Through the Interface

Today is the 30th anniversary of my first day at Autodesk.

On August 29th 1995 - when the first Jurassic Park movie was still relatively fresh in our collective mind - I showed up for work at the Autodesk office on Cross Lanes in Guildford, UK. (This office probably closed 25 years ago, now - we've closed multiple offices that succeeded this one, even. So it goes.)

This was my first proper job out of University, and I was genuinely thrilled to be working at a company with Autodesk's reputation. It was a really easy place to feel at home: aside from the fact our customers use our software tools to build bridges, hospitals and blockbuster movies, the people were just so nice. I mean really, really nice. I immediately felt at home.

Thank you to Autodesk and all the people I've worked with, over the years. You have made it a place I'm still excited to wake up to, every morning. Autodesk has employed me in various roles - and in various countries - across 30 years, and I've worked with many amazing people on some really fun challenges that I believe have made a difference to people. This has been a huge gift, one for which I'll forever be grateful, however much longer it lasts.

And it's thanks to Autodesk that I met my wife and have 3 amazing kids, so there's that.

For my 30th anniversary I decided to celebrate my joining the ranks of 30+ year veterans - still in the Jurassic Park theme - with a mixture of AI and manual image editing.

No-one likes the idea of being a dinosaur, but I do think it's important to call a T-Rex a T-Rex.

In a surreal bit of timing, Typepad sent an email this week to bloggers still using it as a platform (of which there are still several at Autodesk, despite there having been rolled out some more modern infrastructure for the newer blogs). Typepad will be shutting down its service at the end of the September, so I'm now in a crazy panic to recreate this blog - keeping as much of the content as I possibly can - somewhere else. You'll still be able to find it at keanw.com (at least I hope!) but links of the format "through-the-interface.typepad.com/*" will be broken. There's not much I can do about those, unfortunately.

Anyway, do watch this space. Hopefully the newly resurrected blog will be with you in due course, but the timing couldn't possibly be worse: I have several important deadlines and multiple events to attend between now and the end of September. On a positive note, as I'm downloading all the images (which in itself is a story for another blog post… scraping images on sites protected by Cloudflare is a real pain!) I'm getting huge nostalgia seeing images from nearly 20 years of blog posts flash past. We've had some fun over the years!