We sat down with Augusto Goncalves from the Forge Partner Development team. He shares his background and what he is most excited about for Forge DevCon this November. Get to know him below and find him at:
- Follow him on Twitter @AugustoMaia
- Catch him at the Forge Learning Labs at Forge DevCon Las Vegas
- And at Autodesk University he'll be hanging out at the Forge DevLab which will be held at the center of the AU expo hall
Now let's get to know Augusto!
Can you tell me your name and what you do at Autodesk?
My name is Augusto Goncalves. I am a Forge API evangelist for the Forge team, and I’ve been at Autodesk for almost 11 years now. I started with desktop API support, now in the last few years I’ve been moving to cloud support and more recently last week, promoted to manager on my team.
Tell me a little bit more about your background?
My major was civil engineering. When I finished that, I started doing a master’s degree in software engineering, and right after university I joined Autodesk. This happened because during my bachelors, I was working with an undergraduate researcher with computer graphics and technology that’s really correlated with AutoCAD and Autodesk technology. At the time, this professor at the university was a partner of Autodesk, so he recommended me to look at this opportunity at Autodesk. When I was finishing my masters, he sent me the information about the position and I started discussing with the person that would be my manager and decided to join. I finished my masters, and the next week I started the job.
Can you go over a bit of your area of expertise and what you specialize in?
I work closely with partners to help them adopt our best technologies. That goes from showing them what we have, showing how to use it, helping them getting it to work, and at the end, also helping them sell. My team and myself do that by having formal meetings with the customers to showcase what we have, presenting at the events to show Autodesk technology and how we can help them solve problems. We also engage a lot with the sales team to make sure that when we are selling the product, which is a customer offering, we can also sell the technology and how that can be customized side by side. So we start by advertising what we do and evangelizing what we do. Later on we start doing intensive trainings and workshops; presenting in the more technical events, and then follow up after that and provide technical support. If our customer wants to sell to a broader audience, we help them put it on our app store so they can reach our customers. Our customers sometimes need something specific, so a partner can help with that specific need.
What do you like about Forge and being part of the Forge team?
What I like the most is that there is no long term project. We don’t work on one project for a very long time; it's usually very small engagements with customers. Usually I engage with a customer for 1 or 2 days and then move to the next, and come back to the customer again if that’s needed. And that’s something that’s really refreshing; having that kind of new project and new things to do all the time. It’s not something that’s always the same thing. I’m not saying that is bad to do the same thing, but I just really like doing different projects every day and every week.
What are you looking forward to (or hope to see at Forge DevCon)?
One thing that we are working this time is to have a beginner’s track, and that will be in a series of labs. There will be 5 labs on Monday, throughout the whole day. What we’re trying to do with these labs is to make sure that they have a beginning, middle, and end. They have a story and workflow with them. So, if someone wanted to follow all 5 labs, they will leave these labs with a very good understanding of how it works and what they can do. I think this is the first time we’re doing something like this and I’m very excited to be part of that. At the end of the 5 classes, people will most likely accomplish something interesting from that.
We’re trying to cover 5 topics from zero to something, so each lab is independent; independent in a way so people can follow just one, but they complement each other as they cover all major areas of the Forge APIs. I will be teaching one or two labs, but I’ll be overseeing and coordinating the whole track to make sure they are aligned.
Check out all the Learning Labs below
Have you been to Forge DevCon before? If yes, can you tell me about a memorable moment you had?
I’ve been to all of them. I think the first one was really interesting because we had a 3D web-fest. It was something that was really different to have at a developer conference like that, because usually these conferences always had classes, labs and workshops, etc. But the web-fest was like a party. The web-fest was something very non-traditional for a conference, and I liked it a lot. Instead of having presentations, we asked artists to present something fun. Each one presented for 5 minutes. For example, people presented games, music; things that were a bit more artistic but using 3D web technology. It needed to be very geeky and technical, but it must be artistic as well.
I presented in the second one, and what I did was I had a big monitor showing all the seats in the exhibit hall and I asked everyone to raise their phones. I was using the big screen to color code all the phones and draw some patterns in the audience.
