Conferences
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In my last post I mentioned my trip to Las Vegas for this year's Autodesk-internal TechX event. This post summarizes the whole week, to give a taste for how these events go. Things started on Sunday evening at the Allē Lounge on 66 roof bar at Resorts World, where Autodesk's technical leadership community got together for a welcome reception. The view was spectacular!I have made a lot of friends at Autodesk, over the years, and TechX is my main chance to reconnect with many of them. I've known Alan Quinton since my days living in the Bay Area (back in…
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It's that time off year again: our internal Autodesk geekfest (called TechX) is being held this week in Las Vegas at the Resorts World Hotel. (It's held in a different city every year.) I've come across to attend a Technical Leadership Forum on Monday, and then present a TechX session on using WebAssembly to create a Forma extension (in this case using VASA) on Tuesday. I'll also be participating in a number of other activities before heading home on Friday. As I wanted to be here in time for a reception on the Sunday night, I headed across on Saturday…
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It's that time of year again: the Call for Proposals (CFP) for Autodesk University 2024 opened on April 2nd and will stay open until the end of the month (April 30th, 11:59 PM Pacific Time, to be precise). I'll be proposing at least one class, all being well, with the hope of getting to travel to San Diego from October 15th-17th for this year's event. It'd be interesting to see AU in a new city. Fingers crossed! If you're a software developer who is thinking about submitting a proposal, then I recommend checking out this post on the Autodesk Platform…
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I know I'm late to the party on this one - if you're a software developer working in the Autodesk Platform Services ecosystem then you'll by now already have heard the news and marked your calendar - but anyway: a number of Autodesk DevCon events were announced last week. The flagship DevCon event is being held in Munich, Germany, from May 28-29, 2024. (This recognition that Europe is at the centre of the world is long overdue, just sayin'. ;-P) A satellite DevConX with more limited capacity is being held in Boston a few weeks beforehand, from May 14-15, along…
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As I mentioned last week, on Friday I headed across to this year's AEC Hackathon Zurich Edition in the city of Winterthur, about 2 hours from my home. The event was held in one of the buildings on the ZHAW campus. The space was fantastic: an old factory that was once used to maintain trains (it's just next to the train tracks going through Winterthur). I was only able to come for the first evening of the weekend's event, as I had a prior personal commitment during the rest of the weekend. Friday had a number of talks focused on…
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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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Now that the dust has settled on another Autodesk University (the best one ever?) it's a good time to revisit what brought our team to AU, this year. I realize that I've posted a lot of pictures of people wearing helmets and high visibility vests without really explaining what it was all about. Our team at Autodesk Research has been very focused on understanding the human experience of the built environment, with the ultimate goal of making our software tools better at helping our customers design human-centric spaces. Spaces that emphasize occupant well-being in its various forms. Humans are tricky:…
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My second day at this year's Autodesk University started with another lovely sunrise.After breakfast I spent an hour or so writing my Day 1 blog post in the Community Zone before I realised a queue was forming to enter the general session. I wandered over and joined it - quite near the front - and chatted with a number of people who were clearly very excited about listening to the day's guest speaker. Here are the people waiting in the Community Zone for the general session to open its doors. I found a single seat free in the third row…
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After a great trip to Stanford on Friday, we had some last-minute preparation to do for our AU exhibit at Pier 9 on Saturday morning. We headed into the office - after having to explain our way through a security cordon along the waterfront due to APEC 2023 - and printed out a bunch of legal waivers for study participants to sign. It seems APEC will be impacting our SF employees, with the offices being closed during the AU week.Enough people had warned me about craziness at SFO that I ended up at the airport well ahead of my flight…
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In the last post we took a look at the first day of last week's Autodesk DevCon in Munich. Today's post focuses on the second day and overall impressions of the event. For me day 2 of the DevCon started with a short U-Bahn trip from Goetheplatz to Harras. From the U-Bahn exit, I instinctively started walking the wrong way - I'd like to say this is easily done, but anyway - but luckily a fellow DevCon attendee coming from the other direction helped me realize my mistake. I do love the Autodesk developer community! The general session filled up…