Through the Interface

I'm very pleased to be part of a great team at Autodesk: the Developer Technical Services team (DevTech), whose focus is on providing high quality services to members of the Autodesk Developer Network. Aside from providing technical support for programming-related questions, we also write technical solutions (which we call DevNotes), present at technical conferences, provide API training and mentoring (a specific type of short-term consulting), and liaise regularly with our Engineering teams.

The team is spread around the world: Mikako Harada manages our East Asia team, split between China and Japan, Murali Pappoppula manages the South Asia Pacific (SAPAC) team, based in India, Gary Wassell manages EMEA, split between the UK, France and the Czech Republic, and Stephen Preston manages our Americas team, split between the US and Canada. Everyone in the team is a programming expert focusing on multiple products and wearing many hats… We believe very strongly that providing hands-on support is a great way to develop strong technical skills that are of use in other parts of our job, so everyone in the team (managers included) is involved in answering questions from our ADN members.

The team currently covers most of the spectrum of Autodesk products exposing APIs: we have "virtual" workgroups spread around the world for our BSD, ISD, MSD, PTD and ACS products. Support for Media & Entertainment is handled by another team within the company, but we share tools (such as DevHelp Online, our web-based case-submission front-end) and processes.

You'll hopefully get to know members of DevTech as time goes on – I'll be using this blog to showcase their work, sharing some of the tips and techniques they use (and discover) as part of their respective jobs.

Update

A few people have changed roles since this post was made: Virupaksha Aithal is now our manager for DevTech India, Barbara Han manages DevTech China and Katsuaki Takamizawa manages DevTech Japan. Mikako has moved to DevTech Americas, from where she coordinates our global AEC workgroup.