigger pool of answers and resources in English. 00:05:05.400 --> 00:05:06.120 So yeah. 00:05:06.120 --> 00:05:06.700 Yeah. 00:05:06.700 --> 00:05:07.000 Yeah. 00:05:07.000 --> 00:05:08.580 That was a little bit of a barrier. 00:05:08.580 --> 00:05:12.380 In fact, what actually happened is I never really progressed and I just went on to other 00:05:12.380 --> 00:05:12.780 things. 00:05:12.780 --> 00:05:13.240 All right. 00:05:13.240 --> 00:05:14.820 Maybe this program and things not for me. 00:05:14.820 --> 00:05:15.260 Yeah. 00:05:15.260 --> 00:05:16.080 I don't know. 00:05:16.120 --> 00:05:18.800 I guess, yeah, I just kind of didn't really get it. 00:05:18.800 --> 00:05:19.660 Never really clicked. 00:05:19.660 --> 00:05:25.500 And then I moved on to other things and ended up pursuing a degree in architecture to talk 00:05:25.500 --> 00:05:28.280 a little bit about it, but it was a little bit of kind of a gap. 00:05:28.280 --> 00:05:33.500 And then I think it was just during my college years, I tried getting into a little bit of 00:05:33.500 --> 00:05:38.620 web development, played around with action script, flash, or I think that's what it's called. 00:05:38.620 --> 00:05:38.800 Right. 00:05:38.800 --> 00:05:41.060 It was like JavaScript, like inside flash. 00:05:41.060 --> 00:05:46.020 And then within architecture, I got a little bit into like visual programming, which 00:05:46.020 --> 00:05:50.340 it's, I guess, a more sophisticated version of, you know, scratch, but similar to what 00:05:50.340 --> 00:05:52.960 3ds Max uses to compose material. 00:05:52.960 --> 00:05:57.100 You know, this idea that you can kind of connect flows into each other visually. 00:05:57.100 --> 00:06:00.520 And that's used pretty extensively in architecture still. 00:06:00.520 --> 00:06:04.500 And that was kind of like my gateway back into programming in some ways. 00:06:04.500 --> 00:06:08.940 And then a couple of years later, I actually practiced architecture for, I think about five 00:06:08.940 --> 00:06:09.560 or six years. 00:06:10.120 --> 00:06:13.700 And at the time I was trying to figure out how I could change careers. 00:06:13.700 --> 00:06:16.140 And I was just, I had this kind of itch. 00:06:16.140 --> 00:06:19.700 I just really wanted to write code and I couldn't figure out how to kind of break it. 00:06:19.700 --> 00:06:22.980 And I ended up doing this process of changing careers. 00:06:22.980 --> 00:06:28.380 I actually took a year off and spent every kind of brief minute I had trying to learn how 00:06:28.380 --> 00:06:28.780 to code. 00:06:28.780 --> 00:06:31.480 Was that on your own or did you go to university? 00:06:31.480 --> 00:06:32.800 Yeah, it was just on my own. 00:06:32.800 --> 00:06:33.140 Yeah. 00:06:33.260 --> 00:06:36.780 Literally like Google, what language should I learn first? 00:06:36.780 --> 00:06:40.200 And this was like 2014, I think 15. 00:06:40.200 --> 00:06:42.300 And I actually picked Ruby first. 00:06:42.300 --> 00:06:44.220 This was Ruby on Rails. 00:06:44.220 --> 00:06:44.700 Yeah. 00:06:44.700 --> 00:06:45.880 Golden years, I guess. 00:06:45.880 --> 00:06:51.500 And I started with Ruby and after a couple of weeks, I just didn't enjoy it that much. 00:06:51.500 --> 00:06:56.160 I was getting confused with some of the basic kind of built-in blocks and I decided to try 00:06:56.160 --> 00:06:59.480 Python and it was just kind of smooth sailing. 00:06:59.480 --> 00:07:02.120 I mean, I guess as smooth as it can be learning by yourself. 00:07:02.120 --> 00:07:02.980 Yeah, yeah, sure. 00:07:03.140 --> 00:07:07.040 But, you know, I felt like even the basic grammar, it was just kind of stick. 00:07:07.040 --> 00:07:11.100 I didn't have to keep going back and say, oh, how do you do a for loop again? 00:07:11.100 --> 00:07:16.440 I found it was always a bit stickier with me, not having to think about where semicolons 00:07:16.440 --> 00:07:17.580 would go, you know. 00:07:17.580 --> 00:07:18.540 Yeah. 00:07:18.540 --> 00:07:21.980 It was just easier and smoother and more enjoyable for me in general. 00:07:21.980 --> 00:07:22.460 For sure. 00:07:22.460 --> 00:07:27.460 Well, I gave VB a lot of positive praise a little bit ago. 00:07:27.460 --> 00:07:33.120 I think also that language is a really interesting example of how to try to be like, 00:07:33.120 --> 00:07:34.960 Python, but not do it well. 00:07:34.960 --> 00:07:40.820 So, with JavaScript or C# or a lot of these languages, you have all these symbols 00:07:40.820 --> 00:07:42.920 on the screen, especially the static languages. 00:07:42.920 --> 00:07:44.660 C#, Java, C++, right? 00:07:44.660 --> 00:07:49.200 Semicolons, angle brackets, you know, parentheses, all sorts of stuff all over the place. 00:07:49.340 --> 00:07:52.800 And then there's languages like Python that say, you know, you don't need that. 00:07:52.800 --> 00:07:53.880 You don't need all these symbols. 00:07:53.880 --> 00:07:55.180 Let's just go and write it. 00:07:55.180 --> 00:07:56.880 And, you know, VB is like that, right? 00:07:56.880 --> 00:07:57.920 There's no semicolons. 00:07:57.920 --> 00:07:58.940 There's not that many symbols. 00:07:58.940 --> 00:08:03.400 But it's like everything is begin for, end for. 00:08:03.560 --> 00:08:05.520 Like, it's just, it's the worst possible. 00:08:05.520 --> 00:08:09.760 It's like they still need the closing curly braces and stuff like that, but they don't want to 00:08:09.760 --> 00:08:10.440 put a curly brace. 00:08:10.440 --> 00:08:13.920 So, they make you type like a huge long word, which is crazy. 00:08:13.920 --> 00:08:19.420 And somehow Python struck that like smooth balance of not having all that stuff, but not giving 00:08:19.420 --> 00:08:20.420 up too much as well. 00:08:20.520 --> 00:08:23.680 Yeah, and also the boilerplate that's required. 00:08:23.680 --> 00:08:26.560 I think I had tried doing some C# as well. 00:08:26.560 --> 00:08:32.500 And when you open up the simplest example you can find, and it's class, void, public. 00:08:32.500 --> 00:08:34.000 And you're like, wait, what is public? 00:08:34.000 --> 00:08:40.220 You haven't gone to understand classes or access and things like that. 00:08:40.220 --> 00:08:41.600 And it's really overwhelming. 00:08:41.600 --> 00:08:46.520 And in Python, it's like, even the class takes a little bit when you're learning, but you can 00:08:46.520 --> 00:08:49.340 just, here's a function that's inside of this object. 00:08:49.340 --> 00:08:52.280 And it's much easier to understand, I think, as a beginner. 00:08:52.280 --> 00:08:53.100 It's kind of ramp up. 00:08:53.100 --> 00:08:59.020 I think it's a big testament that you can be really effective with Python with a super, like 00:08:59.020 --> 00:09:02.720 a very partial understanding of what Python is or how it works, right? 00:09:02.720 --> 00:09:06.660 You can not even be aware that half of the stuff exists and you can still get along just 00:09:06.660 --> 00:09:06.960 fine. 00:09:06.960 --> 00:09:08.360 So, that's pretty awesome. 00:09:08.360 --> 00:09:12.620 So, let's dive into the main topic, buildings, architecture. 00:09:12.620 --> 00:09:18.820 So, I've seen some of the presentations you've given, and it sounds to me like this is an industry 00:09:18.820 --> 00:09:23.120 that's ripe for more programming, automation, empowerment. 00:09:23.120 --> 00:09:28.140 You know, I always say that programming is a superpower for people who are not programmers, 00:09:28.140 --> 00:09:28.540 right? 00:09:28.540 --> 00:09:33.680 If you're an architect versus an architect who programs, the programming architect can do way 00:09:33.680 --> 00:09:34.220 more, right? 00:09:34.220 --> 00:09:38.880 And it sounds to me like this area is kind of open for more of that. 00:09:38.880 --> 00:09:39.480 Yeah, absolutely. 00:09:39.480 --> 00:09:40.500 Give us the background. 00:09:40.500 --> 00:09:44.380 So, it starts with pictures and drawings and blueprints type things, right? 00:09:44.380 --> 00:09:45.380 Yeah, yeah, exactly. 00:09:45.380 --> 00:09:49.820 So, I mean, I guess I should just preface this with the fact that I've been outside the industry 00:09:49.820 --> 00:09:52.180 for about four years now. 00:09:52.180 --> 00:09:54.780 I'm just doing more traditional software development. 00:09:55.020 --> 00:10:00.460 So, I may be a little bit out of the loop on some changes, but in general, the time I spend 00:10:00.460 --> 00:10:05.620 in the industry, what you would see is that it's still a pretty kind of analog industry. 00:10:05.620 --> 00:10:07.220 And there are parts that are improving. 00:10:07.220 --> 00:10:08.940 There are parts that are very advanced. 00:10:08.940 --> 00:10:11.680 I mean, we do still manage to build incredible buildings. 00:10:12.080 --> 00:10:16.980 But there's this weird kind of tension where people are coming up with these design concepts 00:10:16.980 --> 00:10:20.940 and figuring out what the building is going to look like, what spaces you're going to need. 00:10:20.940 --> 00:10:27.800 And then kind of at the other end, you have people standing on their literally cutting material 00:10:27.800 --> 00:10:29.180 and assembling things. 00:10:29.180 --> 00:10:33.360 And then there's this big kind of gap in the middle of how you go from one thing to another. 00:10:33.360 --> 00:10:36.120 And that's kind of the meat of architecture. 00:10:36.860 --> 00:10:40.820 So, my experience was primarily medium and large buildings. 00:10:40.820 --> 00:10:47.360 And it's actually just very labor-intensive labor as far as software, not the hands-on labor 00:10:47.360 --> 00:10:48.160 for architects. 00:10:48.160 --> 00:10:52.880 But there's just a lot of work that goes into designing a big building. 00:10:52.880 --> 00:10:58.500 So, if you have a, I don't know, one of the office buildings I worked on, 150,000 square 00:10:58.500 --> 00:10:59.920 feet, six-story or something. 00:10:59.920 --> 00:11:04.180 And someone had come up with a design, okay, it's going to look like this. 00:11:04.180 --> 00:11:06.620 And it was very conceptual design, kind of massive. 00:11:06.620 --> 00:11:13.900 And then you have to turn into a real project with faucets that work and lights and sprinklers. 00:11:13.900 --> 00:11:14.620 Exactly. 00:11:14.620 --> 00:11:16.540 When you think, well, let me rephrase that. 00:11:16.540 --> 00:11:21.660 When I think of architecture, I think of the overall feel of it, right? 00:11:21.660 --> 00:11:22.940 Is it flowing? 00:11:22.940 --> 00:11:24.500 Does it have sharp edges? 00:11:24.500 --> 00:11:26.340 Does it feel modern, right? 00:11:26.340 --> 00:11:27.460 And so on. 00:11:27.560 --> 00:11:32.060 I have a picture here on the screen for us to look at that's this, you know, sort of 00:11:32.060 --> 00:11:32.980 wood structure. 00:11:32.980 --> 00:11:34.220 It's light and airy. 00:11:34.220 --> 00:11:36.480 And sure, that's architecture. 00:11:36.480 --> 00:11:39.500 But it sounds like, and so are the support beams. 00:11:39.500 --> 00:11:40.940 So is the plumbing. 00:11:40.940 --> 00:11:44.000 So is the light switch and where they go. 00:11:44.000 --> 00:11:49.180 And just way more detail than just the general skeleton or structure. 00:11:49.560 --> 00:11:54.460 Yeah, and like which part of the plywood is going to go in which direction, like on your 00:11:54.460 --> 00:11:57.520 kitchen counter or something, like that level of detail. 00:11:57.520 --> 00:12:01.420 But what you're showing here, it's kind of what you see in school and what you get really 00:12:01.420 --> 00:12:02.460 excited about in school. 00:12:02.460 --> 00:12:06.660 And then when you start working, you realize that there's only a few people that get to 00:12:06.660 --> 00:12:07.680 do this type of work. 00:12:07.680 --> 00:12:13.280 And the majority of the people are just kind of doing coordination and working on lots of 00:12:13.280 --> 00:12:15.940 drawings and coordination between different trades. 00:12:16.560 --> 00:12:20.140 But, you know, of course that does happen, but big chunk of the work is just figuring 00:12:20.140 --> 00:12:22.120 out how to coordinate and assemble drawings. 00:12:22.120 --> 00:12:28.760 So if you imagine a lot of this work is done on kind of traditional desktop applications. 00:12:28.760 --> 00:12:34.520 So if you're familiar with Autodesk, the biggest ones in the US are AutoCAD, Revit. 00:12:34.520 --> 00:12:38.520 Those are more, Revit is very like architecture kind of building focused. 00:12:38.520 --> 00:12:42.320 AutoCAD is more kind of generic, I know, drawing and drafting. 00:12:42.660 --> 00:12:48.960 And then you have other players like MacNeil, they do kind of 3D modeling and it's used all 00:12:48.960 --> 00:12:53.240 the way from small jewelry design and boats all the way to buildings, but more at the conceptual 00:12:53.240 --> 00:12:58.420 stage and Revit is kind of the big dog as far as like building documentation. 00:12:58.420 --> 00:13:01.740 And there's this interesting process because at the same time you are coming up with the 00:13:01.740 --> 00:13:03.300 building at large scale, right? 00:13:03.300 --> 00:13:04.220 Like what do you see there? 00:13:04.220 --> 00:13:05.220 That's kind of mass in. 00:13:05.220 --> 00:13:09.180 You have to zoom in all the way to what is it going to look like? 00:13:09.180 --> 00:13:12.560 Like cove in a bathroom, for example, and you might have to. 00:13:12.800 --> 00:13:14.300 Cut a section through that in detail. 00:13:14.300 --> 00:13:19.100 And there's this weird process we are still in where buildings are designed half in 3D 00:13:19.100 --> 00:13:19.940 and half in 2D. 00:13:19.940 --> 00:13:25.580 So you do some 3D and then you get sort of these views, but then you might zoom in and 00:13:25.580 --> 00:13:26.080 actually. 00:13:26.080 --> 00:13:27.420 Then you do a projection. 00:13:27.420 --> 00:13:29.240 You're like, oh, we need to see just this wall. 00:13:29.240 --> 00:13:29.660 Yeah. 00:13:29.660 --> 00:13:30.180 Yes. 00:13:30.180 --> 00:13:31.460 Or just the floor. 00:13:31.460 --> 00:13:32.120 How it's going to look. 00:13:32.120 --> 00:13:35.420 You can assemble the sketch work needs a drawing of like, what does it look like if I cut 00:13:35.420 --> 00:13:35.800 through here? 00:13:35.800 --> 00:13:40.580 And you literally draw in 2D and you have to assemble these big drawing sets that are references 00:13:40.580 --> 00:13:44.840 that show the 3D and say, okay, if you were to cut through this, here's what you would see. 00:13:44.840 --> 00:13:47.460 And oftentimes they're not even like the same model. 00:13:47.460 --> 00:13:50.600 You're just trying to make this thing look coordinated. 00:13:50.600 --> 00:13:52.040 How often does it go wrong? 00:13:52.040 --> 00:13:53.100 Oh, pretty often. 00:13:53.100 --> 00:13:53.500 Yeah. 00:13:53.500 --> 00:13:54.200 Pretty often. 00:13:54.200 --> 00:13:58.920 So one of the things that's done, usually there's a tool called Navisworks is one of the ones 00:13:58.920 --> 00:14:00.840 that's used that's for clash detection. 00:14:00.840 --> 00:14:05.440 So, cause not only have the architects, but you also have these trades coming together, right? 00:14:05.440 --> 00:14:11.780 So you have separate models for the architecture, like walls and floors and things like that. 00:14:11.780 --> 00:14:17.060 And then you have the structural engineer as a separate model with all the steel or concrete 00:14:17.060 --> 00:14:17.540 structure. 00:14:17.540 --> 00:14:24.500 And maybe the MEP, mechanical, electrical employment folks have a separate model and then they all 00:14:24.500 --> 00:14:25.140 get linked. 00:14:25.140 --> 00:14:30.980 And in the end you may have like a duck going through a life fixture or things kind of through 00:14:30.980 --> 00:14:31.220 all. 00:14:31.220 --> 00:14:35.540 And you actually have to do clash detections and trying to figure out places where the model 00:14:35.540 --> 00:14:37.540 may not have a kind of a valid condition. 00:14:37.540 --> 00:14:37.860 Yeah. 00:14:37.860 --> 00:14:38.820 I can imagine. 00:14:38.820 --> 00:14:45.300 So this Revit app is largely a .NET C# desktop application. 00:14:45.300 --> 00:14:45.700 Is that right? 00:14:45.700 --> 00:14:46.580 Yeah, correct. 00:14:46.580 --> 00:14:47.060 Yeah. 00:14:47.060 --> 00:14:50.420 And so if you want a programmer to work with it, what do you do? 00:14:50.420 --> 00:14:51.780 Do you do that in C#? 00:14:51.780 --> 00:14:52.020 Yeah. 00:14:52.020 --> 00:14:56.660 So Revit's been around for a while and I'm not sure when it started. 00:14:56.660 --> 00:15:01.860 I don't think it was from the very beginning, but at some point they released an API and without 00:15:01.860 --> 00:15:04.980 this API, you can do everything through the UI, right? 00:15:04.980 --> 00:15:08.740 So you can click around and you can basically achieve everything you need to. 00:15:08.740 --> 00:15:13.140 And through the API, you can sort of automate everything that's visible and sometimes a 00:15:13.140 --> 00:15:14.020 little bit more. 00:15:14.020 --> 00:15:20.260 But the idea is that, for example, one of the first tasks I automated in Revit was I was working 00:15:20.260 --> 00:15:24.500 in a really large office buildings and each room would get tagged with like the name of 00:15:24.500 --> 00:15:25.140 the room. 00:15:25.140 --> 00:15:25.140 Right. 00:15:25.140 --> 00:15:27.220 And I would have to literally drag the stag on. 00:15:27.220 --> 00:15:27.220 Right. 00:15:27.220 --> 00:15:31.620 And then sometimes as the building moved, things would get kind of out of place and you 00:15:31.620 --> 00:15:35.540 wanted the tags to be kind of centered nicely and you would literally have to go around and 00:15:35.540 --> 00:15:36.580 move around these tags. 00:15:36.580 --> 00:15:37.860 And one of the first. 00:15:37.860 --> 00:15:39.140 For hundreds of rooms, right? 00:15:39.140 --> 00:15:42.340 That sounds like not a fun, good use of your time. 00:15:42.340 --> 00:15:43.940 Oh, no, definitely not at all. 00:15:43.940 --> 00:15:44.340 Yeah. 00:15:44.340 --> 00:15:48.660 And yeah, one of the first automations I built was this tool that would just go 00:15:48.660 --> 00:15:51.460 automatically room by room and make sure the tag was in the center. 00:15:51.460 --> 00:15:55.300 So I'm just going to figure out the delta between the center of the room and where the tag was and 00:15:55.300 --> 00:15:56.020 like slide it. 00:15:56.020 --> 00:15:56.420 Yeah. 00:15:56.420 --> 00:16:01.300 And I actually had at the company that I worked at a time, I had a system that would measure the 00:16:01.300 --> 00:16:05.860 use of tools and that tool would just get used like hundreds of times a day. 00:16:05.860 --> 00:16:10.740 So imagine every time someone clicked that button, the amount of time you would see these architects 00:16:10.740 --> 00:16:15.140 like going around and moving these packs to get them center and just little things like that. 00:16:15.140 --> 00:16:21.860 Very kind of monotonous, boring, not very impressive automations, but actually a lot of time in the day 00:16:21.860 --> 00:16:22.180 to day. 00:16:22.180 --> 00:16:22.580 Yeah. 00:16:22.580 --> 00:16:27.300 But you can easily apply code to those and really make people's lives better. 00:16:27.300 --> 00:16:32.020 And it sounds like hundreds of people's lives better by, you know, not making them fiddle with 00:16:32.020 --> 00:16:33.220 stupid labels all the time. 00:16:33.220 --> 00:16:33.860 Oh yeah. 00:16:33.860 --> 00:16:34.580 Push a button. 00:16:34.580 --> 00:16:35.060 Right. 00:16:35.060 --> 00:16:40.100 So while these can be programmed in C#, there's a Python angle, right? 00:16:40.100 --> 00:16:40.660 Yeah. 00:16:40.660 --> 00:16:42.660 There's a couple of different ways that Python comes in. 00:16:42.660 --> 00:16:48.660 I think Revit itself does support some sort of Python automation, but it's again, it's a bit 00:16:48.660 --> 00:16:50.820 bulky, difficult to use, difficult to debug. 00:16:50.820 --> 00:16:55.380 So one of the main ways that it's used these days, there's this project and I've actually 00:16:55.380 --> 00:16:59.860 become really good friends with the maintainer, but there's this project called PyRevit. 00:16:59.860 --> 00:17:05.860 And the idea is that when you write Python, you get used to things being sort of Pythonic or more 00:17:05.860 --> 00:17:08.180 elegant and it's easy to do, right? 00:17:08.180 --> 00:17:13.620 So what he was trying to do is how can we have this kind of experience building automations within 00:17:13.620 --> 00:17:14.660 Revit? 00:17:14.660 --> 00:17:21.220 So instead of having to compile my C# add in, how can I kind of just pop up the script, click 00:17:21.220 --> 00:17:24.340 a button and have it run my Python code. 00:17:24.340 --> 00:17:26.660 And that's essentially, you know, what he built. 00:17:26.660 --> 00:17:32.420 So initially it was using only Iron Python because that's the way it integrates within the Revit 00:17:32.420 --> 00:17:32.900 environment. 00:17:32.900 --> 00:17:36.020 Since it's .NET, you would essentially use an Iron Python. 00:17:36.020 --> 00:17:39.540 You could interact directly with Revit through the common language runtime. 00:17:39.540 --> 00:17:39.940 Right. 00:17:39.940 --> 00:17:41.380 So tell us a bit about Iron Python. 00:17:41.380 --> 00:17:43.620 I suspect many people do know about it. 00:17:43.620 --> 00:17:48.580 This came originally out of a project at Microsoft. 00:17:48.580 --> 00:17:50.420 I think, was this Dino Veland? 00:17:50.420 --> 00:17:51.140 I can't remember. 00:17:51.140 --> 00:17:52.260 Yeah, that's what I've heard. 00:17:52.260 --> 00:17:55.860 I've interacted with the maintainers a couple of times over the last few years. 00:17:55.860 --> 00:18:00.260 And the impression I've had is that there was one or two people kind of trying to get this 00:18:00.260 --> 00:18:02.900 going, but it's not very active. 00:18:02.900 --> 00:18:06.020 And I think the three release wasn't too late. 00:18:06.020 --> 00:18:08.580 So it shows there it's still in alpha actually. 00:18:08.580 --> 00:18:11.220 At the time when I was using it, it was still in 2.7. 00:18:11.220 --> 00:18:12.980 It's been stuck there for a long time. 00:18:12.980 --> 00:18:14.260 At least it's making progress. 00:18:14.260 --> 00:18:16.500 I mean, here's a release in 2021 on it. 00:18:16.500 --> 00:18:17.060 So that's good. 00:18:17.060 --> 00:18:17.540 Yeah. 00:18:17.540 --> 00:18:21.940 One of the things I'm not too familiar with it, but I remember hearing from the PyRevit 00:18:21.940 --> 00:18:26.900 maintainer that they actually ended up using this other project called Python.net. 00:18:26.900 --> 00:18:27.140 Yes. 00:18:27.140 --> 00:18:33.060 And Iron Python is essentially a Python interpreter that was written in C#. 00:18:33.060 --> 00:18:35.700 And Python.net does something kind of different. 00:18:35.700 --> 00:18:40.260 It actually allows you to use CPython, but interact with the .NET side. 00:18:40.260 --> 00:18:43.860 And I don't quite remember how he worked, but I know he got it to work and he was able 00:18:43.860 --> 00:18:46.660 to get CPython applications running inside of Revit as well. 00:18:46.660 --> 00:18:47.060 Right. 00:18:47.060 --> 00:18:54.020 So Iron Python is a Python interpreter, but instead of having the interpreter implemented 00:18:54.020 --> 00:19:00.820 in C the way that the one that we're all mostly familiar with is, it's implemented on top of .NET. 00:19:00.820 --> 00:19:03.140 And yeah, that was Dino Vila in that double check. 00:19:03.140 --> 00:19:05.140 So nice job on that, Dino. 00:19:05.140 --> 00:19:11.780 And it's implemented on top of the .NET CLR runtime and it's kind of its own little thing in this thing called the dynamic language runtime, 00:19:11.780 --> 00:19:18.020 which means integration with .NET is super easy because it's already running in .NET. 00:19:18.020 --> 00:19:23.620 It's equivalent to saying integration with C is easy on CPython because it's already effectively running in C, right? 00:19:23.620 --> 00:19:30.980 And I guess that's probably a pretty natural way to go because if you're trying to integrate with a C# .NET library, 00:19:30.980 --> 00:19:34.580 you got to somehow get that thing in and do something with it, right? 00:19:34.580 --> 00:19:34.900 Right. 00:19:34.900 --> 00:19:37.220 So I could see why they would go with Iron Python first. 00:19:37.220 --> 00:19:44.580 But yeah, I've sort of heard that Python.NET is, it seems a little bit more CPython friendly, I guess. 00:19:44.580 --> 00:19:50.500 Yeah, I think one of the issues with the Iron Python project is that it's kind of impossible to maintain. 00:19:50.500 --> 00:19:58.500 Like how do you keep up with all the changes and releases of CPython and like rebuild them from scratch in C#? 00:19:58.500 --> 00:20:04.500 I would imagine it would take a huge amount of time and resources to keep that project like going in the same pace. 00:20:04.500 --> 00:20:12.260 Yeah. So here looking at Python.NET, we've got, it supports 27, but also 35, 36, 37, and 38, which is not 39 and 310. 00:20:12.260 --> 00:20:12.660 Yeah. 00:20:12.660 --> 00:20:15.860 But it sure is better than alpha support for 3.4. 00:20:15.860 --> 00:20:19.860 Yeah. Do you know how it actually, like what it actually does? How does it get to? 00:20:19.860 --> 00:20:27.860 I have no, I have not learned enough about Python.NET to know how it works, but it's, yeah, it looks pretty neat though, doesn't it? 00:20:27.860 --> 00:20:33.780 Yeah. But I think it's just, it's, you're able to operate in CPython, but kind of import common-legged 00:20:33.780 --> 00:20:40.580 during time and talk to your .NET DLLs in the same way you would from Iron Python. So it's pretty interesting. 00:20:40.580 --> 00:20:46.820 Yeah. You get very foreign looking code. Import CLR from system.winds.forms, import form, 00:20:46.820 --> 00:20:50.900 which is something you would expect to see in a .NET project, not in a Python project. 00:20:50.900 --> 00:20:55.300 Yeah. But there's actually, that's one interesting thing that I've seen happen quite a bit because 00:20:55.300 --> 00:21:01.860 people within this industry ended up using Iron Python quite a bit. I know there's a few projects 00:21:01.860 --> 00:21:08.580 out there for building UIs in Python, but I've actually seen quite a few projects with like desktop UIs 00:21:08.580 --> 00:21:12.020 basically built using, you know, .NET because it has... 00:21:12.020 --> 00:21:12.580 Oh, interesting. 00:21:12.580 --> 00:21:15.460 What is it? Windforms? I forgot what the other one was. 00:21:15.460 --> 00:21:21.540 Yeah. Windforms is the one that's like the modern-ish VB. I say modern-ish because I think they kind of 00:21:21.540 --> 00:21:28.180 stopped advancing that in something like 2008, I think is when they stopped advancing it. So it's 00:21:28.180 --> 00:21:34.100 not like super modern, but it's way more modern than VB6 was. So yeah, there's that and there's WPF. 00:21:34.100 --> 00:21:34.980 And then some weird variants. 00:21:34.980 --> 00:21:37.940 Oh yeah. WPF is the more current one, right? 00:21:37.940 --> 00:21:41.700 Yeah. Also way harder to use, but yeah, more modern one. 00:21:41.700 --> 00:21:49.300 This portion of Talk Python To Me is brought to you by Shortcut, formerly known as clubhouse.io. 00:21:49.300 --> 00:21:53.540 Happy with your project management tool? Most tools are either too simple for a growing 00:21:53.540 --> 00:21:58.420 engineering team to manage everything or way too complex for anyone to want to use them without 00:21:58.420 --> 00:22:03.940 constant prodding. Shortcut is different though, because it's worse. Wait, no, I mean, it's better. 00:22:03.940 --> 00:22:07.460 Shortcut is project management built specifically for software teams. 00:22:07.460 --> 00:22:12.420 It's fast, intuitive, flexible, powerful, and many other nice positive adjectives. 00:22:12.420 --> 00:22:17.860 Key features include team-based workflows. Individual teams can use default workflows or 00:22:17.860 --> 00:22:23.460 customize them to match the way they work. Org-wide goals and roadmaps. The work in these workflows 00:22:23.460 --> 00:22:29.380 is automatically tied into larger company goals. It takes one click to move from a roadmap to a team's 00:22:29.380 --> 00:22:34.580 work to individual updates and back. Type version control integration. Whether you use GitHub, 00:22:34.580 --> 00:22:40.260 GitLab, or Bitbucket, clubhouse ties directly into them so you can update progress from the command line. 00:22:40.260 --> 00:22:46.340 Keyboard-friendly interface. The rest of Shortcut is just as friendly as their power bar, allowing you to 00:22:46.340 --> 00:22:50.260 do virtually anything without touching your mouse. Throw that thing in the trash. 00:22:50.260 --> 00:22:56.420 Iteration planning. Set weekly priorities and let Shortcut run the schedule for you with accompanying 00:22:56.420 --> 00:23:02.260 burndown charts and other reporting. Give it a try over at talkpython.fm/shortcut. Again, that's talkpython.fm/shortcut. 00:23:02.260 --> 00:23:10.980 Choose Shortcut because you shouldn't have to project manage your project management. 00:23:10.980 --> 00:23:17.940 So what you're saying is you've seen some people write Python code that then will do stuff like this 00:23:17.940 --> 00:23:21.060 to put that kind of UI on the screen, right? Right. 00:23:21.060 --> 00:23:26.740 Yeah. And even PyRevit itself had quite a few kind of UI components and they were all just using standard 00:23:26.740 --> 00:23:33.220 .NET stuff, but writing in Python. And what's interesting too is in addition to PyRevit, there's 00:23:33.220 --> 00:23:38.660 a few other projects. And one of them I had worked on that's called, it was called Revit Python Wrapper. 00:23:38.660 --> 00:23:44.100 And there's another one called Revitron, which all have kind of similar idea, which is like, 00:23:44.100 --> 00:23:50.660 I want to have the Python experience, but, you know, using this other kind of stack. So the idea 00:23:50.660 --> 00:23:57.700 for Revit Python Wrapper is that the Revit API, it's this very bulky C# API. Yeah. 00:23:57.700 --> 00:23:58.900 It's enormous. There's... 00:23:58.900 --> 00:24:04.180 You can make it do its thing in Python, but you work with the type names and the function 00:24:04.180 --> 00:24:09.140 names and stuff straight out of the .NET world, right? Which is clearly not Pythonic. They're 00:24:09.140 --> 00:24:13.060 very different in the way of doing things. Yeah. So your code doesn't look or feel like Python. And 00:24:13.060 --> 00:24:18.100 then the interfaces and kind of the APIs for the libraries are weird. So like, if I want to just 00:24:18.100 --> 00:24:23.460 query, you know, this model for a wall, I would have to like build this object and this kind of like 00:24:23.460 --> 00:24:29.140 builder pattern. And, you know, it's, it's very strange. Like it doesn't feel like Python. So when I 00:24:29.140 --> 00:24:34.100 started writing that, I would build these little functions that would take the C# code and 00:24:34.100 --> 00:24:39.620 give me like a Python-like column that I could make. And that's what this project came out from, 00:24:39.620 --> 00:24:44.660 was this idea that I wanted to wrap everything that didn't feel Pythonic to make it like feel like I 00:24:44.660 --> 00:24:50.740 was using it. So you wrote your own, like your PyRevit wrapper a little bit that would then make it 00:24:50.740 --> 00:24:55.300 easier, right? And make it feel more natural. And then eventually you just decided... Yeah. So at the 00:24:55.300 --> 00:25:00.100 time I was writing, I was writing Python code and the PyRevit, it was sort of, it was kind of the 00:25:00.100 --> 00:25:04.020 environment. So the idea for PyRevit is you would, you could literally just save this .NET 00:25:04.020 --> 00:25:10.580 file in a folder and put a PNG icon and it would sort of load it up that file and add it to the 00:25:10.580 --> 00:25:15.540 Revit ribbon. So someone could click on it. And when he clicked, it would load your source code and feed 00:25:15.540 --> 00:25:21.620 it into the Python engine. So it would just help you kind of establish this environment and you didn't 00:25:21.620 --> 00:25:28.500 have to compile and add in, restart Revit. And then Revit Python wrapper was that every script that I had, 00:25:28.500 --> 00:25:34.900 I would just import Revit Python wrapper and then just say collector type equals wall and it would 00:25:34.900 --> 00:25:39.380 query for every wall of the model. And I stopped working on this project for a while. Then I recently 00:25:39.380 --> 00:25:44.260 ran into this Revitron, which is a much more kind of sophisticated version, but essentially the same 00:25:44.260 --> 00:25:51.060 idea. People wanted to write a very clean Python, but operate kind of on top of the Revit API without 00:25:51.060 --> 00:25:57.620 having to deal with the non kind of Python look and feel. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. And even has its own 00:25:57.620 --> 00:26:04.820 CLI. Oh yeah. Yeah. I guess it integrates with the PyRevit CLI, right? Yeah. So one of the things that's 00:26:04.820 --> 00:26:11.380 interesting about this high Revit, which if I go further enough back, I'll find it, is that you can use 00:26:11.380 --> 00:26:17.300 Python to build these little toolbar buttons or widgets, right? Yeah. And the way you do it is, 00:26:17.300 --> 00:26:23.940 as you sort of described, there's this super convention of all of these directory, this directory 00:26:23.940 --> 00:26:29.860 structure, right? Like if you put this file there and then the Python file in like some location that can, 00:26:29.860 --> 00:26:36.500 it'll trigger the discovery that'll then create like a, some kind of icon and action in there, right? Maybe 00:26:36.500 --> 00:26:40.660 tell us about that a bit. Yeah. And under the hood, if you were to write this in C#, there would be a 00:26:40.660 --> 00:26:45.940 whole bunch of boilerplate that you would have to add for how those buttons get instantiated and loaded 00:26:45.940 --> 00:26:52.100 into the UI. And one thing that I've sort of witnessed, like seeing PyRevit project grow, I was one of the 00:26:52.100 --> 00:26:59.780 kind of early users, adopters. And it was this huge barrier for people who wanted to automate Revit because 00:26:59.780 --> 00:27:07.220 you had to learn C# and the add-ins were difficult to build. And it was just this big time. 00:27:07.220 --> 00:27:11.460 You probably had to learn interfaces and how to implement them and all that kind of stuff. 00:27:11.460 --> 00:27:16.260 Yeah. And like you had to, you had to go around like the little, you know, the compile settings and 00:27:16.260 --> 00:27:20.660 think around with it to get it to work. And you had to compile for different versions of Revit. And it was 00:27:20.660 --> 00:27:26.260 really difficult, at least for me, maybe it's easier for some people, but with PyRevit, you could literally just 00:27:26.260 --> 00:27:31.460 duplicate this folder and open a new Python file, start messing with it. And every time you click, 00:27:31.460 --> 00:27:35.460 it would rerun. You wouldn't even have to reload anything because you would just read the source 00:27:35.460 --> 00:27:40.100 code and feed it to the RnPython interpreter. So for the first time, I felt like I had this ability to 00:27:40.100 --> 00:27:46.340 iterate quickly and explore and test things out. So it was a totally different experience. 00:27:46.340 --> 00:27:52.020 Yeah, that's great. I'm looking at the code sample here for PyRevit, the create your first command 00:27:52.020 --> 00:27:58.820 example. And I see exactly what you're talking about with this sort of C# abstractions leaking into the 00:27:58.820 --> 00:27:59.220 Python world. 00:27:59.220 --> 00:28:01.220 Yeah, there's definitely a little vision there. 00:28:01.220 --> 00:28:05.220 Yeah, because it says, oh, look how easy it is to build this. You just drop this in this here and you put your 00:28:05.220 --> 00:28:12.580 Python file in the folder that is like your button where it contains your icons. And then you write capital 00:28:12.580 --> 00:28:19.780 db, capital F filtered, capital E element, capital collector. So filtered element collector of 00:28:19.780 --> 00:28:26.660 da da da da, right? It's real similar to what you would expect from that language. That language's idioms 00:28:26.660 --> 00:28:27.780 and not Python's idioms. 00:28:27.780 --> 00:28:28.660 Yeah. 00:28:28.660 --> 00:28:32.740 In the Revit Python wrapper, I started wrapping these classes. So for example, the filtered 00:28:32.740 --> 00:28:38.180 element collector, I mean, that's a pretty long that I wouldn't give it to a Python class usually. So 00:28:38.180 --> 00:28:43.540 I just called it the collector and I created a class that wrapped the filtered element collector. So 00:28:43.540 --> 00:28:49.300 instead of writing something like this, you would say collector type equals wall. And you could write, 00:28:49.300 --> 00:28:54.740 you know, wall as an enum and you would sort of basically output this code that you're seeing there. 00:28:54.740 --> 00:28:58.740 But the problem is you can't really avoid it because even though you wrapped collector, 00:28:58.740 --> 00:29:04.500 there are like 8,000 other like C# classes that I'm not going to wrap them individually. 00:29:04.500 --> 00:29:08.260 So like eventually just kind of leaks. You just can't, you can't do the whole thing. 00:29:08.260 --> 00:29:13.140 Yeah. Somewhere there's some function you can't get in front of and it returns one of these things. 00:29:13.140 --> 00:29:15.300 And then, then there it is. Right. Exactly. 00:29:15.300 --> 00:29:20.260 I tried at some point, I had these wrappers that would take the return and wrap those into some sort 00:29:20.260 --> 00:29:24.500 of generic wrapper. And you would get so complicated and people that they couldn't 00:29:24.500 --> 00:29:28.660 figure out what it was doing. So that's why that Revit Python project ended up 00:29:28.660 --> 00:29:32.500 just kind of being abandoned at some point. And I wasn't as involved with it anymore. 00:29:32.500 --> 00:29:36.740 So I just kind of sat there, but that was the idea. If you look at an example for that one, 00:29:36.740 --> 00:29:39.780 you see that it looks a lot more, more Python-like. 00:29:39.780 --> 00:29:43.140 Yeah, absolutely. I'm clearly seeing stuff that looks more like Python. 00:29:43.140 --> 00:29:47.860 And that's fantastic. Right. Like, you know, variable names. Another thing that you spoke about that, 00:29:47.860 --> 00:29:53.780 I don't even know what you were doing to solve this, but you said that you had to somehow adapt to things like 00:29:53.780 --> 00:30:00.180 out parameters and ref parameters, which is a certain way to have a, instead of doing pass by value, 00:30:00.180 --> 00:30:05.540 so you can actually modify the reference itself and the parameter. It's a little bit like 00:30:05.540 --> 00:30:11.380 passing a pointer to a pointer in C or something like that, where you can change the pointer itself 00:30:11.380 --> 00:30:16.500 inside the function. What did they do in Python to deal with that? That seems, I don't know how to 00:30:16.500 --> 00:30:17.060 do that in Python. 00:30:17.060 --> 00:30:22.180 Iron Python has a special, I don't remember because it's been a while, but Iron Python has a special construct. 00:30:22.180 --> 00:30:25.620 Oh, okay. So in Iron Python, there's like an out or something. Okay. 00:30:25.620 --> 00:30:32.180 Yeah. So you import some special Iron Python object, and that becomes your reference and pass that. 00:30:32.180 --> 00:30:38.420 So, you know, Iron Python is this, is this weird kind of ways of handling those differences. What's 00:30:38.420 --> 00:30:42.820 difficult is that it's a very niche thing. So when you run into a problem with, with those, 00:30:42.820 --> 00:30:47.860 there's not a whole lot of people like trying to solve this. So it was always a little bit difficult 00:30:47.860 --> 00:30:48.260 too. 00:30:48.260 --> 00:30:54.740 I've had that sort of scenario before. And it's, it's not very often fun. And I remember 00:30:54.740 --> 00:30:59.060 specifically one time there was something I was trying to do with this code and it just 00:30:59.060 --> 00:31:06.180 was not responding in any way that I expected. And I was, I was at my wits and I'm like, I'm just going 00:31:06.180 --> 00:31:10.980 to Google this. I'm just going to just find whatever I can. And the only answer I could find was a blog 00:31:10.980 --> 00:31:15.060 post I wrote about it six months ago. I'm like, well, that's it. We're done. There's, 00:31:15.060 --> 00:31:19.860 there's no hope for me now. Cause I'm sure I've tried. I can't do it. And I, the only thing I can 00:31:19.860 --> 00:31:23.540 find is some dumb blog posts that didn't really answer the question I wrote about it. So here we go. 00:31:23.540 --> 00:31:29.220 On Iron Python, a couple of times I had issues. My only resource was to go into the GitHub project 00:31:29.220 --> 00:31:34.660 and actually post an issue. And I said, there's a stack over full question, no responses. I'm 00:31:34.660 --> 00:31:36.100 completely at lost here. 00:31:36.100 --> 00:31:40.900 Yeah. Well, that's such one of those, such a big challenge of using one of the 00:31:40.900 --> 00:31:46.820 these sort of niche interpreters or runtimes, because when you need help, there's no one to 00:31:46.820 --> 00:31:51.620 help you. And if it comes down to some little weird internal behavior, right, that behavior might be 00:31:51.620 --> 00:31:54.980 different. And just because people, they'll tell you, well, that's how it works in CPython. You're 00:31:54.980 --> 00:31:58.820 like, well, I know, but that's not how it works for me right now. Right. Can you help me? Like, 00:31:58.820 --> 00:32:01.220 no, I don't know anything about that. Right. It's, it's a challenge. 00:32:01.220 --> 00:32:06.420 Yeah. And if you're trying to post a reproducible example in Stack Overflow, and you have to have 00:32:06.420 --> 00:32:10.660 Revit open, for example, to execute this, if you're trying to deal with some like, 00:32:10.820 --> 00:32:14.260 lots of iron Python within this environment, it's really difficult. 00:32:14.260 --> 00:32:17.700 Yeah. Oh my gosh. I can see why you would want to get away from it. I'm guessing that 00:32:17.700 --> 00:32:22.500 Python.net makes this easier. Maybe it's still the same. I'm not entirely sure. I would like to learn 00:32:22.500 --> 00:32:23.780 more about that one, but yeah. 00:32:23.780 --> 00:32:24.420 Same here. 00:32:24.420 --> 00:32:27.700 Yeah. Let's see. On the live stream, I just want to say, hey, 00:32:27.700 --> 00:32:33.060 Bhavani, that finally could catch up on the live stream here. Big fan of Python. And just, 00:32:33.060 --> 00:32:37.700 you know, people listening, if you get the chance to be grateful to drop by the live stream we do on 00:32:37.700 --> 00:32:42.420 YouTube, just go to talk python.fm/youtube. YouTube can be part of it. It's always fun to get 00:32:42.420 --> 00:32:47.860 input from everyone out there. All right. Give us some examples of the types of things that you were 00:32:47.860 --> 00:32:52.980 able to do with Python and automating Revit. There's a talk, I'll go ahead and link to the talk that you 00:32:52.980 --> 00:33:00.820 gave at a meetup in San Francisco at Pine Silla. I'm saying that correctly. Yeah. And you talked about, 00:33:00.820 --> 00:33:05.460 there's a lot of nice graphics and you talked a lot about what you've done at various projects and stuff. 00:33:05.460 --> 00:33:09.540 Give us some concrete examples. Like it's all great in practice to say you could automate stuff, 00:33:09.540 --> 00:33:10.660 but like, what did you actually do? 00:33:10.660 --> 00:33:16.020 Yeah. So there was a lot of those kind of very boring, automating, moving tags type of thing. 00:33:16.740 --> 00:33:21.220 Some of the other bigger projects I worked on at the time I was working at WeWork. 00:33:21.220 --> 00:33:23.780 This is the fast growth time at WeWork as well, right? 00:33:23.780 --> 00:33:29.300 Yeah, that's right. So when I joined WeWork, it was a relatively small team. I think the 00:33:29.300 --> 00:33:34.660 built-in information, you know, modeling team, which is the team that I had joined, had just a handful, 00:33:34.660 --> 00:33:41.220 like four, five people. And I think the company as a whole was maybe 800. And when I left four years 00:33:41.220 --> 00:33:46.340 later, they were at around 10,000 employees. Oh my gosh. And then the building department, 00:33:46.340 --> 00:33:51.540 or the design building and design department initially was open in one or two buildings a 00:33:51.540 --> 00:33:58.900 month. And by the time I left, they were open in like 25 or 30. So all other kind of WeWork drama 00:33:58.900 --> 00:34:03.700 side of what happened within the company, within the kind of design and architecture department, 00:34:03.700 --> 00:34:07.540 it was just, it was really interesting to see. Yeah. Because traditionally, 00:34:07.540 --> 00:34:11.940 companies build in buildings, they're doing that as a service. So they're an architecture office 00:34:11.940 --> 00:34:16.580 that you hire. And WeWork was one of those examples where you had this kind of vertical integration. 00:34:16.580 --> 00:34:21.460 They were the owners, they were the operators, they were the designers, they were the builders, 00:34:21.460 --> 00:34:28.180 they even bought, they acquired a general contractor. So you had this huge opportunity to optimize and to 00:34:28.180 --> 00:34:33.300 integrate. So some of the things that we did, like one of the projects I worked there was related to 00:34:33.860 --> 00:34:39.940 integrating data from the earlier design process into everything that would happen kind of downstream. 00:34:39.940 --> 00:34:44.420 So for example, as designers were working on buildings and trying to get them through the 00:34:44.420 --> 00:34:50.660 approval process, as soon as this project was sort of starting to materialize, we wanted to get those 00:34:50.660 --> 00:34:57.780 spaces fed into the kind of sales pipeline. So we would actually build Revit integrations that would extract 00:34:57.780 --> 00:35:03.300 data from these models and feed them to other parts of the company. So one of them was related to 00:35:03.300 --> 00:35:04.020 Oh, interesting. 00:35:04.020 --> 00:35:08.500 Yeah. To figuring out how many offices are going to be in this building, how big are they, 00:35:08.500 --> 00:35:12.980 how many desks are in each one, and essentially integrate that, for example, with Salesforce, 00:35:12.980 --> 00:35:20.420 so that the sales team could start selling them. We did things with supply chain as well. So we have 00:35:20.420 --> 00:35:26.980 logistics company that would be trying to orchestrate shipment of, for example, these chairs and couches 00:35:26.980 --> 00:35:31.540 that you see in the photo, they would need to be placed at warehouses and then delivered to buildings 00:35:31.540 --> 00:35:36.900 before opening. And they turned these buildings around really quickly. So it was really important 00:35:36.900 --> 00:35:42.580 that they had kind of insight. So as people were designing these buildings, we could actually start 00:35:42.580 --> 00:35:48.260 quantifying what was being used, what was going to be assigned, and then get the data sort of out of the 00:35:48.260 --> 00:35:54.100 model, which is not very, it's essentially a file that sits there. And we would use Python, for example, 00:35:54.100 --> 00:35:59.060 to quantify these things, pull the data out, and then send them on to other platforms. So it's a 00:35:59.060 --> 00:36:00.420 little bit of kind of data wrangling. 00:36:00.420 --> 00:36:06.340 Yeah. It's like JIT interior design, just in time, right? Like, we're going to need this here by 00:36:06.340 --> 00:36:11.140 Tuesday. So we're going to automate it. So one of the things you have to do is you have to figure out 00:36:11.140 --> 00:36:15.540 how, you know, maybe describe for, I'm sure not everyone's been inside of what we work before. Give 00:36:15.540 --> 00:36:19.620 us a quick sense of like, what is the inside of what we work look like? Or any, a lot of these co-working 00:36:19.620 --> 00:36:22.020 spaces, but we work is probably one of the bigger ones. 00:36:22.020 --> 00:36:29.220 Yeah. So we work, it would take empty floor spaces and they would use sort of storefronts, 00:36:29.220 --> 00:36:35.220 kind of glass their storefronts and subdivide them into small offices, as small as a single desk or 00:36:35.220 --> 00:36:41.940 kind of cuticle. And they could be as big as a 15 or 20 person office. And they were really efficient 00:36:41.940 --> 00:36:46.740 in how they kind of packed these desks. And they would do it in a way that it was very efficient for them. 00:36:46.740 --> 00:36:50.740 They would pack these offices really close, but then they would create these really nice, 00:36:50.740 --> 00:36:57.140 beautiful shared common spaces. So when you would walk into WeWork, you would often see these very 00:36:57.140 --> 00:37:03.220 kind of slick hip spaces, well-designed music playing. So it was this kind of nice experience, 00:37:03.220 --> 00:37:09.940 this cool kitchen and coffee area. And I think they were really good at it. I got to work out of WeWork 00:37:09.940 --> 00:37:15.620 for many years and it was a really nice change for my previous kind of office environments. And even as a 00:37:15.620 --> 00:37:18.100 a product, I actually really enjoyed what they were building. 00:37:18.100 --> 00:37:22.660 Nice. Yeah. So one of the things you spoke about is setting up some automation to figure out, well, 00:37:22.660 --> 00:37:28.100 how should we lay out these tables, either this open space, like just hangout area tables or 00:37:28.100 --> 00:37:34.340 like the co-working desks, or there's some parts that have like glass, clear glass separators. So you 00:37:34.340 --> 00:37:38.340 have some sort of quiet, but it's still, they've all got to be laid out, right? And you can say, 00:37:38.340 --> 00:37:42.740 okay, if we adjust the walls like this or do that, then here's the arrangement, right? 00:37:42.740 --> 00:37:47.380 Yeah. A couple of my coworkers were trying to figure out how to automate this so that 00:37:47.380 --> 00:37:52.580 as architects are taking this kind of big floor plate and they're slicing it, they're generally 00:37:52.580 --> 00:37:56.660 trying to figure out how the circulation is going to work. And then we build these kind of long blocks, 00:37:56.660 --> 00:38:00.660 and then you're going to start subdividing them to offices. And then as you start subdividing them, 00:38:00.660 --> 00:38:04.500 then you've got to figure out how the desks are going to work. And then you have columns. So actually 00:38:04.500 --> 00:38:11.220 like laying them out and getting kind of an efficient algorithm can be kind of time consuming. So some folks from 00:38:11.220 --> 00:38:17.460 the data and research team, they were writing algorithms. And the first one that I saw was actually written in Python. 00:38:17.460 --> 00:38:23.460 And I think it was served like using a Flask API, but the idea is that you could pass it a polygon 00:38:23.460 --> 00:38:28.900 and you would apply these rules about how you can lay out desks within this kind of polygon. 00:38:28.900 --> 00:38:35.220 And you would say, the door is here, do your best to lay out desks. And you would, you would try to do that. It was 00:38:35.220 --> 00:38:40.100 fairly straightforward math. It wasn't artificial intelligence or some sort of machine learning. It 00:38:40.100 --> 00:38:44.020 was actually pretty straightforward kind of brute force, which I found laying these out along the 00:38:44.020 --> 00:38:48.340 edges. But they were really interesting. They did some really interesting research on that. 00:38:48.340 --> 00:38:53.060 Yeah. Cool. A lot of nice examples of what you can do with a little bit of Python, a little bit of 00:38:53.060 --> 00:38:58.820 automation, even if you've got to somehow mash that together with a .NET or, you know, I guess if it 00:38:58.820 --> 00:39:02.340 was a Java API, you could use Jython or some other thing like that, right? 00:39:02.340 --> 00:39:07.540 Yeah. And this one specifically, the way we got around it is by actually building it as an API and 00:39:07.540 --> 00:39:13.780 have a C# add in called API to do the calculation. So that way we're going to have to deal with it. 00:39:13.780 --> 00:39:15.620 Nice. Yeah, that's perfect. 00:39:15.620 --> 00:39:23.860 This portion of Talk Python To Me is sponsored by Linode. Cut your cloud bills in half with Linode's 00:39:23.860 --> 00:39:29.860 Linux virtual machines. 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You can choose shared or dedicated compute instances, 00:40:09.780 --> 00:40:16.740 or you can use your $100 in credit on S3 compatible object storage, managed Kubernetes clusters, and more. 00:40:16.740 --> 00:40:22.820 If it runs on Linux, it runs on Linode. Visit talkpython.fm and click the create free account button 00:40:22.820 --> 00:40:28.100 to get started. You can also find the link right in your podcast player show notes. Thank you to Linode for 00:40:28.100 --> 00:40:35.780 supporting Talk Python. Let's talk about this other thing that you've been working on, 00:40:35.780 --> 00:40:41.780 AEC.works, which is architectural engineering and construction works. And tell us a bit about this 00:40:41.780 --> 00:40:47.220 project. This is a website you built for raising the visibility of cool companies in the space. 00:40:47.220 --> 00:40:55.620 Yeah. This actually started when I was an engineer at WeWork and I was seeing a lot of really interesting 00:40:55.620 --> 00:41:04.180 companies start to show up and try to build either software products or try to take a technology and 00:41:04.180 --> 00:41:10.500 build new companies within AEC that were trying to use technology in some interesting way. And I started 00:41:10.500 --> 00:41:16.100 keeping a list of it, Google sheet or your table form or something. And this list started growing. 00:41:16.100 --> 00:41:21.140 And so it started with four and five and eventually I had 20 or 30 of them. And I would often share them 00:41:21.140 --> 00:41:26.900 in different kind of community forums. And then I thought it would be interesting if I could somehow make 00:41:26.900 --> 00:41:33.380 that available and maybe even so that people could contribute and edit them. So basically build this out. 00:41:33.380 --> 00:41:40.580 It's a Django, a traditional, somewhat traditional Django app, except that on the front end, instead of 00:41:40.580 --> 00:41:47.860 using templates, I just use Vue.js. So it's a front end, back end separation type project. And yeah, 00:41:47.860 --> 00:41:52.340 the idea is that you can create these entries that represent these different companies or products. 00:41:52.340 --> 00:41:56.500 And then it just, you know, it's kind of displays them. It's pretty simple, nothing really crazy. 00:41:56.500 --> 00:42:01.140 Nice. Yeah. I will highlight a couple just to give people a sense, but there's a way to come here and say, 00:42:01.140 --> 00:42:05.220 suggest a company that's doing like innovative work here, right? So if people are out there like, 00:42:05.220 --> 00:42:07.300 why is my company out here? Well, there's a button, right? 00:42:07.300 --> 00:42:08.020 Yeah, exactly. 00:42:08.020 --> 00:42:13.940 All right. So I just briefly, let's talk about two of them that are maybe noteworthy. 00:42:13.940 --> 00:42:20.500 This one right at the top of the moment that says it's called Speckle. And let's see, it says, 00:42:20.500 --> 00:42:25.220 engineers, designers, and hackers, and the entire organization rely on us for interoperability 00:42:25.220 --> 00:42:30.980 automation. So it's like source control collaboration, versioning notification for 00:42:30.980 --> 00:42:33.380 architectural construction folks. 00:42:33.380 --> 00:42:40.820 Yeah. It's a little bit like AC architecture, geoconstruction data wrangling on steroids, right? 00:42:40.820 --> 00:42:45.140 So when you're in, and if you're working with software, you can pretty much always just like 00:42:45.140 --> 00:42:50.420 make a JSON and pass it around. Right. And you can, as long as you can get, you know, at least some basic 00:42:50.420 --> 00:42:56.020 data types. Now, if you have to pass around a wall, it's much more difficult than just passing around a 00:42:56.020 --> 00:43:02.500 string. And what type of wall is it? Where is it located? How big it is? It's complicated. So you have 00:43:02.500 --> 00:43:06.260 all these different desktop applications. And I've highlighted some that are used primarily within 00:43:06.260 --> 00:43:11.060 architecture, like Revit, for example. But there's all these other applications for other disciplines 00:43:11.060 --> 00:43:13.860 within the construction, you know, engineering industry. 00:43:13.860 --> 00:43:19.860 Right. Some of the ones they highlight are like Unity, Civil, 3D, E-Tabs, Blender, Unreal, 00:43:19.860 --> 00:43:21.220 that kind of stuff. Yeah. 00:43:21.220 --> 00:43:21.220 Yeah. 00:43:21.220 --> 00:43:22.180 There's Revit, yeah. 00:43:22.180 --> 00:43:28.020 So yeah, the first time Speckle came around, I believe it was like an academic project came out of 00:43:28.020 --> 00:43:32.980 Europe. And what they would do is they would build, like, for example, you know, an add-in for one of 00:43:32.980 --> 00:43:39.140 these platforms. And they would output some sort of serialization of these objects. And then they would 00:43:39.140 --> 00:43:44.980 build an add-in for another of these, you know, desktop apps that could read that JSON object. 00:43:44.980 --> 00:43:50.020 And DC realized it back into this architectural or, you know, engineer whatever structural beam or 00:43:50.020 --> 00:43:54.500 something. So it was about building all these connectors and would plug into these environments 00:43:54.500 --> 00:43:58.260 that weren't very easy to interrupt data in and out. Right. 00:43:58.260 --> 00:44:03.140 And on top of it, you would have a web platform. I think they call it like streams or something. 00:44:03.140 --> 00:44:08.020 And that way you could take data from one thing and plug it into another, see them all online 00:44:08.020 --> 00:44:12.340 together and share them, for example. So there's some, you know, really interesting ideas about 00:44:12.340 --> 00:44:17.380 collaborating, tracking them. And that's only possible because you take them out of these desktop 00:44:17.380 --> 00:44:23.220 apps, because a lot of them are not really built for this type of collaboration or this type of data 00:44:23.220 --> 00:44:26.820 sharing. Yeah. That's a really interesting idea. Like these things do not support 00:44:26.820 --> 00:44:31.780 any sort of interoperability, but if we can just get stuff in and out of any one of them, 00:44:31.780 --> 00:44:36.340 we could be that middle ground. Right. Yeah. So I don't know a ton about this. I really basically 00:44:36.340 --> 00:44:41.300 just skim the website and watch their explainer video, but it seems like some pretty cool open 00:44:41.300 --> 00:44:44.740 source stuff for people in this space. So they could check that out. Right. 00:44:44.740 --> 00:44:48.980 Yeah. And what I think what it's exciting about them is that they're actually open source too. So 00:44:48.980 --> 00:44:55.780 a lot of software in AC is they're big companies and they're paid and there's not a lot of example of 00:44:55.780 --> 00:45:02.340 successful open source companies essentially. They've actually been able to become a real company with 00:45:02.340 --> 00:45:06.900 employees and raise money and they're open source. So it's really interesting to see them trying to 00:45:06.900 --> 00:45:10.980 build a successful open source model within the industry. Yeah, absolutely. 00:45:10.980 --> 00:45:18.340 Prad Vaughan out in the live stream says two double high fives for Django for your app at 00:45:18.340 --> 00:45:23.860 AEC.works. All right. So that's Speckle, which is cool. And then also Ladybug, Ladybug tools. 00:45:23.860 --> 00:45:28.340 Yeah. Ladybug is incredible too. Ladybug's been around for a while. I don't know how long, 00:45:28.340 --> 00:45:33.620 but it was actually one of my first experiences, one of the first times I got exposed to open source 00:45:33.620 --> 00:45:39.780 within AC industry as well. But it's essentially, it started, it was a bunch of Python tools that would help you 00:45:40.340 --> 00:45:46.260 do kind of environmental analysis and they would basically use like weather data and some 00:45:46.260 --> 00:45:51.620 existing products. I forgot that it's been a while since I used this, but they would essentially wrap 00:45:51.620 --> 00:45:58.820 around these heavier duty programs that could actually do like daylight simulation or like solar analysis. 00:45:58.820 --> 00:46:04.740 But they would, they would build an interface in Python that you could use within, or Revit wasn't too much 00:46:04.740 --> 00:46:09.940 later, but right now when some of these other AC applications and the outcome within was that you 00:46:09.940 --> 00:46:15.300 would basically would allow any kind of architect, you know, students to essentially take any type of 00:46:15.300 --> 00:46:20.020 building that they were designing and actually run and see what does this building look like throughout 00:46:20.020 --> 00:46:25.940 the year? What does sun hit or what does light look like inside and actually render these analytical 00:46:25.940 --> 00:46:31.140 kind of drawings from it? So it was really interesting. It made all of that kind of accessible to a lot of 00:46:31.140 --> 00:46:35.700 people that wouldn't have been able to otherwise. And I think it was entirely written in Python for a long time. 00:46:35.700 --> 00:46:41.060 Yeah. It has a cross platform, Ladybug tools. It's written in Python, which can be run almost anywhere 00:46:41.060 --> 00:46:47.220 and plugged into any geometry engine, which is great. And then it talks about having some visual aspects of 00:46:47.220 --> 00:46:54.100 harnessing the capabilities of CAD to produce a variety of interactive 3D graphics, which producing cool interactive graphics in 00:46:54.100 --> 00:46:56.820 Python is always fun. But yeah, this one's also free and open source. 00:46:56.820 --> 00:47:01.860 Yep. That's right. I think they've received some grants from the public of energy or something like 00:47:01.860 --> 00:47:03.780 that. They're pretty well supported. 00:47:03.780 --> 00:47:09.540 Yeah. And it's 99.8% Python. That's still a lot of Python and 0.2% other. 00:47:09.540 --> 00:47:10.580 It's probably marked down. 00:47:10.580 --> 00:47:15.620 It's probably. I'm guessing it's the one shell script and the requirements.txt here. 00:47:15.620 --> 00:47:16.580 Yeah, that's right. 00:47:16.580 --> 00:47:22.100 Awesome. All right. So all that stuff is super neat. The work that you're doing here to shine a light on, 00:47:22.100 --> 00:47:26.820 the different ways we can automate stuff. In architecture, we've got Revit and then the 00:47:26.820 --> 00:47:35.220 PyRevit and the Python Revit wrapper and then Revtron, you said. And then also these open source 00:47:35.220 --> 00:47:40.020 like connectors and interoperability platforms are all super neat. I do want to talk to you about 00:47:40.020 --> 00:47:44.740 one other thing that doesn't have a super clear connection, but it's also, it sounds like it came 00:47:44.740 --> 00:47:48.340 out of your time at WeWork, this stuff you did with Airtable. Is that right? 00:47:48.340 --> 00:47:49.460 Yeah. Yeah, that's right. 00:47:49.460 --> 00:47:54.500 Yeah. So Airtable is something that I've seen and I've had people tell me that, oh, you definitely have 00:47:54.500 --> 00:48:00.420 to work with Airtable. It's amazing. It's like Sheets or Excel, but way nicer or things like that. 00:48:00.420 --> 00:48:04.820 Tell us, you know, a couple people out there, Airtable is this commercial product, right? Tell us about 00:48:04.820 --> 00:48:08.020 this and then we'll get to some Python side of things in a moment. 00:48:08.020 --> 00:48:13.620 Yeah. I'm a huge fan of Airtable. Pretty much since the first time I sort of run into it, 00:48:13.620 --> 00:48:19.540 I've been an user and I use it for everything personal projects work, but I define it as this 00:48:19.540 --> 00:48:25.940 kind of Google Sheets meet relational database. And I think there are other products like it, 00:48:25.940 --> 00:48:28.980 but I find Airtable just really kind of a joy to use. 00:48:28.980 --> 00:48:34.260 Yeah. I also feel like there's a Trello Kanban board aspect of it as well, right? 00:48:34.260 --> 00:48:37.860 Yeah. They've been adding, you know, quite a few kind of like views 00:48:37.860 --> 00:48:42.340 and tooling on top of the underlying data. So there's some interesting things you can do. 00:48:42.340 --> 00:48:49.780 It's not as sort of pure of a kind of tracker as Trello is, but you can basically build a Trello-like 00:48:49.780 --> 00:48:56.020 interface and there's a Kanban mode. So you can, whatever your roles are, if you have certain fields. 00:48:56.020 --> 00:49:01.140 So for example, you could maybe have a table with like apartments you're enlisted, for example, and maybe 00:49:01.140 --> 00:49:07.540 you have a column that is the status, whether you've visited them or not. And in Google Sheet, you would maybe 00:49:07.540 --> 00:49:12.740 type it or do like a data validation. In Airtable, you can actually see this is a field that links to 00:49:12.740 --> 00:49:19.140 this other table and you have the options that I want. And you can kind of create truly kind of relational 00:49:19.140 --> 00:49:24.100 data and have these views be linked to each other and in some really interesting ways. 00:49:24.100 --> 00:49:30.340 Yeah. Cool. Yeah. So it's, it's a little bit like spreadsheet meets relational database 00:49:30.340 --> 00:49:34.340 that has relationships rather than just random stuff you type in Excel, right? 00:49:34.340 --> 00:49:39.540 Yeah, that's right. Cool. All right. So that's Airtable. The Python side of things is you created 00:49:39.540 --> 00:49:45.700 this thing called a PI Airtable, which is a Python client for the Airtable API, right? Tell people about 00:49:45.700 --> 00:49:51.460 this. The initial version of this was through my time at WeWork as well, but we had all these Airtables 00:49:51.460 --> 00:49:56.820 that would store, I think one of them was like a furniture database. So everywhere was a piece of 00:49:56.820 --> 00:50:02.820 furniture and you had all this detail about these objects, maybe some data. And now you were to use 00:50:02.820 --> 00:50:08.180 that in other places or you wanted to feed additional data in that, in that table. So Airtable 00:50:08.180 --> 00:50:14.020 expose an API, but API, it's somewhat simple and minimal, but you know, it works as effective. 00:50:14.020 --> 00:50:21.380 So this was originally called Airtable Python Wrapper and was recently renamed to PI Airtable, but it's just 00:50:21.380 --> 00:50:29.300 a kind of a lightweight Python client around. It just, it adds a lot of the kind of nuances about the API 00:50:29.300 --> 00:50:34.820 itself, some of the data types and just kind of a high level interface. So then you can just kind of 00:50:34.820 --> 00:50:39.540 import it and you don't have to go spend too much time in the documentation, figuring out what all 00:50:39.540 --> 00:50:44.500 the HTTP requests are. And it just wraps them up and handles a lot of the, a lot of the things and add 00:50:44.500 --> 00:50:49.860 some, you know, nice high level abstractions to make it really easy to use. I've been working on this 00:50:49.860 --> 00:50:54.900 project for probably maybe three years now. And it was really interesting because in the beginning it was 00:50:54.900 --> 00:51:00.260 just me and I thought it was useful to have this and I just kind of put it out there. And it was really 00:51:00.260 --> 00:51:06.980 fun to see like people coming into the repo and actually asking questions or opening bug tickets. 00:51:06.980 --> 00:51:13.300 And in some cases, like I've had people just do lots of contributions. Like this one, this one person 00:51:13.300 --> 00:51:18.740 came out of nowhere, would they, and just like rewrote a test suite for it. I had these, the initial 00:51:18.740 --> 00:51:24.420 test suite, I guess I didn't know any better, would actually make calls to the API. And it was hard because 00:51:24.420 --> 00:51:30.100 the state wasn't predictable. Tests were a bit slow. So I guess when I did that, I didn't know you should 00:51:30.100 --> 00:51:35.300 sort of mock your requests and run your tests that way. And they literally came and like rewrote all 00:51:35.300 --> 00:51:41.300 my test suites. And so it was really fun. And it's been kind of one of the longer running open source 00:51:41.300 --> 00:51:46.180 projects that I've had. And over time I've just gotten better at kind of maintaining and added features. 00:51:46.180 --> 00:51:52.980 And then more recently, I just kind of rebranded Aspire table, build new documentation. And it's been 00:51:52.980 --> 00:51:58.820 really fun to see the project grow and it's got a decent user base. So I often see people coming up in 00:51:58.820 --> 00:52:02.980 there and I searched GitHub every once in a while and I see it used in a lot of different places. 00:52:02.980 --> 00:52:04.020 So it's really cool to see. 00:52:04.020 --> 00:52:10.100 Yeah, that's fantastic. So you said it has 200,000 downloads a month and it's listed as the 00:52:10.100 --> 00:52:14.580 official Python air table library, right? And the air table docs. 00:52:14.580 --> 00:52:22.340 Yeah. I assume those 200,000, a lot of them are CI. I don't know how many are actual direct installs, 00:52:22.340 --> 00:52:26.340 but you know, it does get used. Yeah. And then the air table documentation. 00:52:26.340 --> 00:52:29.460 That's not nothing, right? So that's a lot, right? Even if it's a quarter, 00:52:29.460 --> 00:52:29.940 Yeah. Yeah. 00:52:29.940 --> 00:52:31.860 That's still a ton of people using the library. 00:52:31.860 --> 00:52:35.700 Yeah. It's pretty exciting. And then recently, I think it was about a month ago or so, 00:52:35.700 --> 00:52:41.140 they added to the official documentation as the community driven kind of Python client. And 00:52:41.140 --> 00:52:46.020 they didn't have any others listed before that. So I think that's bringing more people. 00:52:46.020 --> 00:52:49.620 Nice. And so you said it also has some ORM capabilities. 00:52:49.620 --> 00:52:54.420 Yeah. So this was really fun. I would always use this library or whatever I needed to work with 00:52:54.420 --> 00:53:00.580 their table, but I would oftentimes want to build classes for the models that I had. I was always, 00:53:00.580 --> 00:53:05.780 I love using Django and these different types of ORMs. I think it's a really fun way of kind of working 00:53:05.780 --> 00:53:12.260 with persistence. And I wanted to do something like that with air table. So I, in this recent release, 00:53:12.260 --> 00:53:18.580 I basically kind of tried to build my little ORM and the idea is that I would define, for example, 00:53:18.580 --> 00:53:24.180 if I had an air table that it was contact, name, first name, email or something, I could essentially, 00:53:24.180 --> 00:53:30.740 you know, define a class called contact and then inherit from this air table base model and then 00:53:30.740 --> 00:53:37.300 define the fields. And then I could just instantiate that class and say, not save. And you would fire the 00:53:37.300 --> 00:53:42.340 request to basically save it. I could update an attribute and then just hit save and you would 00:53:42.340 --> 00:53:47.860 update it or call it delete method. So it was really fun. I don't know how much that's used. It's kind of 00:53:47.860 --> 00:53:53.860 a new feature, but I had tons of fun building it. And I got into descriptors, which I had never used 00:53:53.860 --> 00:53:59.620 before. Yeah. Descriptors are wild. Yeah. They were really crazy. So you had to define, these are the 00:53:59.620 --> 00:54:04.340 attributes this model should have, but when you actually instantiate, they behave very differently. 00:54:04.340 --> 00:54:10.340 You want to get the actual value, but not the kind of the field type. So descriptors were 00:54:10.340 --> 00:54:13.460 the natural answer, everything to it, but it was really fun building it. 00:54:13.460 --> 00:54:18.500 Right. And you've got like text fields and email fields and even checkbox fields, which I don't 00:54:18.500 --> 00:54:24.820 typically recall from the Django ORM or SQL. Yeah. That's an air table, a kind of native type. 00:54:24.820 --> 00:54:30.980 Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. You even have links from one air table to another. Cool. Yeah. I didn't 00:54:30.980 --> 00:54:36.100 realize it had this ORM aspect to it. This is very neat. Yeah. So when you fetch a record from air table, 00:54:36.100 --> 00:54:41.140 if it's a link, you actually just get the ID. It doesn't actually like transverse the link. So 00:54:41.140 --> 00:54:47.300 if you define it as a, as a link field, it actually takes that ID and fetches the next one. And then 00:54:47.300 --> 00:54:53.060 actually gives you the object instead of the ID. Yeah. Perfect. Like a foreign key type of relationship 00:54:53.060 --> 00:54:57.860 thing. Awesome. All right. Anything else you want to throw out there about higher table before we 00:54:57.860 --> 00:55:01.620 wrap this thing up? No, that's it. Yeah. So if people are out there using air table and they want to 00:55:01.620 --> 00:55:06.260 treat it like an ORM, I just want to talk to it. Yeah. Sounds like you should check this out. 00:55:06.260 --> 00:55:11.860 Yeah. I actually have a blog post I wrote when I, maybe about a year ago, that was called using air 00:55:11.860 --> 00:55:18.180 table as a backend on the medium. And it was an initial version of AC that works instead of having 00:55:18.180 --> 00:55:24.580 a Django backend. I actually tried to build it with just an air table serving it. And it was interesting. 00:55:24.580 --> 00:55:29.300 It's not, you won't have all the guarantees you have from a, from a proper database, but it's a really 00:55:29.300 --> 00:55:34.900 easy way if you just want to put data somewhere and be able to fetch it. And you also get a free kind of 00:55:34.900 --> 00:55:40.100 UI that you can see the data and change it. So yeah, it's kind of like the admin backend of Django, 00:55:40.100 --> 00:55:45.060 but it's like this super rich thing in the form of air table, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Very nice. 00:55:45.060 --> 00:55:51.300 I mean, maybe it's not a full ACID transactional database, but at the same time, if that's where 00:55:51.300 --> 00:55:55.700 people are putting the data, you don't want to put it into Postgres and then try to keep the thing in 00:55:55.700 --> 00:56:00.500 sync or something like that. Doesn't sound fun either. Right. So use the one place that holds the data. 00:56:00.500 --> 00:56:03.780 That's what you're doing. Yeah, exactly. You won't get, I mean, I think if you're doing this, 00:56:03.780 --> 00:56:08.180 you're probably not, you won't be replacing Postgres, but it would maybe be replacing just 00:56:08.180 --> 00:56:13.860 like a local file or something. Yeah. But yeah, you do get, you get some form of like revision. 00:56:13.860 --> 00:56:19.060 It keeps track of every change. And so you get a lot for free. Yeah. Very nice. Yeah. People should 00:56:19.060 --> 00:56:23.860 definitely check that out. All right. Well, we're about out of our time. So let me ask you the final 00:56:23.860 --> 00:56:29.460 two questions here. If you're going to write some Python code, what editor do you use? I think these days 00:56:29.460 --> 00:56:33.860 it's probably always VS Code, right? Or a big percentage of it. 00:56:33.860 --> 00:56:39.540 Yeah. There's definitely a big chunk. Yeah. I had a little, like my first one was notepad 00:56:39.540 --> 00:56:45.780 plus. Then I think I used add a sublime for a while and then add them and then end up in VS Code. And 00:56:45.780 --> 00:56:51.460 these days I just, I love the Python integrations that the team that there has built. So I couldn't 00:56:51.460 --> 00:56:55.060 really see myself moving away from it anytime soon. Yeah. That's cool. 00:56:55.060 --> 00:56:55.860 Very invested in it. 00:56:55.860 --> 00:57:02.100 Oh, there's a lot of action going around on with VS Code in general. And then also in the Python 00:57:02.100 --> 00:57:09.780 aspect of it. Right. I do feel like this sublime to Adam to almost everyone who is on that path. 00:57:09.780 --> 00:57:11.300 VS Code is the destination. 00:57:11.300 --> 00:57:11.700 Yeah. 00:57:11.700 --> 00:57:12.260 I agree. 00:57:12.260 --> 00:57:12.260 Yeah. 00:57:12.260 --> 00:57:14.020 It just kept getting easier. 00:57:14.020 --> 00:57:18.420 Cool. All right. And notable IPI package. I mean, you've already given us 00:57:18.420 --> 00:57:22.340 many different packages and things for people to check out, but something that, you know, 00:57:22.340 --> 00:57:25.300 you ran across like, oh, this is cool. I really got to tell people about this one. 00:57:25.300 --> 00:57:30.500 Yeah. This is not a secret package. I think it's a pretty well-known, but I, I've just 00:57:30.500 --> 00:57:35.300 really come to enjoy using a Pydantic. It's one of those that I think I added on pretty much every 00:57:35.300 --> 00:57:41.220 project I have. I think it's such a blast just to be able to define my classes and set the types. 00:57:41.220 --> 00:57:46.180 I really enjoyed the way the project came together and it's sort of one of the standard ones that I 00:57:46.180 --> 00:57:47.140 added everywhere now. 00:57:47.140 --> 00:57:52.900 Yeah. If you have to parse data into your model or turn your model into something like JSON, 00:57:52.900 --> 00:57:56.580 it really helps a lot, especially if you have a hierarchical model, right? I've got this thing 00:57:56.580 --> 00:58:01.860 that contains a list of other Pydantic models, and then you've got to do type conversions to date 00:58:01.860 --> 00:58:04.580 times or to numbers or stuff like that. Yeah. It's fantastic. 00:58:04.580 --> 00:58:10.660 Yeah. And even on projects, you're collaborating with other people, you have a sort of my PY first 00:58:10.660 --> 00:58:15.380 kind of approach, right? Where from the very beginning, your objects are kind of typed and 00:58:15.380 --> 00:58:19.860 that just makes it a lot easier to collaborate with other people that will jump into your project. And 00:58:19.860 --> 00:58:22.900 it's very clear what that object is and all the types. Yeah. 00:58:22.900 --> 00:58:25.540 So that kind of helps make sure that you stick with it. 00:58:25.540 --> 00:58:29.940 Absolutely. Good recommendation. I suspect people probably have heard of it as well, but it's 00:58:29.940 --> 00:58:34.260 definitely a good one. Yeah. I've had Samuel on the show to talk about it. All right. Final call to 00:58:34.260 --> 00:58:40.500 action. People, especially those out in architecture, engineering, construction, are excited about Python 00:58:40.500 --> 00:58:41.940 and some of the tools. What do you tell them? 00:58:41.940 --> 00:58:46.660 I think it's a, it's an exciting time for the construction industry. It's kind of really good 00:58:46.660 --> 00:58:52.100 place to innovate. There's a lot of exciting technology products and companies being built. 00:58:52.100 --> 00:58:57.300 So I think there's a lot of opportunities to do something in kind of a different space. And I think 00:58:57.300 --> 00:59:02.260 they can really benefit from experience people that have been, you know, doing more traditional 00:59:02.260 --> 00:59:07.380 software development to help them scale and build things. So yeah, it's interesting to see how 00:59:07.940 --> 00:59:12.580 that those kinds of streams cross and to see architects go to build software and also seeing 00:59:12.580 --> 00:59:18.100 engineers come to help make the architecture and construction industry better. Yeah. Fantastic. 00:59:18.100 --> 00:59:24.180 All right. Well, thank you so much for being here. It's been great to have you on the show. And I'd love 00:59:24.180 --> 00:59:29.620 to get these views into the different areas and communities where Python is making a difference. 00:59:29.620 --> 00:59:32.260 So thanks for sharing it in the architecture space. 00:59:32.260 --> 00:59:33.140 Nice. My pleasure. 00:59:33.140 --> 00:59:34.740 Yeah, you bet. See you later. 00:59:34.740 --> 00:59:35.300 Thanks, man. 00:59:35.300 --> 00:59:42.020 This has been another episode of Talk Python To Me. Thank you to our sponsors. Be sure to check 00:59:42.020 --> 00:59:47.140 out what they're offering. It really helps support the show. Choose Shortcut, formerly Clubhouse.io, 00:59:47.140 --> 00:59:51.940 for tracking all of your projects work because you shouldn't have to project manage your project 00:59:51.940 --> 00:59:58.020 management. Visit talkpython.fm/shortcut. Simplify your infrastructure and cut your cloud bills in 00:59:58.020 --> 01:00:03.220 half with Linode's Linux virtual machines. 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You can also find the iTunes feed at /itunes, the Google Play feed at /play, and the direct RSS feed at /rss on talkpython.fm. 01:00:49.300 --> 01:01:01.300 We're live streaming most of our recordings these days. If you want to be part of the show and have your comments featured on the air, be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel at talkpython.fm/youtube. 01:01:01.300 --> 01:01:07.300 This is your host, Michael Kennedy. Thanks so much for listening. I really appreciate it. Now get out there and write some Python code. 01:01:07.300 --> 01:01:27.300 I'll see you next time. I'll see you next time. 01:01:27.300 --> 01:01:57.280 Thank you.