Thanks for all the interactions, yesterday. April 1st is really one of my favourite days of the year: there’s lightheartedness and creative energy everywhere you look. But all good things come to an end – even if the years seem to tick by increasingly quickly – so it’s time for more serious matters.
Today’s post shares a couple of updates related to Autodesk’s burgeoning PaaS layer…
Firstly, the inaugural Autodesk Cloud Accelerator turned out to be wildly successful: both for the external people who attended – there were 12 proposals selected from a pool of 50, with developers focused with a fairly even split between the View & Data, BIM 360, AutoCAD I/O and ReCap Photo APIs – and the Autodesk employees supporting them.
I’ve heard from a number of people that this type of activity – where you spend 2 intensive weeks kick-starting the project and working through those early, often gnarly issues – is extremely rewarding for all involved. Our engineering teams got some great, actionable feedback, for instance.
Based on such a positive experience we’ve already planned to hold another one, (once again) in Autodesk’s San Francisco office from June 1st-12th, 2015. Head on over to the Cloud & Mobile DevBlog – or to the accelerator’s web-site – for more details, but do bear in mind that the proposal deadline is already looming: you have to submit a proposal by April 19th to qualify.
Secondly, the Autodesk Web Services Platform portal has been revamped.
You’ll find updated documentation, live sample code and testimonials from developers who are already working with our web-service APIs.
Something else to point out is the streamlined application process: people requesting an application key to use the View & Data API or AutoCAD I/O (or both) no longer have to wait for an actual person (or even multiple people) at Autodesk to approve the application. Once you’ve provided the few pieces of information that are required you’ll be notified immediately of your consumer key and secret.
All in all the experience of working with Autodesk’s Web Services Platform is getting easier, and we intend to make it more so, over time. If you haven’t already, it’s time to take a look!
