Autodesk
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It's an exciting time to be a developer working with Autodesk technology. For my entire career at Autodesk, I've been a platform guy at a product company: while much of AutoCAD's success, over the years, can be indirectly attributed to the existence and use of a rich set of APIs, Autodesk has largely (and this is of course a gross generalisation) approached the exposure of APIs as an afterthought, or at least a secondary activity. Some teams have been better than others at building a platform and then a product based on top of it – a shining example is…
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This is cool: yesterday President Barack Obama – on what is likely to be his last visit as POTUS to Germany – visited the Autodesk stand at the Hannover Messe (the largest industrial trade show in the world) alongside German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Here's a picture of them meeting with Autodesk's Roland Zelles and para-cycling world champion, Denise Schindler: (Photo source: Adam Berry/Getty Images Europe) Here's another shot, this time via the Twitter feed of Autodesk France:
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Preparations are in full swing for the Forge DevCon being held in San Francisco on June 15-16, 2016. Fort Mason is going to be transformed into a Mecca for software developers serving the AEC and Manufacturing industries (or people simply wanting to know more about the Autodesk platform technology). As I've mentioned a few times, I'm in charge of the speaker track for Virtual and Augmented Reality. We have some great speakers lined up: Tony Parisi (one of the inventors of VRML, back in the day) will be talking about WebVR and glTF, Josh Carpenter will be talking about User…
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A few days ago, Scott Sheppard wrote an interesting blog post entitled "Why does Autodesk have a Labs?". I tweeted it, as I found it did a good job of describing not only the rationale behind Autodesk Labs, but other important customer touch points such as the Beta program and Autodesk Research. With my completionist hat on I'd probably expand the touch points to include how we connect with Major Account customers – particular via Autodesk Consulting and our Enterprise Support teams – as this is also a way that product features and defined and delivered. In fact, I'd probably…
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The tracks have now been posted for the upcoming Forge DevCon in SF on June 15-16, 2016: Forge Basics AEC (including BIM and Generative Design) Manufacturing – Design Manufacturing – Making (including 3D printing and subtractive) Manufacturing – Manage (including PLM, ERP and more) Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality Internet of Things Business Development To give people an idea of the content, we've pulled together about 35 class descriptions of the 60 or so we expect to schedule. I'm managing the VR/AR speaker track, so I've been spending time reaching out to and signing up speakers for the 8 or so sessions…
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After a pretty late night on Monday – I stayed to help clear up after the evening Swiss Tech Talk – I managed to grab a few hours of sleep before getting up early, yesterday, to head across to Zurich for meetings at ETH. I'd been invited by Philipp Mueller (from our Education team) and Peter Schlipf (from ADN) to meet with a few different groups at ETH. I was happy to see Jeremy Tammik also came along for the first meeting. It's that first meeting that I really wanted to talk about, today. It was with Dr Philippe Block,…
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Yesterday I had the honour of presenting a Swiss Tech Talk in Autodesk's Neuchatel office. I've attended a number of these events over the last year or so – on such diverse topics as Bluetooth, IP issues related to the cloud and IoT, and the changing face of management consulting – so it was a great pleasure to be invited by the Swiss Tech Association to deliver a session on behalf of Autodesk. I figured the audience wouldn't be interested in hearing about AutoCAD APIs – sure, I find this fascinating, but different strokes and all that – so I…
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After a nice week on the slopes – children in Neuchâtel have their annual "semaine blanche" around March 1st, the day the canton celebrates becoming a republic – I eased back into work this morning by heading across to Geneva for the 86th "Salon de l'Auto". I was there when the doors opened so I could make it home for a late lunch. As usual there was plenty of shiny on display at this year's show. I liked the fact that I could watch the reflection in the paintwork of a physical car of a video that was certainly computer-generated…
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Registration is now open for the Forge Developer Conference being held at Fort Mason in San Francisco on June 15 & 16, 2016. This event marks a significant shift for Autodesk, as we march towards a future where the majority of software is delivered via the web – and is accessible via web-services. We're still very much at the beginning of this journey and this conference is a great opportunity to be part of it: you can get in on the ground floor and participate actively in this important industry shift. We're expecting upwards of 1,100 developers (from more than…
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As part of the restructuring that went on at Autodesk, last week, I have a new role. This isn't a bad thing, thankfully: in fact it's the opposite… it's something I've been working towards for several years. I've been in the AutoCAD team for the last 4 years and was in the Autodesk Developer Network team for my 16+ years at Autodesk prior to that. These were great environments for me, for quite different reasons, but my ultimate interests lie in where the company (and the broader industry) is heading, technology-wise… one reason I've always felt drawn to the work…