Through the Interface

A visit to Kingspan in Dublin

This week I had the chance to make a long-overdue first visit to Ireland. I flew across to Dublin for meetings with Kingspan, a large building products manufacturer. Brian Glancy, Kingspan’s Head of BIM Strategy, had organised a session for the people working with BIM in the various Kingspan companies around the world. It was the first time most of the attendees had met one another, and the discussions were extremely interesting: most of the people there work with wildly different toolsets – most containing Autodesk tools, at some level, but many relying heavily on competitive products. The event... Read more →

A visit to Basler & Hofmann

Yesterday I headed across to Esslingen, a town south-east from Zurich, to meet with a large Swiss customer of ours, Basler & Hofmann. They’re an independent engineering, planning and consulting company with 600 employees in 4 countries (although most are based here in Switzerland). One of the reasons for meeting in Esslingen was the chance to visit the site of their Office Building Extension eGHA project – the winner of an AEC Excellence Award that was presented at Autodesk University 2018. Our hosts were Mathias Kuhn and Gianluca Genova, who had been in Las Vegas to receive their award,... Read more →

Forge skeletons and disappearing signs

It’s been a strange few days. It’s the very last week anyone will be working from Autodesk’s Neuchatel office. This really hit home when the Autodesk name and logo were removed from the building, last Friday. Photo credit: Estelle Ormrod I salvaged an A (the were signs on the front and back of the building, so this wasn’t the only one) for my daughter’s bedroom. It’ll be some kind of reminder of the wonderful years we’ve all spent here. The staff departures have been staggered, over the last 6 months or so: there have been leaving aperos for people... Read more →

A visit to regenHU and farewell to Philippe

I had the pleasure of a visit from Peter Schlipf of the Forge Partner Development team, this week. Peter had come across for a number of reasons, but the first “task” was to catch up with Philippe Leefsma and wish him well for the next stage in his career. We met for an “apero” and then headed into Neuchatel for a lovely farewell dinner at the historic Cardinal brasserie. It was a lovely evening, but bittersweet: I’m very happy to see Philippe moving into an interesting role at an Autodesk customer, but sad that we won’t be working together... Read more →

From Neuchatel to Appenzell

On August 1st we celebrated my first Swiss National Day as a Swiss National. After clearing up, on the 2nd, we packed our camping gear into a couple of trailers and started cycling across Switzerland, from Neuchatel towards Appenzell. Our aim for the first day was fairly modest: to go from our home to a campsite on the shore of the Lac de Bienne. We ended up fighting a couple of fierce inclines (by the side of a lake, no less!) so made much slower progress than Google Maps had predicted. (This did help us recalibrate expectations for the... Read more →

Happy August 1st!

Today is the Swiss National Day, commemorating the creation of the Old Swiss Confederacy back in 1291. It’s an important one for me, as it’s my first as a Swiss citizen. My kids have presented me with this fine creation: Yesterday we stopped down by the lake to watch fireworks and eat some traditional pea soup (or watch others eating it, in my case, as I don’t eat meat). Today the garden has been appropriately Swissified, and we’ll soon be roasting cervelas and melting raclette. After that I’ll be taking a couple of weeks off work (and blogging, although... Read more →

Our closing party

On Thursday we celebrated Autodesk’s presence in Neuchatel together, one last time, at the official office closing party. It was held at the new bar on top of the Beaulac Hotel… a fitting venue, in some ways, as this was for many of us the first place we stayed when we first visited Neuchatel for our job interviews (it certainly was mine: I stayed here back in July 1995 when I came across for my 2nd-round interview to join Autodesk UK, some years before I moved here). Anyway, the new bar is really nice, with interesting decor… … and... Read more →

Life after Autodesk [Neuchâtel]

Given the impending closure of our Neuchâtel office – we have our big closing party on Thursday afternoon, although a few teams will still have people in the office until the end of August – there are a lot of former (and soon-to-be-former) Autodeskers starting to look for jobs in the region. Most were offered jobs in either Barcelona or the new Dublin office, but – given the salary differential to work in these locations and the currently booming Swiss economy, which has around 2.5% unemployment nationwide – the vast majority have chosen to accept their termination offers and... Read more →

Autodesk Football World Cup 2018

On Friday lunchtime – after a great few days in Barcelona for the Forge Accelerator – I hopped on an EasyJet flight to Bordeaux for this year’s internal Autodesk football tournament. I was one of the lucky ones: there was a later Vueling flight – which I’d very nearly opted to take – that was cancelled because of strikes in South-Eastern France. A bunch of players and fans from the Barcelona office ended up having to rent cars and drive them to Bordeaux to participate. Apparently a number of others from the UK and Italy were also impacted and... Read more →

I <3 Hockey (but probably not the one you think)

Back in the UK, during my teenage years, I got into field hockey in a big way. I spent several winters playing hockey on frozen grass pitches around the East of England. When I went to University I played a lot more (between the 2nd and 1st teams, this time mostly on astroturf), and thoroughly enjoyed myself. Once I started working things became harder… I still managed to play a few times, but mostly ended up joining teams to play other sports: Field hockey just turned out not to be a sport I could play regularly, for one reason... Read more →

Happy Star Wars Day

To help celebrate Star Wars Day, I’ve decided to talk about an incredible concert I was lucky to be able to attend with my wife and friends last weekend. It’s funny: I remember booking tickets for the concert way back during our round-the-world trip: it was a rainy day in Sao Paolo when I found out about it and immediately snapped up seats. The event was a ciné-concert of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope held at the Théâtre de Beaulieu in Lausanne with accompaniment by the 21st Century Symphony Orchestra. I hadn’t realised before, but “film concerts”... Read more →

Celebrating a 20-year journey

When I first visited Neuchatel I instantly fell in love with the city. This was back in the summer of 1995, during my second round job interview for Autodesk. From that moment I knew I wanted to live here, but it was only in early 1998 that I had the chance to do so: a colleague had moved across to San Francisco to join the Kinetix development team, which left a Swiss-based vacancy in the European Developer Support team. I was thrilled to have the chance to move across and fill that role. During my first few weeks in... Read more →

Taking a (very cold) breath

It’s been a busy couple of months since getting back from our big trip (which, while incredible at many levels, was in itself not really a relaxing experience, all things considered). So in some ways it feels like a good time to take a break, especially as the kids have the week off school. We took the chance to head up to the Bernese Oberland for a bit of skiing and snowboarding, as we often do at this time of year. I’m working a bit in the mornings and the evenings – I have a few important projects to... Read more →

On becoming Swiss

Last week I received an important letter through the post. It was final confirmation from the Swiss Confederation that I’m being granted Swiss nationality. This is something I could have requested some time ago – due to the years I’ve been married to a Swiss person (something I lovingly refer to as “time served” ;-) – but it was the Brexit referendum that pushed me over the edge. The day after the vote I requested the forms I needed to fill out. It took me a few more months to get around to submitting them, but Brexit was definitely... Read more →

The world seen through social media (or not)

Something has been nagging at me, since returning from our world trip. Perhaps it’s best described as the impact social media is having on travel. Interestingly it’s been talked about very recently in The Guardian in an opinion piece entitled “Instagrammers are sucking the life and soul out of travel”. While we didn’t necessarily plan our trip to be able to take iconic pictures, having our own Instagram feed (which we’ve made private now that the trip is over, although I’ll accept connections if it’s obvious you’re a reader of this blog) meant that we weren’t completely immune from... Read more →

Thinking about light

A year ago I talked about my early forays into the world of home automation, mainly via Philips Hue. I’m now treating the “experiment” as a success, and have decided to invest in more lights (and another Hue bridge for our main home). While thinking about this, I decided to check on the availability of an API. Sure enough there’s a great REST API available for Philips Hue, as well as a number of SDKs. All of which has me thinking about possibilities of using Philips Hue as a way to visualize data. Just as we use Forge inside... Read more →

The end of our 6-month adventure

So, that’s it. 6 months flew by in the blink of an eye, and we’re back home in Switzerland. On the one hand it seemed to go quickly, while on the other hand we feel as though we’ve come back to a house we barely recognise full of stuff we don’t need… We each have a room of our own to sleep in (if we so choose)! And look at all those clothes! Detaching from most of your former existence – while retaining and strengthening ties to your core, your nuclear family – is an interesting experience. During the... Read more →

Cape Town

We arrived in the Cape on New Year’s Day. Leaving Swellendam we stopped by Robertson to see the house in which my wife’s grandmother grew up. A nice bit of family nostalgia. We then decided to swing by Franschhoek for a quick visit… on the way we passed by the Theewaterskloof Dam: one of the main reservoirs supplying the Cape. It was depressingly empty: the Cape has been suffering a multi-year drought, to the point that they currently have level 6 water restrictions in place. To get to Franschhoek we headed across the lovely Franschhoek Pass. Franschhoek is a... Read more →

The Western Cape

Happy New Year! Hopefully you all managed to take a break during the last few weeks; from our side we were focused on spending an enjoyable Christmas with our family in South Africa and then squeezing the last few drops out of our 6-month adventure. After Addo we spent a couple of days in Port Elizabeth, with some old friends. We visited a few beaches for walks, but the bulk of our time in P.E. was actually spent at the mall. Yes, at the mall. On our night safari in Addo, the driver had mentioned going into P.E. to... Read more →

Addo Elephant Park

This is likely to be my last post of the year, so for those of you who are still reading this in 2017, I hope you have a peaceful, relaxing holiday season and a fantastic start to 2018. If I don’t manage to post sooner, I’ll certainly do so once back in Switzerland from our 6-month round-the-world trip (I’ll be back at work on January 5th in some capacity). We were very excited about our visit to Addo Elephant National Park. While not the Kruger, it’s certainly a large, impressive park and the most easily accessible large park for... Read more →