Through the Interface

This week I've had the pleasure of spending time at the first Forge Accelerator to be held in Autodesk's Soho office (in central London).

On Monday morning I headed to Geneva, and had a minor panic attack when I saw that so many London-bound flights had been cancelled.

My own flight was delayed by about an hour, but only due to late arrival of the plane from Zurich. Nothing related to Storm Dennis, which came as a huge relief after having watched the viral Etihad A380 landing video. In fact it was nice and sunny when I finally arrived in London.

It's always a pleasure to catch up with the Forge team – they're such a great (and talented) bunch. As we were all staying in The Resident Soho – just around the corner from the office in Broadwick Street – we also bumped into visiting Autodeskers such as Ollie Williamson and Sander Lijbers.

The event itself was being held on the 4th floor of our office.

The office is pretty empty at 8:30am, which I'd already noticed the last time I visited. This is, of course, completely understandable given the harsh reality of commuting in the South East of England.

In all honesty I didn't get hands-on with many problems, this week: the Forge team handled things admirably, and I was mainly there to chat with people about some of our ongoing research topics. Here's a rare snap of me with hands on keyboard.

We had our "celebration dinner" on Tuesday night: in the past this has often been held later in the week, but it's such a good ice-breaker that I think it's a great idea to hold it earlier on.

I was really happy to have some quality time with Dave Geary and Dawson Bunn, two developers I've known for nigh-on 25 years. We had a blast reminiscing about the old days (Dave remembers when I had hair, for instance, while Dawson claims to have some Autodesk-branded tartan underpants in a box somewhere).

The dinner itself was in The Lyric Pub – the food was decent and the service was excellent. A great night had by all!

Being in Soho can be interesting, once the sun goes down.

It's a place of stark contrasts, with people living rough near expensive cars.

Aside from some pub grub, the rest of the week's dinners was spent enjoying Indian food. It was interesting to see salad in my thali: something I don't ever remember seeing in India, but there you go.

The best food of the week was on Wednesday night, at Dishoom Carnaby.

The drinks weren't bad, either: this is an Old Fashioned that had been left to steep for a month before being served.

A big thanks to the Forge team for their standing invitation for me to attend these events! It was a fantastic (and actually very valuable) few days.

I headed home a bit early – I'm writing this from the train home on Thursday night – as tomorrow is the annual ski day for the Engineering team in Gumligen, which I'm also lucky enough to have been invited to. This year it's being held in Grindelwald: from there I'll head across to Adelboden to spend next week's holiday with my family. It'll be really nice to kick back and hang out with my wife and kids for a few days.