Autodesk
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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:…
-
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…
-
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…
-
A few weeks ago - while I was on holiday, in fact - we posted a job description that I mentioned on LinkedIn: Interested in developing and applying novel AI-based human simulation to improve the built environment? Come and work in my research team at Autodesk! Candidates open to working in London or Toronto are preferred, but the role will be largely hybrid. We've already had several really interesting candidates apply for the job, but I did want to talk a bit more about this position and encourage more folks to apply. Here's the job description itself: Autodesk Research is…
-
Now that I'm back from Toronto I have the time to share some news that came our way last week. The production team at Frontiers in Sustainable Cities informed us that a paper we've been working on - Experiential space analysis: scoring tranquil, social, and explorative places in habitable buildings - has been published in their research topic on Intelligent Systems for Sustainable Building: Balancing IEQ with Energy Efficiency. The paper is the culmination of significant effort from the various authors - Rhys, Nastaran, Jeremy, Seba, Dianne, Frederik, Mike, Liviu, Tomas, Dagmara and myself - over a couple of years.…