In 2014 I was working on a building energy software for Iran's building regulations which differs significantly from the rest of the world. (most of the world rely on simulation on an engine called EnergyPlus, Iran used to have a static envelope-based heat transfer calculation as well). Back then the U.S National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) used to have this plugin for SketchUp where you could model a building and the plugin would let you add energy details to the model.

I wanted to have that data model and SketchUp had this amazing cool thing where all plugins (which were written in Ruby) used to be running in the same space and so I could access the runtime of any other plugin. Here the team of OpenStudio were kind enough to share some of their internal APIs with me and so I could take their model and append my own data on top and let my users reuse all of their models from OpenStudio.

And then SketchUp web came and that whole plugin world was crashed. This forced me to go down the path of using a union-of-all-industry-file-formats (like TIFF for pictures) for building energy called gbXML, back then no one supported the file and so it was hopeless (and hard to implement) and eventually trying to create a CAD, which given the state of tech at 2016~2017 was hopeless too, and so it failed miserably.

Seeing this now, I was wondering how hard would it be to recreate that project with its own full CAD from KetchUp...