This year’s Autodesk Technical Summit had a couple of fantastic parties. After all, the event’s raison d’être is – beyond inspiring employees with excellent technical content, much of which I’ll be going through offline during the coming weeks – to get a bunch of introverts to speak to each other. One was held at The Roof Gardens / Babylon – a rooftop venue with live flamingoes in central London (wait, what?) – while the other was held at that venerable Londonian institution Madame Tussauds.
Madame Tussauds is one of the most visited tourist attractions in London, and has been for the better part of 200 years. People used to visit to get a sense for how celebrities look in real life, nowadays they go to take selfies for sharing on social media. Which in itself is quite interesting: that a wax museum has managed to continually find relevance in a world chock-full with digital technology. I fully admit I had a lot of fun taking and sharing selfies: you can see many of them here.
Towards the end of the evening, a colleague told me about a roped off section of the exhibit housing characters from the Star Wars films. He’d managed to sneak in and take a quick look, and I was determined to do likewise. Initiallly I wondered why it was roped off, but then I realised it was probably a good move: several hundred geeks dosed with alcohol at a Star Wars exhibit? What could possibly go wrong? :-)
Anyway, I figured that having one or two surreptitious (and very respectful) visitors wouldn’t be a problem, so I snuck in and took a few photos:
It was a great way to finish up another incredible Tech Summit. I hope I’ll get the chance to go to next year’s!