Autodesk
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The last post talked about the trip across to Santa Fe and the first few days settling in. Now that I'm back from the week away, I've written up the second part of the mini-series, which covers the main part of the trip and the return. As I was up early with jet lag on my second morning in Santa Fe, I headed across the car park to "the gym" at the resort. I use inverted commas because it really wasn't much of a gym, and by the time I arrived it was already full of Autodeskers (three of my…
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On Saturday I went to the station in foggy Neuchatel to take the train to Zurich. From there I was heading to the town of Santa Fe in New Mexico - somewhere I'd never been - for our annual meeting of the leaders working on our various research areas. There are no direct flights to Santa Fe - it's a very small domestic-only airport in the US - and the best I could do was fly to San Francisco and take a smaller plane to Albuquerque. Which is only an hour's drive from Santa Fe. I was really apprehensive about…
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I was up early all three days I stayed in Nashville, irrespective of how late I ended up staying out the night before. I was pleased with myself for getting to the gym on Days 0, 1 and 2 of this year's AU. I was staying in the Omni Hotel, which happened to be the location of my Tuesday afternoon session. Which meant I could check out the room before I even made it across to the main conference venue. This year's venue - Music City Center - was really quite nice. The AU team did a solid job of…
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On Sunday I took the train across to Zurich to start the journey to Nashville for Autodesk University 2025. Everything went smoothly, to start with - I was through ZRH security in very little time, which is always nice. The person who checked my passport at the E gates (a special check specifically for people flying to the US) was an engineer who seemed very excited to speak to someone from Autodesk (despite being a SolidWorks user himself). Anyway, I eventually boarded the first leg to Chicago. My first movie choice for this trip was The Salt Road, which had…
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On Sunday I'll be heading to the US for a pretty full-on week, split between Autodesk University 2025 in Nashville, from Monday to Wednesday, and the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA) 2025 conference in San Diego, from Thursday to Saturday. I asked AI to create an image morphing Nashville with San Diego and it came up with this. I know neither city well enough to recognize whether it succeeded, to be honest. There weren't any direct flights available between the various legs, so this is what I ended up with. It could always be worse, I suppose. On Monday…
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A couple of weeks ago I mentioned the news that Typepad has (finally) decided to get out of the blog hosting game, after 22 years. The platform had steadily become less relevant, and from my side I was forever fighting with silly technical issues - mostly related to images, for some reason - so a) I'm not surprised and b) I won't miss the platform at all. The timing was insane, though: they basically gave a month's notice for the remaining blogs to figure something out. Even accessing the old content in the days after the announcement proved to be…
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After holding a couple of fantastic Encoding Experience events in Boston and San Francisco, last week was our chance to see how well the format would work in the UK. On Monday I was back in Zurich airport to fly across to Heathrow. It was one of those rare flights where I opted for a window seat, so I made the most of it. Here's the view as we crossed the channel, the coastline being the south coast of England.As we approached London the weather was still lovely.And then we landed.Rather than inflicting the ever-increasing Heathrow pick-up fee on my…
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Today is the 30th anniversary of my first day at Autodesk. On August 29th 1995 - when the first Jurassic Park movie was still relatively fresh in our collective mind - I showed up for work at the Autodesk office on Cross Lanes in Guildford, UK. (This office probably closed 25 years ago, now - we've closed multiple offices that succeeded this one, even. So it goes.) This was my first proper job out of University, and I was genuinely thrilled to be working at a company with Autodesk's reputation. It was a really easy place to feel at home:…
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At the beginning of this week I recorded my class for Autodesk University 2025. It's largely a repeat from my session at DevCon 2025 in Amsterdam, so if you attended that class then this one won't be especially exciting (unless you're like me and a second watch of something is actually really helpful, these days!). Do you know my favourite thing so far about this year's conference? My "class ID" is 1980. For some reason this fills me with a great deal of satisfaction. Go figure. The in-person class will be held during the last session of Day 1 of…
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For much of my career at Autodesk I (and eventually my team) focused on encouraging development (internally) and adoption (externally) of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to our products. It's why I named this blog "Through the Interface" when it started back in 2006. At the beginning (for me this means the 90s) this was clearly around desktop software; starting with DOS and even UNIX, although by the time I had joined the company Windows was becoming the primary OS platform for our products. We worked to help companies integrate their own software with ours, whether "in process" via plugin architectures…