Through the Interface

Learn about combining APS and WebAssembly at Autodesk DevCon Europe

While at the time of writing I’m not yet on the official speaker list, I’m happy to say that I will be presenting a session at the Autodesk DevCon that’s being held in Amsterdam from May 20th-21st, 2025. I’ll also be attending the Dynamo Hackathon on May 19th as a warm-up. My session is entitled “Supercharge your browser-based APS applications with WebAssembly” and will explore how you can take C++ libraries and build them into WebAssembly modules to bring impressive capabilities to your browser-based Autodesk Platform Services applications. Over the last few years I’ve spent quite a bit of... Read more →

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 →

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 →

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 →

AU 2024 Days 0 and 1

On Sunday morning I headed across to Geneva Airport for my trip to Autodesk University 2024 in San Diego.The trip itself didn’t start very smoothly: I couldn't check in online - I suspect having two passports, only one of which has a valid US ESTA - meant that the airline flagged me for manual review. I really need to be more careful with my API (not the one I work with usually ;-) in future. Anyway, this check-in fail led to a cascade of irritations, from having to pay for a seat (to avoid being assigned a middle seat... 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 →

Using web workers to run intensive browser-side analyses in Autodesk Forma

The topic for this post relates to a project I’ve been working on for a few weeks, now. We’ve taken a complex set of spatial analyses - that use our favourite voxel-based architectural space analysis Dynamo package, VASA - and have translated them to work directly in the browser. (This translation process isn’t really the subject of this series, but it’s pretty interesting, nonetheless, and it’s mostly what I was working on during the recent trip to Munich for the DevCon. Most of the Dynamo code was fairly easy to translate, although things like the automatic lacing of nodes... 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 →

Left to My Own Devices: I join the TRXL podcast for episode 152

Some weeks ago I joined Evan Troxel for a couple of hours to chat about my journey and some of the projects I’ve worked on. I’ve enjoyed the TRXL podcast for some time, so it was a real honour to be invited on. Our discussion has just been published as episode 152. If you prefer video, here’s the version from YouTube: Evan’s a great interviewer: I enjoyed the session a great deal and I hope you do, too. Listening back to it I realize there’s a lot more we could have talked about… hopefully Evan will invite me back... Read more →

Autodesk DevCon 2024 events announced

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,... Read more →

AEC Hackathon Zurich Edition 2024

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... Read more →

Swissbau 2024

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).... Read more →

Come and build a Forma extension in Oslo

Happy New Year to everyone reading this blog. I hope that those of you who had time off enjoyed it to the max: I certainly did. Mixing metaphors gratuitously, I’m now back in the saddle and trying hard to get my head back in the game. Here’s a fun topic to get the year started: Håvard Høiby from the Forma team has posted about an event that’s coming up in Oslo from February 13-14, 2024. It’s called an Extendathon: a public Hackathon (although if you want to treat it like an APS Accelerator and work on your own company’s... Read more →

AU 2023 class materials: Monitoring and Visualizing Data from the MX3D and Dar Smart Bridges

After yesterday’s post pointing folks to the material for my first class at AU 2023, here’s the material for the second one, which I co-presented with Pete Storey. I only have this photo from outside the classroom for this session: But I did get to hang out with Pete before we flew back to our respective European ports on the Thursday after AU was over. Here's the summary without audio: Here’s the material posted for the class on the AU website: Class recording Presentation slides Handout Read more →

Autodesk DevCon 2023 in Munich - Part 2

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... Read more →

Autodesk DevCon 2023 in Munich - Part 1

This is a two-part series covering last week’s Autodesk DevCon in Munich. I ended up choosing to write the series chronologically - so readers get a sense of the event’s flow - and found it was long enough to split into two: there was just so much to talk about! On Sunday of last week I once again hopped on the train to Zurich and then the Flixbus to Munich, heading across for the European instance of this year’s Autodesk DevCon series. Children in Bavaria headed back to school last week, so there was quite a lot of traffic... Read more →

AU class registrations so far

As mentioned in the last post, it’s now possible for people to sign up for their AU classes. And it’s really worth taking the time to do so, as some classes are filling up quickly. Despite being held at a ridiculously early time on the first day of the conference, my first class is already 88% full, for instance (there are 141 registered and the capacity of the room it’s currently assigned to is 160). I see that 300+ people have this session in their list of favourites, so if you do want to attend then I recommend signing... Read more →

The public demo of Project Dasher is going offline

This milestone has crept up on me, over the last few months. I guess I’ve been putting off thinking – and blogging – about it. Earlier this year we made the decision to wind down development and support of the time-series database that serves as the back-end for Project Dasher. (Fun fact: this project was originally codenamed Blitzen – the name of a reindeer that was part of the “back-end” for Dasher on Santa’s sleigh – and eventually became known internally as Data 360.) Anyway, it was time to wind it down, both because of the widespread availability of... Read more →

Register today for Autodesk DevCon 2023 in Munich

Photo © Michael Šubák from Pixabay Hopefully those of you interested in attending the Autodesk DevCon 2023 in Munich, Bavaria, were able to save the date of September 11th-12th. Well, it’s now possible to register for the event. There is an attendance fee – with early-bird pricing of 180€ up until July 30th, with the price going up to 300€ and then 360€ at the event itself – but hopefully there are fewer capacity limits on attendance than in SF (one of the advantages of not being on a boat ;-). It’s a fun time to be in Munich,... Read more →