The keynote slot was a real treat for all in attendance. The two founders of Revit, Leonid Rais and Irwin Jungreis were interviewed in a “late night talk show” type setting. They talked about their inspiration and motivation to develop Revit from the ground up. Both came from a mechanical/manufacturing background with little to no building design or construction experience. Their first employees were architects to help mold the product into what it is today. It is pretty amazing how much of the core features have not changed that much since the early days. Several of the early Revit Technology Cooperation staff were also interviewed, including Marty Rozmanith, David Conant, Steve Burri, Dave Heaton, Harry Mattison, Matt Jezyk and Richard Taylor. At the end, they all gathered for a group photo which included a few early adopters like Wesley Benn (RTC Events Management founder), Jim Balding (RTC-NA Region Chairman), Phil Read (RTC Global Director of Marketing and Communications), Scott Brown, and Scott Davis. Fun stuff.
I encourage any aspiring Revit guru to go to AUGI.com and search for old posts by Leonid Rais (LRaiz) and Irwin Jungreis (irwin). Although some of the Revit inter-working’s have changed since their posts, which range from 2003 – 2013, one can gain some significant insight! There are great discussions on rounding, backwards compatibility and much more. One comment Leonid made, which I clearly recall and generally agreed with at the time, was this… in response to an architect asking where to start in order to learn to program, he said “Unless you want to change your profession then save your time and stick to architecture. I think it is silly to expect that a non-professional programmer might be able to develop anything significant in for an application as complicated as Revit.” Looking at the number of classes on programming, including one by me (JavaScript programming in Revit using LazJS), and the groundswell around Dynamo, this sentiment has clearly not been shared by the design community. Additionally, the OP of that thread went on to create some really nice tools such as Keynote Manager (http://www.revolutiondesign.biz/products.html).