Autodesk
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This week I'm up in the mountains with my family. It's my younger children's winter half-term break, but as I do have a few meetings to attend during the week I decided to only take half days off: snowboarding in the morning and working in the afternoons. I found some time between meetings to work on the VASA inside Forma prototype. My goal for the week was to have the visibility cones displayed for our proposal building - something we saw in the last few posts - intersect with the surrounding geometry, whether other buildings or greenery of some kind.…
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This week I've been continuing some of the work I did during the recent Forma Hackathon in Oslo. Part of this was using the Forma Elements API to extract information about buildings included in the "proposal" being developed. For the Hackathon I'd hardcoded the size of the buildings - the number of floors and the heights of each floor - but the Forma team (thanks, Vilde!) has been helping me figure out how to get this information from Forma. In a nutshell, it's possible to get the grossFloorAreaPolygons for the building of interest and then analyze the associated data: the…
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On Monday I headed to Zurich airport with our eldest son to hop across to Oslo. He's between semesters at Uni - waiting for his exam results to trickle in - and it's great we're getting the chance to get a change of air for a few days.It's rare that I sit in a window seat, so I was sure to capture the view as we left Zurich... … and arrived in snowy Oslo. The weather had impacted our trip very slightly - a 30-minute delay to our 2-hour flight - but we were still happy to touch down in…
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I woke up this morning to the sad news that Autodesk's founder and first CEO, John Walker, has died. You can find the announcement and brief obituary here. I can't claim to have known John very well, despite us living less than 15km from each other in Switzerland. I did spend a very memorable evening with him back in September of 2008, which led to this series of posts about Autodesk's early history: Part 1 - Autodesk's early history Part 2 - AutoCAD's architecture & APIs Part 3 - Autodesk's eco-system and strategy Part 4 - Past and future opportunities…
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Photo by Vecteezy My team has a number of internships posted for the coming summer. If you or a family member is interested in working at Autodesk Research - something I can strongly recommend - then an internship is a great way to see whether we're a good fit. Intern, Machine Learning & Computational Design Intern, AI for Architecture, Engineering & Construction Intern, Neuroscience for Architecture There are many more internship positions posted on the Autodesk Careers site, too, both in other parts of Research and the broader company. Be sure to check them out!
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This post is a bit different from my usual fare. Susanna Holt, a colleague I've known for more than two decades - and have a huge amount of respect for - recently posted on LinkedIn about an encounter we had soon after we first met. She was amazing throughout the process of sharing the information: she made it anonymous, was unnecessarily complimentary and even made sure I was fine with it being posted. So I have no idea why I feel the need to post something here. It's just a bit of an itch I feel like scratching, I suppose. I'll…
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On Monday afternoon I received a message from my friend Sven Amiet asking whether I'd be going to Swissbau 2024. I had some sense it was happening this year (it happens every other one), but I hadn't realised it was this week already. In any case I checked my meeting schedule - and found that I didn't have anything important - and decided to head across to Basel on Tuesday morning. It's always impressive to arrive at Basel's Messeplatz by tram. The last time I'd been here was for Swissbau 2020 (I skipped the one held 2 years ago). Once…
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Happy New Year to everyone reading this blog. I hope that those of you who had time off enjoyed it to the max: I certainly did. Mixing metaphors gratuitously, I'm now back in the saddle and trying hard to get my head back in the game. Here's a fun topic to get the year started: Håvard Høiby from the Forma team has posted about an event that's coming up in Oslo from February 13-14, 2024. It's called an Extendathon: a public Hackathon (although if you want to treat it like an APS Accelerator and work on your own company's project,…
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This may well be my last post of 2023, so I thought I'd take the time to say a quick thank you to all of who have read and commented on this blog (whether here or on social media channels) over the course of the year. I don't post as much as I once did - due to the nature of my role, these days - but every interaction with the broader community is precious to me. So here's a little GIF of Autodesk's seasonal greetings cards to say "thanks". 🙂 Looking forward to next year… we've just heard that…
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It feels good to be easing into the end of the year after a hectic - but fantastic - AU 2023. For me it started with the Autodesk Switzerland holiday gathering in Bern.I was able to catch up with Jeremy Tammik, who I'm happy to say is recovering very well after a 6m (!) fall. The week after I was invited along to the Lausanne Christmas Market for some hot wine and fondue with the team - and other fellow interviewees - from the Conversation Constructive podcast. (My episodes will be airing in the new year, in case you speak…