Stoking the Forge

It’s an exciting time to be a developer working with Autodesk technology.

For my entire career at Autodesk, I’ve been a platform guy at a product company: while much of AutoCAD’s success, over the years, can be indirectly attributed to the existence and use of a rich set of APIs, Autodesk has largely (and this is of course a gross generalisation) approached the exposure of APIs as an afterthought, or at least a secondary activity. Some teams have been better than others at building a platform and then a product based on top of it – a shining example is the Object Modeling Framework, upon which AutoCAD Architecture and MEP are based – but there are many cases where APIs have simply had to be retrofitted. Revit’s a great example of a product that fits into this category: it was definitely not architected as a platform when the company was acquired by Autodesk, but over the years the Revit team has done an amazing job of turning that around, building a robust platform…