Through the Interface

Register today for the Autodesk DevCon 2025 in Amsterdam!

Well this is exciting: it’s now possible to register for this year’s Autodesk DevCon. It’s being held in Amsterdam from May 20th-21st and is the only Autodesk DevCon event being organized in 2025. (There will be APS-related content at Autodesk University 2025 in Nashville, of course.) I mentioned the DevCon - and the personal significance of it being held in Amsterdam - back during the CFP process. The venue is the historic Beurs van Berlage which dates from the end of the 19th century. Amsterdam is actually the cradle of modern securities trading, with the Dutch East India Company... Read more →

Season's greetings

Here we are again, at the end of another year. This time last year I posted a compilation of Autodesk’s holiday greeting messages, and I thought I should do the same for 2024. This year’s are very nice: I’ve been using the one with fairy lights for my Zoom backdrop for the last week or two, and it’s been going down a (winter?) storm. Last year I reflected on my personal year ahead a little bit - and how our son would be studying in Baltimore for the academic year between 2024 and 2025. As it happens we’re heading... Read more →

Tandem gets a timeline!

The awesome team working on Autodesk Tandem has integrated a timeline - much as we had in Project Dasher, although the implementation is different - to bring Tandem into the fourth dimension. Here’s a video describing Tandem’s Time Navigation feature: This is really exciting news for people wanting to explore historical time-series data streamed in from their facilities. Tandem now has the full set of features that once-upon-a-time allowed Dasher to be used as a “building debugger”. For more information on this exciting set of time-centric features, head on over to the forum post. Read more →

Back in the Bay Area

What seemed like a few short weeks after Autodesk University 2024 in San Diego, last week I was back in the San Francisco Bay Area for internal Autodesk Research meetings. On the Saturday I hopped on a flight from Zurich to San Francisco. The flight itself was comfortable enough - at least it was direct. I love arriving at SFO. It brings back all kinds of memories of when we lived in the Bay Area back in 2000-2003. The sun was setting as I took a Lyft into downtown SF. I stayed one night at Hotel G, which was... Read more →

Measuring the feeling of architecture: an article about our collaboration with The Bentway

A year or so ago I posted about our collaboration with The Bentway, and how it kicked off some really interesting research into combining qualitative and quantitative data collected during efforts to measure the human experience of the built environment. Members of our team have been working hard with our talented research communications colleagues to create this interesting, in-depth article describing the collaboration. It complements the existing project page that has been up for a while now. Between these two pages we now have a couple of videos describing the project. The first shorter overview was from last year:... Read more →

Submit your Autodesk DevCon Europe 2025 class proposals

As I mentioned after the announcement at AU 2024, I was thrilled to see an Autodesk DevCon happening back in the fine city of Amsterdam. It’ll be held from May 20-21, 2025. The last one I attended was the week (maybe a few days more) after I joined Autodesk, back in August of 1995. I wasn’t actually presenting at that first one, if memory serves me right, I was assisting my colleague Jim Tinney with his presentation about the Autodesk WorkCenter API. The event was held in a super-fancy Japanese hotel in Amsterdam - at least it certainly seemed... Read more →

Dogs of Autodesk

Autodesk loves its dogs. You might say it’s in the company’s DNA. One of my favourite internal Slack channels is #fun-dogs-of-autodesk (the “fun” prefix just indicates it’s not business-related). Susan Taylor posted a link to a CBS flashback video there yesterday, which speaks to our long history of welcoming furry friends into the workplace. There are lots of familiar faces in this video: Lynn Levy, Linda Saldana and Patti Harris (who very sadly passed away some years ago). I worked with them all in the 90s/00s in some capacity, so this was a real “blast from the past”. By... Read more →

AU 2024 Days 2 and 3

After a great first day of Autodesk University - and it's preceding Dynamo Day - it was time for Days 2 and 3. After breakfast and an internal meeting, I headed to the Expo to watch the Day 2 General Session. It wasn’t quite as impressive as seeing it in the mainstage venue itself, but it was convenient being able to sit at a table and write up the last blog post. There’s something about the view from the escalators that made me want to continually snap this photo! I headed up the escalators to attend Ray Wang's Theater... Read more →

Gearing up for AU 2024

We’re once again in the craziness before the storm (hmm - wasn’t there meant to be some calm?!?) that is Autodesk University. Requests for meetings are gradually filling up calendars… from my side it’s looking like another busy (but very fun) event. As a reminder, here are the classes that I’ll be part of, in some capacity this year. The class on extending Forma - where I’m co-speaking - has the slides and handout posted, in case you want to check it out ahead of time. In anticipation of this year's event (and the chance to connect with academic... Read more →

Toronto

Last Monday I left my son in Baltimore and headed back to Dulles for a short flight to Toronto to attend internal meetings with our research team. I didn't feel like fighting public transport for 3+ hours to get from Baltimore to Dulles, so took the easy (and much more relaxing) path of taking an Uber. I was there in less than 90 minutes - a not insignificant time saving. I really wish it was more convenient to take public transport here. The flight to Pearson was short - a little over an hour in the air - and... Read more →

Transitioning from summer mode

Life seems to have shifted quite radically this week, as the summer here in Switzerland starts drawing to a close. A Sunday morning storm reset the temperature to something more autumnal (although these are looking to climb again gradually - we’re not completely done with warm days here, thankfully) and all of my three children started their respective schools again on Monday. The two youngest are once again in the same institution - they’re in the first and last years of our local “lycée” (the Denis-de-Rougement in Neuchâtel), which is the three years of post-mandatory schooling that often precedes... Read more →

Sign up for AU2024 classes today! Here are some suggestions.

The class catalog for Autodesk University 2024 has been live for a week or two already, with attendees being able to bookmark sessions ahead of the ability to enroll fully. Well, today’s the day that enrollment opens properly, so have at it! Classes often fill up quickly, so doing it sooner can certainly be better than waiting. I also have a few suggestions if you’re at a loss for what to choose. These are all classes that I or my research team are involved in, of course. That’s just how things work around here. :-) It turns out there’s... Read more →

Dorset and London

In the last post I wrote about our recent time in Brittany and Cornwall. Something I find very striking about the English countryside is the thatching on (some of) the rooves. This also apparently exists in Brittany, but seems to be more rare. I'd been speculating about the amount of upkeep needed on a thatched roof and then we came across one being replaced. I suppose you could call it a cottage industry! (Groan.) It turns out a thatched roof can last as long as 40 years - if maintained well - although the ridge will probably need replacing... Read more →

Brittany and Cornwall

We're just back from a fantastic 2+ week roadtrip to France and the UK. I'll talk about the initial part of the trip today and the rest of it in the next post. Our trip towards the UK started on Friday July 5th with a trip to the vet. Dogs entering the UK have to have documented proof of having a de-worming pill administered by a vet less that 120 hours (5 full days) before departure. As our ferry from Roscoff to Plymouth was scheduled for Wednesday July 10th at 9am, we were within the window by taking Daisy... Read more →

The Autodesk Design & Make EduHack

There’s a fun virtual event happening at the end of September, the Autodesk Design & Make EduHack. It’s for students who know some programming - whether studying Computer Science or another STEM discipline - and would like to get connected with Autodesk and learn how to use Autodesk Platform Services. The event is fully virtual - participants will use tools such as Zoom and Slack to communicate about their projects - and should be a great way to meet folks at Autodesk and accelerate skill development. The hacking will take place from September 27-29, 2024, and the after a... Read more →

Autodesk DevCon 2024 in Munich

A full week has now passed since more than 500 people were in Munich for the Autodesk DevCon 2024, and yet I'm only now finding time to put proverbial pen to paper. It's just been really busy, but I'll talk more about why at some point in a future post. For this year's event I opted to take the train from Neuchatel to Zurich and then from there on to Munich. In theory that's 5.5 hours from city to city, but that's not really accounting for delays due to the unreliable Deutsche-Bahn network. (That's not me being all “Swiss”about... Read more →

Getting ready for the Autodesk DevCon in Munich

On Monday I’ll be taking the train across to Munich for the 2024 version of the Autodesk DevCon in Europe. I’ll be around at the event on Tuesday and Wednesday, heading back on Thursday morning. If you’re going to be at this year’s DevCon, please do say “Hi”! Read more →

Why I love my job

A quick post today to shamelessly plug the company I've spent so much of my life working for, and more specifically for the organization where I’ve worked most recently, Autodesk Research. This video was compiled from - among other footage - interviews done at Autodesk University 2023. It also happens to include quite a bit of footage for the From Steps to Stories exhibit we created in partnership with The Bentway. If you're interested in coming to work at Autodesk, you can search through the currently open job postings via our careers site. Thanks for watching. :-) Read more →

TechX 2024

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... Read more →

Back in Las Vegas for TechX 2024

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... Read more →