During my recent travels I managed to be away for a couple of anniversaries. My youngest child turned 17, and this blog turned 20. A definite "how did that happen?" on both fronts.
So yes, on June 19th, 2006, I posted for the first time to "Through the Interface". It was actually an experiment that came out of a brainstorming the Autodesk Developer Network team had gone through some weeks earlier, where one of the ideas that was proposed (OK yes, it was by me) was to start a developer-centric Autodesk blog. By this time Shaan Hurley had been blogging successfully via "Between the Lines" for a couple of years, and was showing that it was a really meaningful way to engage with our customers, and was helping mitigate against us becoming a BFC (Big Faceless Corporation). I'd started blogging - only internally, for Autodeskers - while living in Bangalore, documenting the challenges of being an ex-pat via a blog called "Living in India". I knew I enjoyed the act of writing regularly, so was definitely up for the challenge of doing something more public.
There were a few additional motivations for starting the blog, beyond giving Autodesk a more human face: I'd recently been promoted to a worldwide role at Autodesk, and found myself managing a larger team. In many ways my regional managers and their staff were more connected to our technology and the developer community: my hope with the blog was that it would help me stay connected more to both.
There was also a huge need for someone to document the brand-new AutoCAD .NET API: back then the documentation was sparse, yet this technology was both very different from the existing COM interfaces (as used by VBA, Visual LISP and standalone Visual Basic) and very similar to ObjectARX, the underlying C++ layer. Being familiar with ObjectARX, I was in a position to help people get to grips with AutoCAD .NET, which we all believed was a really important technology for the future, in that it really allowed AutoCAD developers to harness the power of ObjectARX from a more accessible (and arguably more productive) language and developer toolchain. C# (and its lesser-used siblings) turned out to be huge for the AutoCAD developer community, and this blog helped people along that journey.
After a few years we decided to broaden our blogging efforts to other products: in 2008, Jeremy Tammik started The Building Coder (for the Revit API) and Brian Ekins started Mod the Machine (for the Inventor API). Many of you will have used one or other of these resources. Later still we started the ADN DevBlogs, which were more about sharing technical content and less about the individual bloggers (we started referring to the original 3 developer blogs as "personality blogs", which still makes me smile to think about).
A fun fact: thanks largely to this blog I ended up working with Dr. Robert Aish soon after he joined Autodesk. Robert joined in 2008 and started working on a design-centric programming language: at the time it was code-named D#, but many of you will now know it today as DesignScript. Back before Dynamo was a thing, Robert and I worked together during a really intensive sprint to create a prototype of D# working inside AutoCAD - the most capable platform for the language, at the time - which I believe ended up being shown during the mainstage keynote at AU 2008.
Engaging with the AutoCAD developer community - looking for interesting ways to "show off" the AutoCAD platform - has led to me exploring all kinds of fun and interesting technologies, over the years, such as integrating data from the Kinect sensor, programming with F#, creating fractal geometry, working with point clouds and reality capture tools, trying to fly drones, using virtual reality headsets, 3D printing, and so much more.
This blog led to me interviewing Autodesk founder, John Walker, back in 2008.
This blog has certainly covered some ground since its (humble?) beginnings talking about AutoCAD .NET. As my role at Autodesk evolved it became about my experiments with the View & Data API, which was the beginnings of Forge, later renamed to Autodesk Platform Services. When I moved into Research it was a way for me to share knowledge acquired during the development of Dasher 360, our first foray into web-based digital twins. I shared how we were using the Viewer to display time-series data coming from our custom back-end database, which helped people see the potential for the technology but also laid a foundation for Autodesk Tandem, which was in many ways inspired by our work on Project Dasher.
Early on in my time in Research I also got roped into a number of early Generative Design for AEC projects (remember Project Refinery?) which led me to engaging more with the Dynamo community. This was a really fun time, as we were starting to see the potential for generative technology in the context of future design workflows.
Oh, and it was the place I documented my family's round-the-world trip, back in 2017.
Over the last 3-4 years my role has shifted once again, to lead our research into human experience simulation. We originally called this "human-centric building design" but later pivoted to broaden out across industries, coining the term "Enlivened Design", something I hope you will gradually learn more about. While I do blog a little about what we're delivering technically, there's a lot that it's still too soon to talk about, so I have inevitably been blogging more about my work travels than about technology. This will change as we engage more publicly about our research efforts: it'll feel good to be talking more openly about how the team is building some really interesting capabilities using the Autodesk platform.
I recently asked an AI tool to give feedback about this blog, and it pointed out that the latest redesign doesn't do much to highlight its depth of content (among other things, of course). I've gone and added a tagline that links to a couple of the more significant categories of post, as well as creating an overall categories page that makes it easy to browse through the others. It includes a running count of the posts since it launched - still averaging 2+ per week over the 20-year lifespan, which surprised me - in addition to the category links.
I hope folks find it an easy way to dig into some of the older content hosted here. I know I'll use it myself, which frankly is as good a reason to do something as any. 🙂
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