Through the Interface

A visit to the MTC

On Sunday night I hopped back across to Birmingham airport in the UK in order to visit the Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC) in Coventry on Monday. The weather has been gorgeous in the UK for the last month or more, so everything was a little parched. That, in combination with the fact England was still in the running for the World Cup, meant the country seemed imbued with optimism: seemingly welcome respite from the Brexit-related anguish the UK has been suffering since the EU referendum. After a nice dinner with old friends and a quick sleep at a hotel,... Read more →

Class recordings from AU London 2018 are now available online

The class recordings from this year’s Autodesk University held in London’s Tobacco Dock are now available for your viewing pleasure. Here’s the recording of the class I presented: If you’re interested in going a little deeper into the technical aspects of how we’ve used Autodesk’s Forge platform in Dasher 360, then I recommend watching this class from the Forge DevCon at AU 2017 in Las Vegas, where my colleague Simon Breslav presented similar material – but with greater depth – for an audience made up primarily of developers: We have a number of ongoing projects related to Dasher 360,... Read more →

Just a few weeks until the AEC Hackathon in Berlin

On July 20-22, 2018 I’ll be attending the AEC Hackathon in Berlin. Here’s some information about the event: The AEC (Architecture, Engineering and Construction) Hackathon is a weekend of geeking at its finest. It gives those designing, building and maintaining our built environment, the opportunity to engage, collaborate and interact on multiple aspects of the building industry. Not all built environment professionals have to code or have much background with tech. Just come with your knowledge, an open mind, collaborative spirit, and willingness to solve Mon-Fri problems leveraging various kinds of technology. We’ve shaped an exhilarating Program on Robotics,... Read more →

Voting for Autodesk University class proposals

The call for proposals for Autodesk University 2018 has ended and people have the opportunity for vote for their favourite classes. Head on over to this page and start voting for the classes you’d like to see at AU 2018. From my side, I’ve submitted three different class proposals for AU 2018. I don’t expect (or want!) them all to make the cut, but I’d be happy to receive your votes for the ones that interest you most. My favourite proposal is actually a class that would have 3 speakers, two from Autodesk and one from Van Wijnen. The... 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 →

AU London 2018

After all the fun of the Autodesk World Cup in Bordeaux, it was off to London for my first-ever non-US Autodesk University. (I nearly made it to AU Sydney and AU India during last year’s big trip, but I somehow managed to miss both events by a week or so… next time we do a “once in a lifetime” trip I’ll be sure to check the AU international schedule when planning it. ;-) Arriving in London on Sunday morning, I had the chance to catch up with Simon, an old friend from university who lives and works near Windsor.... 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 →

Forge Accelerator in Barcelona

I’m back in Barcelona for this spring’s Forge Accelerator. It’s been an interesting week: I arrived on Tuesday morning – having missed the first day in an attempt to shave a little time off my June travel craziness – and arrived to find a number of attendees working on projects related to (and inspired by) the work we’ve done in Dasher 360. This is really encouraging… I’m thrilled to see others using Forge to tackle the kind of problems Dasher was always intended to help address. Onwards! The weather on Tuesday wasn’t great – a little windy and grey... Read more →

AU classes and Forge events

I’m on the train, heading to Geneva airport for my trip across to Barcelona for the latest Forge Accelerator. It seems there’s a good crowd in the room, already, so it should be a fun week. Yesterday I submitted two classes for Autodesk University 2018 in Las Vegas: I wonder what proportion of classes are submitted on the last day of the CFP period, and whether this number is stable, year after year. I usually try to submit my own classes earlier, but this year things have been a little hectic, for some reason. The first class I submitted... Read more →

SimAUD 2018

On Monday afternoon I flew back across to the Netherlands, this time from Bern airport. My main purpose for this trip was to attend the Symposium on Simulation for Architecture and Urban Design, or SimAUD, in Delft. I’ve been staying at an Airbnb a little way out of the centre of town, the advantage being I’m just across from a really pretty park. Delft is a university town and is a bit like a smaller, easier version of Amsterdam. There are canals everywhere… … and almost everyone seems to travel around by bike: I rented a bike from a... 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 →

NEST in Zürich

Yesterday I headed across to Zürich for a number of different meetings. One that I wanted to talk about on this blog is my visit to Empa, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, and – in particular – their NEST building. NEST is a testbed and showcase for emerging techniques in the construction and operation of buildings. They have a heavy focus on modularization, pre-fabrication and robotics. I’d been invited to visit by Reto Largo, Director of NEST, along with Philipp Mueller from Autodesk’s Education team. Reto wanted to hear about Dasher 360, while I wanted... Read more →

One man’s trash... Bjarne Stroustrup’s The C++ Programming Language

I came across this classic tome while wandering the halls of the Neuchatel office, this week. It’s one I remember reading when in my last year at University (in fact I’m almost certain I have a copy gathering dust in my basement). This particular volume once belonged to James Carrington (at least that’s my best guess from a Post-It on the inside that mentions his first name), who was an early member of the Developer Support team at the ESC (European Software Centre) in Neuchatel, way back when. This edition is from 1986, which I’m pretty sure makes it... Read more →

Autodesk TechX 2018

This week I’ve been in Detroit for Autodesk’s annual internal share-fest, TechX. In previous year’s we’ve had Technical Summits and X-Summits (for eXperience), but this year is the first combined event welcoming 1,000 Autodesk employees to the Motor City. A lot of the content from the event is – of course – internal, but here are some shots I can share. Being a Delta hub, flights to Detroit from my part of the world mostly seem to go via Amsterdam or Paris. In fact I’m heading out via Schipol and back via Charles-de-Gaulle. In an attempt to mitigate the... Read more →

Migrating Dasher 360 to use the Forge viewer v4.2 - Part 2

Last week I mentioned the effort to update Dasher 360 to use v4.2 of the Forge viewer (the most recent version, at the time of writing, and a fairly big jump from our previously-used version, v3.2.1). Here’s how Dasher 360 is now looking after these various changes: In this post I’m going to give more details of what specifically was involved in refreshing Dasher 360 to the latest Forge viewer, in the hope it’ll help people make decisions around their own use of the viewer and hopw/when they migrate their applications. Background As we’ve developed Dasher 360, we’ve done... Read more →

One man’s trash… T-shirts from Autodesk Neuchatel

Here’s some fun memorabilia from Autodesk’s Neuchatel office: T-shirts from a couple of different events held in recent years. Both are brand-new and have never been worn. The first comes from an internal event that was held back in 2015 to highlight the importance of taking security (particularly product and information security) seriously. The T-shirt is red and of size XXL: The second comes from the first Design Night Switzerland held at the end of 2016. The theme for this event was robotics, so there’s a picture of a robot on the back. the T-shirt is white and of... Read more →

The Forge DevCon (and AU) 2018 call for proposals is now open!

This year will be the 3rd edition of the Forge DevCon. Once again it’s being held in Las Vegas on the Monday before Autodesk University 2018 starts, which for this year means November 12th, 2018. The “call for proposals” website is now live, and will remain open until June 11th. If you’re interested in submitting a class for this year’s DevCon then head on over: we’d love to hear from you! This year’s event will have the following tracks: Forge Platform and Roadmap Getting started with Forge and Forge APIs Community stories and case studies General web programming Complementary... Read more →

More on AutoCAD Web at Google I/O

After the previous day’s excitement of seeing AutoCAD Web on mainstage at the Google I/O developer keynote, on Wednesday our very own Marcus O’Brien, Senior Product Line Manager in the AutoCAD team, took to the stage during another session at Google I/O – entitled “Building the Future Web with WebAssembly” – to talk a bit more about AutoCAD’s history and the path that led to this latest incarnation of AutoCAD Web. Here’s a video of the session. It’s probably worth watching more of this one, but for your convenience I’ve set the below video to start with the AutoCAD... Read more →

AutoCAD Web featured at Google I/O

As a great way to demonstrate the promise WebAssembly holds for software developers, AutoCAD Web was showcased during yesterday’s developer keynote at Google I/O. This is well-deserved recognition of the important work done by the AutoCAD team on the Fabric project (and on AutoCAD Web itself, of course). Congratulations to all those involved! Read more →