Through the Interface

After a great start to this year's Autodesk University in Las Vegas, day 2 kicked off well, too.

I had a bit of a brainwave in the Expo: rather than taking the photo from the front, I took it from the back and the selfie camera automatically flipped it. Neat!

After scoping it out during the Day 1 keynote, I went early to a great spot near the puppy park to watch the Day 2 keynote.

One segment of great interest was the Autodesk Operations Solutions update by Steve Hooper.I was particularly curious about the work being done to integrate Tandem with FlexSim. This work is really interesting to my team - our research into human experience simulation has the potential to dovetail into it nicely, I feel.

Lunch - and my session was down the escalator on the basement level.

Mine was the 3pm class in Casanova 501, conveniently close to the meals hall.

I was co-presenting my class with Andres, who kindly snapped a few photos while I was presenting.

Overall I was pleased with how the class went: there were some great questions and a few folks - at least - who seemed to engage well with the topic. If you're interested, do check out the class recording which should be live now.

After the class I met up with a customer who wanted to talk about AI, as well as a number of colleagues from Sales in Europe. I popped by a Happy Hour hosted by Hypar before meeting with Research colleagues for drinks at the Happy Camper.

It was a mixer for folks from our PDMS division (I think!) and I was very happy to reconnect with some old colleagues from my AutoCAD days.

From here I popped over the road to the Wynn… friends from Research (and elsewhere) were meeting at 11pm to go to a club.

The Wynn is really a very pretty casino, I find.

We were meeting in the Encore, at the Beach Club.

It was an interesting deal: as long as we were more women than men (we were), we could go in and drink for free until midnight. With the caveat that the drinks were made with their cheapest vodka or tequila. But hey.

I tried to take a selfie, but my phone was somehow still in portrait mode (something you might have noticed from my last post). I'm putting this in here because I do think it's glorious to have a properly narcissistic selfie where everyone but you is blurry.

Luckily I managed to borrow Kelly's phone which could take the picture properly.

Once I figured out my phone's settings (OK, Boomer), I was able to take a few more photos of the lovely people I got to spend a very nice moment with.

I had a much better time than I expected to, but around 1am I headed back to The Palazzo to sleep.

The final day of this year's AU started with coffee. As breakfast was stopping promptly at 8am (this is not ideal for some of us, I have to say!), I ended up having to wait in a very long line at Starbucks. I was intrigued by the fact they had a Kanban board showing when your order would be ready.

I was slightly late for the only class I managed to attend (aside from my own) at this year's AU: Ming, from LAWA (Los Angeles World Airports) presented alongside James Awe from Tandem and Michael Beale - formerly one of out rockstar developer advocates but now at AWS. Their topic was a digital twin Ming had created for LAX using Tandem's SDK and MCP server.

Day 3 was a quiet one for me, so I spent quite a bit of time meeting with people in the Expo. Autodesk Research had a large presence at this year's AU, between the Research and AI Zones.

Esen, who works in our team, was showing off some great work exploring the potential for driving agentic design workflows with speech.

The prototype integrates agentic simulation with a world model.

Another member of the team, Lorenzo, was working at another demo station.

Here's a photo of the neighbouring - and highly visited - AI Zone.

I was very happy to get to hang out with Lee Mullin for a while.

Another old friend - this time attending AU for the first time - was David Gerber.

One of my favourite places in the AU Expo is the puppy park.

Over the course of the 3 days, many adorable pups were on site and looking for affection.

I do my best to avoid the casino floors when at AU, but occasionally I end up seeing the odd bank of slot machines. The tech seems pretty advanced, these days!

This year's closing party was once again at the Linq Promenade.

After grabbing a drink and some food with Michael Pontin, who i've known from AU and other events for many, many years, I met up with more folks to see some of the comedy show (via screens - the theatre itself was full) and then headed to the Brooklyn Bowl.

We went upstairs - the balcony looked down onto a reggae concert. Not my favourite musical style, but hey.

We actually spent more time bowling than listening to music.

After the party ended at around 9pm, we met more Research folks across in a cocktail bar in Caesar's Palace, and I then headed back to The Venetian.

This year's AU has been really valuable, perhaps even more than usual, given the stage of our research and our readiness to discuss it with customers.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to meet in Vegas - from casual chats to deeper discussions. I really enjoyed getting to see som many of you. If you weren't in Vegas - or you were but our paths didn't cross - do reach out if you'd like to meet separately now that it's over.