I thought of Autodesk as a product company that’s interested in selling of theirs products instead of growing a community of loyal developers. I was completely wrong, Autodesk treats developers as first-class citizens. Guys from Autodesk were friendly and willing to tell us as much as NDA permits about their current technology platform. I was primarily focused on technologies that they use to do 3D-models for the web, and they’d given me enough information to consider Autodesk as a big player in the 3D-visualization field.
At the same time me & Andrey Kasatkin were invited to the conference to share some of our engineering expertise. We were told that attendees don’t know much about the current state of technology, excluding Autodesk’s. I’m not sure about that, because in general questions from the audience were meaningful and sometimes even challenging. Most of the conferences I’ve been there’s always a .NET guy who’s trying to convince everyone that only MS knows how to do serious things, this one wasn’t an exception. I don’t know how Microsoft does that, but it’s embarrassing to tell someone that there’s a lot of other technologies to consider that these guys are reluctant to hear about.
We had a lot of fun.
