Through the Interface

On Saturday I once again headed to my local railway station to start my journey to this year's annual technical conference for Autodesk employees, TechX 2026.

It was, as ever a lovely train journey to Zurich.

There were some engineering works, so I had to change trains in Zurich's main station. Not uncommon for a weekend.

This year's event was in Seattle. There isn't a direct flight from Zurich, so my first flight was to San Francisco.

The flight was uneventful. I had a middle seat but at a bulkhead, so I was actually really comfortable.

I'd been warned by colleagues about US immigration being tricky, at the moment, so I was fully prepared to show my "business justification" letter to the CBP agent. In the end it was super smooth - I used the MPC app and then the special queue, and it was a breeze.

I then had a couple of hours to wait before my onward flight to Seattle.

I wasn't at a window seat, which was actuallyu a shame: there were some impressive views of Mount Rainier as we approached our destination.

My Uber driver was from Azerbaijan. His English wasn't great, but we somehow managed to communicate.

I checked into the Hyatt Regency, which is just across from the Seattle Convention Center. I was on a low high floor (floor 27, which was actually nice, as I could take the elevator directly to my floor... there were elevators that served 1-26 and others that served 27 and above),

I had a quiet beer and some light food and managed to sleep through reasonably. On Sunday morning I headed out to wander around the city.

My first stop was for breakfast. Seattle is known for its coffee, of course.

I didn't actually do very much: I picked up a pair of shoes, but otherwise just had a gentle day.

At 5pm we had a welcome reception for the Technical Leadershio Forum - a pre-event for the company's more senior technical leaders. I was the first there, so could pick up my conference badge without queueing.

The event was in a bar with lots of ping pong tables.

I was really happy to catch up with so many old friends. Several members of the AutoCAD team were there, some of whom I've known for 25+ years.

After the reception was finished I was going to head back and sleep, but it was still very early. I was happy when my friend Jonathan Geffen pinged me and we decided to meet up for a bite near the water.

Monday's Technical Leadership Forum was conveniently held in the Hyatt.

I'd been looking forward to this event, as there was inevitably going to be some discussion of how the technology landscape has evolved over the last 6-9 months. I wasn't disappointed.

During the afternoon teams were formed by table that worked through a really interesting collaborative development workshop using Claude Code. Table 17 didn't win, but we definitely had fun.

After the forum was finished it was time to join the welcome reception for TechX proper. I spent time catching up with lots of old friends, including Sebastian Casallas and Albert Szilvasy.

This year's venue was the gorgeous Seattle Convention Center, designed by LMN Architects.

It's a fantastic building.

We were mostly going up and down escalators...

… but I did take the stairs all the way up once, to see if I could.

I really liked this piece of stained glass art.

TechX has definitely become more polished, over the years. The General Sessions on Days 1 and 2 are really slick.

We had 2,400 attendees, which also made the event slightly less intimate than I'm used to. It's incredible to have so many techie and techie-adjacent folks in one place, though!

My team had a few talks scheduled, plus we had a booth in the expo area to introduce people to our work.

We had iPads set up letting people explore the graphic recording from each of our Encoding Experience events, playing back key audio snippets from the conversations we had there.

I was happy to catch up with my two Webb friends at Autodesk. First Mark...

... and then Fenton.

When we wanted something different from the standard conference drip coffee, we could go to get a custom barista-made coffee near the expo area. A nice touch.

They also had the usual (?) AI photo booth, with some fun local affectations.

After Day 1 we headed across to MOHAI, the Museum of History & Industry for a divisional mixer event.

I somehow didn't take any snaps inside the building, so here's another one I took outside before entering.

It was a nice, relaxed evening. Nothing too crazy. Which is just as well, as my presentation was schedule for Day 2, just before lunchtime.

It turns out that competing with lunch is a tricky proposition: it wasn't the largest crowd I've presented to. But everyone was really engaged, staying to the end and asking great questions. Quality over quantity! Thanks to my session's moderator, Shawn Chaput - for whom I moderated at DevCon, coincidentally! - for taking the below photo.

At the end of Day 2 we had one more mixer - this time for a smaller group, the people working in Research or on generative AI - at the Gold Dust Room.

It was a very nice couple of hours.

There was even a pool table, which I enjoyed playing one game on.

My friend Kelly brought the circa 1997-1998 MapGuide jeans jacket she'd offered me (see this post for the background). I love it!

A group of us headed across for a few more drinks on the way to our planned karaoke session. We walked past Bezos' Balls (ahem, the Amazon Spheres).

We managed to get someone to take a photo of the whole crew. Nice!

After failing to gatecrash a PDMS mixer, we saw the Gum Wall (it was beyond gross) and then managed to find a virtually empty Irish pub that seemed delighted to have our business on a Wednesday night.

From there we hit the TechX "karaoke jam", as it's become known.

We had a private room, which was perfect. I really dislike public karaoke bars, which tend to attract people who sing really well. (It makes me think of the guys who hang around at lasertag or paintball.)

This was my last night at TechX, so I definitely made the most of it. It's a really fun event, and I tend to meet many of the same people there each year.

Jonathan took a few snaps that I've included here.

Yes, the blurring is 100% accurate, at this stage of the evening.

Day 3 was the "Unconference Day", which I really like. Unfortunately I only had time to meet with Nathan Kutz - our new Director of Physics-Informed AI - and Dagmara before having to head to the airport for my flight back to Europe.

I'm writing this in Frankfurt Airport, from where I'll soon be flying to Alicante for a friend's 60th birthday. I'll head from there to Berlin for the Machine+Behavior conference - I'll be reporting on at least one of those events next week.