Dubai, Hackathon Preparation and Viewer Workshop

I am in Dubai for the AngelHack Hackathon.

We held a pre-hackathon workshop on using the View and Data API last night, and we've scheduled another one here at the hackathon itself at four o'clock this afternoon.

I'll jot down my notes and the most up-to-date sexy links here to prepare.

Here are some other important upcoming events and tips for getting prepared:

• 3D Web Festival in San Francisco
• AngelHack in Dubai
• AngelHack in Athens
• Autodesk University proposals
• Preparing for a hackathon
• View and Data API tutorial and other material

3D Web Festival in San Francisco

Hey, there is this really cool event coming up in San Francisco on May 13^th, the 3D Web Festival, sponsored by Autodesk, Goo Technologies and Leap Motion:

If you know any folks in the Bay Area who might be interested in seeing and experiencing what's possible today with 3D on the web, please let them know.

AngelHack and I♥3D in Dubai

As said, I am in Dubai right now, for the first time in my life.

Here are some snapshots from wandering around Jumeirah Beach Residence yesterday, aka JBR, and behind the house of the AngelHack hackathon at the Microsoft office this morning:

Last night, we held the AngelHack Dubai Pre-Hackathon Meetup and Workshop to get all interested AngelHack Dubai Hackathon participants up to speed on the View and Data API in preparation for the awesome apps we are now creating.

Now we are doing it.

AngelHack and I♥3D in Athens

We also just held the inaugural I love 3D – Athens meetup, on April 24^th, at The Cube, Greece's biggest coworking space.

Cyrille Fauvel and Peter Schlipf presented the View and Data API, Fusion360, AutoCAD I/O and Recap360 to a group 30 enthusiastic local developers:

They loved it.

I will be going there too soon, for the Angelhack in Athens, on June 5-7.

Again, we have scheduled an AngelHack workshop meetup session on Friday evening to get us all well prepared and up to speed for the subsequent hackathon.

I am looking forward to meeting you there!

Autodesk University proposals

The Autodesk University Call for Proposals has opened.

I am already busy preparing mine   :-)

Preparing for a Hackathon

Talking about preparing, here is a nice and succinct overview of the really important points to get right to have a chance at winning a hackathon, presented this morning by Athahar Mohammed of Risery:

• [vauth.io]
• @athahar
• [pre-hackathon]
• Minimum Lovable Product
• Envision Perfect demo
• DO NOT use any new technologies, if you have not explored & mastered before
• Understand judging criteria
• [hour 1]
• Setup - Github, Bitbucket, Paas(Heroku, Azure, divshot.io), codeship.io [30 minutes]
• Use boilerplates: iOS boilerplates, Hackathon starter (node), best looking landing page (Bootstrap) [30 minutes]
• Divide and conquer
• [hacking]
• hack your way, no need of registration pages, login etc (everyone knows it can be done anyhow)
• hardcode data, API responses, everything.
• show something which is not done before.
• [during]
• Deploy, test, early, often, always
• Eat loads of food, water, take rest and have fun, in between
• [last 3 hours]
• Keep a timer: last 3 hours
• NO new feature development; only bug fixes
• Polish the demo; add some bling to UI [Flawless demo always wins over a bloated features demo]
• Go for the kill - PITCH
• [pitch]
• 1 presenter, 1 demoer
• WRITE the script and practise the demo with a TIMER
• First statement always interactive; maybe a joke, or a question to crowd; capture attention
• Revise the pitch; practise again with TIMER [leave 30 seconds buffer for nasty surprises]
• No fillers like hmm, um, uh ; Use sensible pauses instead.
• [judges]
• want to be WOW’d
• might not be technical in your field
• are dreaming about the future, show them the stars :)
• Good Luck

I think that is really good advice!

For you who prefer graphics, here are Athahar'a slides in PDF.

Of course, I still hope lots of people will be interested in trying the View and Data API in spite of the good advice above   :-)

View and Data API Tutorial and Other Material

Now for preparing my spiel this afternoon... 91 minutes to go... oops, 34 now...

So, what is the view and data API?

It enables you to present a live 3D model that any user can interact with on your web site with a minimum of fuss.

Interaction includes both the geometrical aspects such as rotate, pan, zoom, navigate, walkthrough, and – at least equally important – explore model data, structure and metadata; query properties, switch on and off certain layers or categories, etc.

The main entry page is developer.autodesk.com, providing:

• Access to the View and Data API as well as AutoCAD I/O (a different topic)
• Overview
• Live demonstrations
• Step-by-step guide
• API reference

That is the place where you can sign up and create your own secret app key to immediately access the API.

We have built tons of samples, all of them hosted on GitHub in our Developer-Autodesk repo collection.

We created a special technical landing page to provide a sample code introduction and overview.

We created a workshop tutorial to guide you through the creation of your own first app.

Here are some other interesting samples to try out live today:

• Front loader excavator machine
• VR samples for stereoscopic viewing using Google cardboard
• Gallery
• Morgan steam punk
• Stephen's chicken coop
• Lmv Rocks
• LmvDbg
• New experimental LMV Nav Test

Snoop around, explore the samples, work through the tutorial, have fun and do awasome amazing stuff!