On Friday I did my annual (well, it’s actually only the second time, but I get the feeling it’s becoming annual) trip to Winterthur for the Friday-night kick-off of this year’s AEC Hackathon Zürich.
The focus of the first set of Friday afternoon talks was on the wood industry and its challenges - a fascinating topic to hear about first-hand.
I was actually more interested by the second set of talks, which were focused on digitalization challenges, including a really nice session by Michael Drobnik from Herzog & de Meuron.
As last year there were lots of hackers present, and the organization was typically “Swiss” (i.e. everything worked).
It was once again at the ZHAW building near the railway station in Winterthur. This time I spotted a handmade model of the Watchmaking Museum in la Chaux-de-Fonds (near where we live).
Someone was showing off some construction exo-skeleton research that had come out of ETH Zürich. Looked cool!
I was mainly there to say Hi to some old friends, particularly Damon Hernandez...
… and Alex Walzer, who recently became “Dr. Alex” (congratulations, once again!).
The announcement of challenges and the formation of teams happened soon before I headed off - my February weekends are 100% allocated to being on the slopes, something I really don’t want to compromise even for an event like this.
I did stay to see Damon giving his introduction before I “sloped” off. Haha.
I was happy that I did head up, though, as I had a lot of fun snowboarding with my daughter.
And there's always another Hackathon to join. The next one in my calendar has just been announced: a Dynamo Hackathon will be held ahead of the Autodesk DevCon in Amsterdam on May 19th. Mark your calendars and be sure to arrive a day early for the conference!I’m now confirmed as a speaker for the conference proper, and have been cooking up some really neat (if I do say so myself) demos showing multi-agent simulation in Forma (and later Tandem). It’ll be a lot of fun!
