Wednesday marked the start of this year's DevCon, after the warm-up day on Tuesday.
Things started with a breakfast in the Expo Hall. (These pictures are actually from later in the day, when I happened to be upstairs by the balcony.)
Autodeskers were asked to attend the keynotes in the overflow room. The main takeaways for me from the Day 1 keynote were around the imminent public availability of official MCP servers for some of our products, as well as the fact that Autodesk Assistant will be able to call MCP servers that partners have certified in our Design & Make Store. Lots of great opportunity there!
Back in the Expo I got to hang out with Sander Lijbers, who now works at OpenSpace. Fun fact: in the background of this photo you can see Eva Lindholm, with whom I used to work 25+ years ago (and probably haven't seen in person since then!).
I sat at the back of a session about Tandem.
As I was wandering the halls I came across Petr Broz. If it wasn't already clear he's into 3D, he was sat in exactly the right chair.
While in the speaker room I found the famous robot that had been wandering the halls. I asked its handler whether it could work autonomously: apparently it can, but when there are too many people around it gets very shy (it's programmed to avoid people for safety reasons, so tends to get stuck unless it's reassured).
My friend James Awe gave a great high-level overview of where things are with Tandem development.
The 30-minute format doesn't allow much depth, but James and team have been having great discussions in the Expo during the event.
It was great bumping into a former colleague, Nikki van der Walt.
For the evening event some of us decided not to take the "official" boat and to hop on the commuter ferry to get across to the Eye Film Museum venue.
It was a very interesting location for a party.
Here's the building without us blocking the view of it.
It was impressive to see 1,000+ people in the space!
I spent most of my time outside on the terrace.
At some point towards the end it just got too cold, and basically everyone except the hardcore smokers migrated inside.
It was another nice evening hanging out with James and Tomas.
One of our partners, Chaos, were there in strength.
Once the party finished we hopped back onto the ferry across to the mainland.
It's the first time I'd realised that the Central Station has AMSTERDAM written in huge letters on the roof.
Day 2's keynote was also in the overflow room (for me, at least). I suspect there was more flexibility about joining the main room as there were fewer folks in the overflow.
At 10am I snuck out to hit the Flower Market.
I'd been asked to pick up some tulip bulbs, naturally enough. There were some pretty crazy bulbs (or root networks) for sale, but I just picked up a few bags of the classic variety.
Back in the Expo my robot buddy was still wandering around.
My old friend and former colleague, Jaime Rosales, co-presented on the agentic workflows being implemented by the AWS data-centre team.
I popped by the Autodesk Developer Champion Awards ceremony, as there were lots of old friends both giving and receiving awards. 🙂
I love seeing our partners getting well-deserved recognition of their contributions to our business.
Back in the Expo I chatted with Frode and Simen from Norconsult along with Petr Broz.
In the afternoon I was "room captain" for the room I'd be presenting in. A big one!
Our presentation was right at the end, but the attendance was pretty good, considering the need for people to avoid traffic!
We presented our session on capturing the human experience of design.
Here's the video recording we did ahead of the event, in case you're interested:
Thanks to Jaime for taking the above photos!
It was another awesome DevCon. It was great to see so many old friends and to meet new ones, too. I'm already looking forward to next year's event!
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