Drafting is mostly the same hour, repeated.
Every MEP project runs on the same handful of actions done thousands of times. Tag a duct. Match the graphics. Fix a level. Renumber a run of sheets. None of it is difficult and none of it is where the value is — but it eats the day, and the coordination that actually decides whether a building works gets whatever hours are left.
I spent my first years in Doha doing exactly that, on villas and towers, in AutoCAD and then Revit. The work I was paid for was thinking. The work I actually did was typing.
So I stopped doing it by hand.
Rather than work through the same task again, I started building something that would do it instead. Small routines at first, nothing sophisticated, each one taking a job off my hands that I was tired of repeating.
That is the turning point, and it is not really about code. It is the realisation that the repetitive half of the work can be described precisely enough to hand over — and that the half worth keeping is the judgement. Everything since has been the same idea applied to larger problems.
- AutoLISPsmall routines inside AutoCAD
- Dynamovisual scripting against the Revit model
- pyRevit and Pythonproper tools, shared with the team
- C# add-insinstalled, versioned and supported
Each step covered more ground than the one before it. Where that line ends up is the next chapter.
Looking for an MEP BIM Coordinator?
Doha, Qatar · transferable QID with NOC · able to join within days.