Autodesk
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Tomorrow marks the 20th anniversary of the day I joined Autodesk. I know: it's tomorrow, not today, but then you really can't beat good Beatles lyrics (and it hopefully helps reset the cosmic balance after quoting an Olivia Newton John song in the title of the last post ;-). I already used this title – somewhat prematurely – 5 years ago, but hey. As I'm feeling a touch nostalgic, here's a BBC video about computer graphics & animation – and even CAD! – from 1983: it was around this time I first became interested in computers. I recommend watching this episode…
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I've just received an email from one of our in-house recruiters listing a number of open software development positions. I thought it was a good time to share some of these with this blog's readers, partly because people may be interested in applying, but also to shine a light on the fact Autodesk hires coders in lots of different locations. When people email or ask me about positions at Autodesk, I typically suggest they visit our careers page. This provides access to a handy tool listing the various positions open across the company: at the time of writing there are…
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Autodesk sponsors a great event, here in my home town: the Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival (NIFFF). An old friend and colleague from the UK, Nick Manning, typically comes across to talk at the event, as well as to present the Imaging the Future award: 5,000 CHF for the international competition film with the best production design. The 2015 winner was a post-apocalyptic Ethiopian movie called Crumbs. This year's festival – the 15th edition – closed its doors on Saturday. Over the years the NIFFF has really grown in stature, and regularly attracts impressive guest speakers from the film industry…
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It's time for another trip down memory lane… From time to time, I hear people talking about Autodesk's more "radical" R&D investments… whether in the consumer software space – much of which is being driven by the Maker movement – or related to the bio/nano research Andrew Hessel and team are performing at Pier 9. I can understand that to some this might seem as though Autodesk is departing from its core mission, in some way. I have a slightly different perspective on this… yes, we had perhaps 15 years of our history – largely during the Bartz era –…
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Last week I was in Singapore for our annual, internal, two-day technical summit. Upwards of 500 members of Autodesk's various engineering and technical teams gathered together at the iconic Marina Bay Sands for the event. The hotel was pretty amazing. Having been told my room number (4619), I first exited the elevator at the 4th floor. It's only then that I realised the rooms on each floor were numbered in double digits, and so my room was on the 46th! While I didn't end up making much use of the hotel's facilities – aside from the conference centre, of course…
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After the first two successful Cloud Accelerators held in San Francisco, it's time to go international. The next one, labeled a Cloud Accelerator Extension, is being held in the beautiful Czech city of Prague from September 13-18, 2015. This is a great opportunity to kick-start your development using Autodesk's PaaS infrastructure. Members of the ADN and Engineering teams – me included – will be on-hand to help you work through any development issues you hit while creating or honing your Autodesk Cloud API-integrated application. So come join me in Prague for a fun week of cloud-oriented development. All you need…
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Looks like this week is going to be all about sweat. Hopefully there won't be blood and tears to go along with it. On Friday I drove with my family across to Verona, Italy, for Autodesk's annual football (soccer) tournament. This year was incredible: 20 teams from around the world showed up with around 600 people (between the players and supporters). We had hoped that Google Maps' estimate of the length of the drive would more or less accurate at 5 hours 40 minutes, but – through no fault of Google's – it ended up taking a brutal 8 hours.…
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It's live! Our entry for the recent VR Hackathon in San Francisco has received a significant amount of spit and polish (OK, perhaps not the best mental image) over the last couple of weeks and is now ready for prime time (i.e. Beta testing ;-). Check it out at http://vrok.it! It should work well with Chrome, Firefox or Safari, although for best results I'd stick with Chrome on mobile devices. The term "vrok" is one I came up with on the trip back from San Francisco… it's a combination of an invented acronym – Virtual Reality Online Collaboration – and…
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I wanted to post on a more in-depth topic, today, but I've been heads-down working on our project from the recent VR Hackathon, getting ready to push it live. We've made really good progress over the last few days, especially considering it's only a part-time project for Lars, Oleg and myself. We've implemented per-session support and a number of other important features (Lars has also spent some serious time re-factoring the code – it's certainly more elegant than what I'd usually crank out ;-). The code is all here, in case. Here's a quick audio-less demo, to give you a…
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I spent some time back down at our local Fab Lab, today, finishing the laser cutting work for the jigsaw project I mentioned previously. Since I last mentioned it, we managed to procure some Plexiglas – in our case it was Perspex, in fact – and cut various sections of the puzzle, with each piece including an engraved word and a hole to make it into a key-chain souvenir. Today's job needed the additional size of the Fab Lab's laser cutter – theirs can cut sheets with 40cm on a side, whereas ours can only manage 30cm – as we…