Open Source Software

 

// nfo

NBBJ Digital + Open Source

2015-present

// role

varies

// tech

C#, Rhino/Grasshopper, Javascript, Rhino.Compute

// key activities

product management

coding

branding

marketing

demo day

// description

I have had the great fortune to learn a great deal from my fellow design computation specialists; the AEC computation community is incredibly generous with its skills, knowledge, and code.

I enjoy being able to give back to the community, and over the years we have publicly released a number of tools that were developed in house at NBBJ. Some of these were developed for our computational products, some were developed as general infrastructure, and some were developed as part of internal and external hackathons. A few highlights:

Human UI (link)

Product Manager, Contributing Developer, Branding

A Grasshopper plugin that allows users to create sophisticated WPF UIs for their tools. Human UI was open sourced in 2016, has been downloaded over 24,000 times, and is industry standard for creating client- and designer-facing Grasshopper tools.

Telepathy (link)

Concept, Product Manager, Contributing Developer, Branding

I conceived Telepathy as a way to bring the textual coding concept of variable namespaces to Grasshopper. This allows data to flow from anywhere on the canvas to anywhere else using simple namespaces; it is a crucial part of the NBBJ scalable tool workflow, as it improves code hygiene and provides a method for highly modular code practices.

Bifocals (link)

Concept, Developer, Branding

I wrote this plugin to aid in my teaching — I am an “icons guy” and many new users are “text” people. Bifocals automatically labels every component placed on the canvas with a tag with its full, searchable name, so that anybody can follow along in class (or video tutorials) with no confusion. Downloaded over 8,000 times.

Mouse Rat (link)

Contributing Developer, Branding

This grasshopper plugin allows users to set up clickable mesh workflows that leverage a live modifier key listener. Users can now add Ctrl-Click functionality to select live Grasshopper geometry using a very clean UX.

RESThopper (link)

Hackathon team member, front end developer (Ionic), demo leader

RESThopper was developed at the Thornton Tomasetti AEC Hackathon in 2018, where it won “Best Overall Hack”. RESThopper leverages the new Rhino Inside and Rhino Compute technology to allow developers to solve Grasshopper definitions in the cloud using a simple REST API.