C# · Revit API · T.G. Gallagher co-op
Construction modeling involves a shocking amount of repetitive clicking. Renaming hundreds of elements to match a convention. Checking views against a checklist before issuing drawings. Exporting the same set of sheets, the same way, every week. Everyone on the team knew these tasks were automatable; nobody had the time to automate them.
That became a big part of my co-op. Over four months I built 13 custom C# workflows and plugins for Revit and Navisworks — small tools, each aimed at one annoying repetitive job. Some were Revit API add-ins written in Visual Studio; others were Dynamo scripts for the quicker wins. Nothing glamorous. But each one took a task that ate an hour of someone's week and turned it into a button press.
A few patterns kept showing up. First, the best automation targets are the tasks people describe as "it only takes a minute" — because they do it forty times. Second, a tool nobody trusts is worse than no tool: I learned to make each workflow show its work, log what it changed, and never silently modify a model. Third, adoption is the whole game. The fanciest plugin in the world is useless if it lives on one person's machine, so I documented everything and got the tools onto the team's machines, not just mine.
This is the work that pulled me toward the software side of mechanical engineering. Buildings are physical, but the process of designing and coordinating them is mostly information — and information problems are solvable.