2021 Speckle Review
2021 has been a crazy but really amazing year for Speckle the product, the company and the wider community behind it. The last 12 months have flown by and all the achievements and milestones we have reached deserve some time to be properly acknowledged.
Written by Speckle on
Since 2020, when we set up a company to focus entirely on Speckle, we've stayed true to our mission.
We want to transform AEC and 3D design by connecting all data siloes and providing a solid digital base for people to build the next generation of tools.
A better product 🎁, a loving community 🥰, a larger team👪 , and more amazing open-source tech 🧑🚀. Here’s what happened in the speckleverse in the last year ✨!
Speckle Connectors
Speckle has grown over the past year. We announced our beta release back in March, which included only 4 connectors: Revit, Rhino, Dynamo and Grasshopper.
To date, we have reached 19 connectors! Can you believe it? We hardly can, as it’s more than one per month. Here’s the full list:
Dimitrie Stefanescu
Community Contributed Connectors: TopSolid (EPFL), Microstation, OpenBuildings, OpenRoads, OpenRail (Arup)
Speckle Contributed Connectors: Sketchup, ETABS, AutoCAD, Civil3D, Blender, Unreal Engine, Excel, QGIS, PowerBI
Speckle Web
Web side, we’ve done massive improvements all across the board, from developer features such as webhook support to IFC file imports, a snappier and faster 3D viewer - and much more behind-the-scenes work!
specklesystemsNew Features: Globals, Server Overview, Server User Admin, Server Stream Admin, Preview Service, Webhooks, IFC Imports, 3D Viewer improvements, Nested Branches, Frontend redesign & more.
Community & Content
2021 was also a stellar year for our community which has grown from a tiny group of AEC hackers and technology enthusiasts to a global phenomenon 🤩.
The place that clearly saw the most action is our community forum, which has seen more than 400 new users register and more than 3000 posts! Haven't joined and introduced yourself? Do it now!
This year we also continued our Community Standup series which always proves to be very successful. On a semi-monthly basis, people from all sorts of different backgrounds, disciplines, and companies join and show what they’ve achieved with Speckle.
We have also launched our Academia partnership programme to help the next generation of construction technology leaders become experts in cloud-based collaboration. You can learn more about it here:
Speckle
Finally, this year we hosted our first ever real conference: Connect! Over 3 days some 50+ speakers, 30+ sessions, and 3 incredibly good panels.
The turnout was unexpected and super successful, we saw 1300+ registrations from 57 different countries!
Did you miss on Connect? No worries, all our sessions have been recorded and are available in our youtube channel 📺!
Speckle
Team
A larger and more sophisticated software platform needs a bigger team, that’s why our core group of full-time specklers has increased from 4 to 10!
As early as January this year we had Claire join, then Cristi, and later this year Jedd, Reynold, Kateryna, and Gergo.
With them on board, we’ve definitely unlocked the fully remote and distributed team status, having team members located in UK, Spain, Romania, Canada, Singapore, and Hungary - where will the next Specklers be based?
We have also managed to meet (almost) all of us IRL (in real life), for a company retreat, and given the current global pandemic, it was maybe one of the hardest things we’ve done 😅
Conclusion
2021 has been amazing way beyond our expectations, we can now only dream about what 2022 will bring us. But here’s a spoiler alert: more connectors, more integrations and a far more powerful and featured web app - so stay tuned!
Did you know? Stars matter! All our code is open source and available on GitHub, if you like Speckle and want to support us, star our repos - it does matter!
Thanks to all of you for reading this, and for being part of our journey - we simply could have accomplished all of this without you 😍.
Our team wishes you an amazing start of 2022, and if you’d like to stay in the look with what we’re doing, don’t forget to follow us:
Feeback or comments? We'd love to hear from you in our community forum!
