Heading for ADN M&E Devdays & Devlab in China

This week and next week, I'll be travelling through China and Japan (next week) for the ADN Devdays & Devlab. I'll start in Shanghai, followed by Beijing.

Devdays

Devdays is a series of one day event across the world that Autodesk holds once a year where we invite members of the ADN (Autodesk Developer Network) and show the new stuff in the upcoming releases. Under NDA of course. ;-)

The whole idea of doing so is to educate development partners in advance of product changes that will affect their plug-ins and help them take decisions on future development. This is a technical conference with very little marketing verbiage, but there is information about our 2-3 years plan for development even if we cannot guarantee for sure that anything will happen as planned.

Devlab

We found there are some misunderstanding about the format of ADN DevLab. If you’re not already familiar with the format, then I hope this post will explain how Devlab works:

The ADN Devdays Conference, is our normal conference – a series of presentations on our future technology and strategy with general session in the morning and breakouts in the afternoon.

Next day, we host a Devlab which is a workshop (i.e. not a conference or a formal training class) and will be staffed by members of the ADN DevTech team and members of the Autodesk engineering teams whenever possible. The idea is that you bring your laptop, work on your code, and discuss your problems with us. Perhaps you need some general design advice; or you’d like some guidance on implementing a specific algorithm; or you’re having trouble isolating and fixing a bug in your code; or you just want to spend a day programming with Autodesk staff and your fellow ADN members available to answer your questions and chat about the products and APIs you’re using? You can come and go as you please – stay all day or just pop in when you want. If we cannot help on the spot, we will take your questions as homework and come back to you in the following week(s).

We’ll have API experts available for the following products:

• Maya
• 3ds Max
• FBX
• SoftImage (Japan only)

Please let us know if you’re interested in a product not in the above list so we can try to find someone to help you on the day (or confirm if no-one with those skills will be available). Also, it would be very helpful if you would send us details of any issue you’d like to discuss if you believe it may require particularly in-depth research – so we have the chance to prepare in advance.

Europe?

Devdays & Devlab in US, China, Japan, India – but why not Europe?

Strangely, finding a good venue in Europe where we can get at least 30 (or more) developers in a room is more challenging than anywhere else. Is it because Europeans not ready to travel for such conference, or not interested? It is very hard to tell – but if you got a proposal, I'd be happy to hear and organize that events in Europe as well.