Through the Interface

The Walmsleys hit the US: Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia

In the last post I shared some experiences from the first half of our two-week trip to the United States. Now we’ll look at the second half. After leaving Bethany Beach we headed northwards along the coast, stopping at a few outlets along the way. Shopping in Delaware is presumably a thing because of the lack of sales tax. I will say that from this trip - and my son’s stay in US generally - it’s obvious that prices have gone up a huge amount over the last few years. Switzerland used to feel really expensive when compared with... Read more →

The Walmsleys hit the US: Washington DC and Delaware

We're back from a wonderful two week break in the United States. In this post and the next I'll share some pictures and talk a little about the experiences we had. Since much earlier in the year we’d planned on spending the holidays in the US with our son who's studying for an exchange year in Baltimore. This was well before it became clear that the Alps would be getting the most snow over the holiday period than we've seen in the last decade or so. A bit of a shame - we typically enjoy the Swiss slopes at... 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 →

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 →

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 →

250 years of programmable computing

This is a topic I can’t quite believe I haven’t covered at any point during this blog’s existence, as I'm such a huge fan of a) the Neuchâtel region and b) vintage computing. This year marks the 250th anniversary of the creation of the world’s first programmable computer, which also happened to be the world’s first programmable robot. This might be a bit confusing to some, especially those who associate this concept with Babbage, Turing, etc. The world’s first “computer” was a mechanical automaton that translated a “program” into (mechanical) hand-written output. So no, it’s not a general-purpose computing... 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 →

Back in Baltimore

I mentioned last time that I was going to be busy preparing and delivering a number of presentations. I’m happy to say that crazy period has mostly come to a close. It was marked on Friday with the recording of the Autodesk University 2024 class that Håvard Høiby and I will be delivering again soon in San Diego. It was a lot of fun preparing and delivering this class with Håvard, I must say. And I think people are going to really engage with the content (especially the information about Forma’s extension framework and SDK). Be sure to check... 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 →

DC and Baltimore

I haven’t been the the US purely for personal reasons for quite some time. The last time was probably on our round-the-world trip, and interestingly our first stop was in Washington DC. I’ve just flown across to Dulles, to help my sone get settled into his exchange university. I always love seeing the crazy elevator bus transport system that I haven’t yet seen anywhere else in the world. It’s like you’re in some strange parallel universe where this kind of futuristic system became widespread, back in the day. What I like less about Dulles is the immigration queue. We... 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 →

Taking stock before the summer

It’s been an interesting year, so far, at many levels, and I have no major expectation that it’s going to become less so in its remaining months. For starters there’s the weather. As someone who is walking a dog for an hour a day, I feel intimately in tune with the weather, these days. And it has sucked. Badly. Even nature seems to be rebelling at the amount of rain, which is in itself remarkable. We’re about to head off to visit friends in Brittany and family in the UK, which means it may well get worse before it... 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 →

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 →

Farewell to Jim Quanci (from Autodesk)

Last night there was a retirement party for my old friend and mentor, Jim Quanci, in the Autodesk Gallery in our 1 Market Street office in downtown San Francisco. Jim has just posted his reflections on his retirement to LinkedIn, so I thought it a good time to chime in with my own thoughts and feelings. I’ve known and worked with Jim for upwards of 25 years. Some of that has been captured in this collage I put together for the kudoboard his colleagues (past and present) put together for his retirement. I genuinely believe that Jim has had... Read more →

April 1st posts through the years

As I was “researching” last week’s April Fools’ Day post, I went back and collected links to all the April 1st posts I’ve put out on this blog, over the years. The first was back in 2008, and the 17th was last week. Here they are (hopefully) for your amusement: Unpublished AutoCAD 2009 APIs to improve application, OS and system performance Through the Interface moving from TypePad to Twitter Child’s Play: a new tool for generating 3D models from children’s drawings AutoCAD for DOS 2012 360 convergence Taking reality capture to the next level: 3D scentsing New pink theme... 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 →

John Walker leaves us

I woke up this morning to the sad news that Autodesk’s founder and first CEO, John Walker, has died. You can find the announcement and brief obituary here. I can’t claim to have known John very well, despite us living less than 15km from each other in Switzerland. I did spend a very memorable evening with him back in September of 2008, which led to this series of posts about Autodesk’s early history: Part 1 - Autodesk's early history Part 2 - AutoCAD's architecture & APIs Part 3 - Autodesk's eco-system and strategy Part 4 - Past and future... Read more →

An AEC Hackathon in Zurich this weekend

The awesome AEC Hackathon folks are running an event near Zurich this weekend, February 2-4, 2024. This Hackathon will actually be at the ZHAW campus in Winterthur - which is actually a completely different Swiss city that’s admittedly only 20 minutes away from Zurich by train. So the branding isn’t completely off, in a global sense. :-) We’re in the middle of the snowy season, here in Switzerland, so I’m “committed” to being on the slopes with my family. While I won’t be there for the weekend itself, I will be stopping by Winterthur for the Friday afternoon talks... Read more →