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Please enjoy this transcript. Autodesk's Kean Walmsley (@keanw) on prioritizing fun, freedom, and flexibility, traveling and working around the world with family, blogging, teaching, remote work, and the post-COVID world. Transcripts may contain typos. You can find the episode notes here.
0:00Kean Walmsley: In the course of teaching it as well, you also deepen your understanding of things, of lots of things. And there is this feedback loop that you create when you're seeing people progress. And you're really getting a genuine sense that you're helping people. It was very important to me, and very beneficial. In my career and the way I'm feeling about life, I have to say I'm very happy that I did start the blog. It for sure—from my perspective—has led to me having the freedom to make these changes and to do what I do now. I've kind of liked to continue developing, and growing, and doing interesting things, but it's mostly about enjoyment and less about having a goal in mind.
0:42Nono Martínez Alonso: Hey, it's Nono, and this is the Getting Simple podcast.
0:46 Welcome to the Getting Simple podcast.
0:54 Before we get started, I'd like to remind you that you can find a detailed list of episode notes, transcripts, and past episodes at gettingsimple.com, and that you can listen to this podcast wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and Overcast.
1:11 I'm also starting to upload learning videos to YouTube to teach how I do things. And we'll start live streaming in the near future, covering topics from computational design and creative coding, to design automation, machine learning, workflow optimization, or even how I make this podcast. You can find these videos if you go to gettingsimple.com/youtube and look for my learning playlist.
1:33 Hi, everyone. It's Nono here.
1:35 Today I'm excited to introduce you to Kean Walmsley.
1:39 Hi, Kean. How are you doing today?
1:41Kean Walmsley: Hi, Nono. I'm well, thank you.
1:43Nono Martínez Alonso: Kean is a researcher at Autodesk that works out of Switzerland, and has a 25 year history working for Autodesk in different roles. He actively blogs at keanw.com that's K-E-A-N-W.com sharing insights on his latest projects, travel, events, and experiments, including a generatively designed post-COVID world. Maybe we can hear more about that later. Thanks so much for being here today Kean. I'd love for you to start by telling us a bit about yourself and how you got to where you are today?
2:20Kean Walmsley: Okay. Well, thanks for having me Nono. It's really an honor to be invited on this podcast, and I'm looking forward to chatting over the next hour or so. The question is how I got to be where I am today.. Well, so going back—you know, in terms of my studies—I'm a computer science person, I suppose I studied computer science when I was at school. I always loved studying French at the same time. So I was into languages, I was into programming. And eventually—as a kid—I think my dream was always to live and work in a French speaking environment, doing something to do with software. Something I should point out, I grew up in the 70s, yeah mid-70s. It was a generation of people as well who were not really focused on the financial aspects of making money in software or programming, because it wasn't really happening to that extent there. It was just—for me—it was always an interesting area that allowed me to sort of use my brain to solve problems. It was creative.
3:22 So I did my studies in computer science. I did a year of studying computer science in French in Paris. And then—by the end of my studies—I joined Autodesk. I got an email out of the blue in my final year at university, and it's because of some student work I'd done with a company that was using AutoCAD, and then another software company that was creating third party applications for use with AutoCAD. I had done some student work in both those places, and that was how I became known to somebody working at Autodesk. And I got an email, and came along for an interview in Guilford, which was where our office was in the UK back in 95. And then I came for a second round interview in Neuchtâel in Switzerland, and immediately fell in love with the place. I just knew that that was the place I wanted to move to, because it was a French speaking environment, which is what I had been looking for, the office that we had there was full of young people from all over the world—mainly from Europe—but multilingual.. It just felt like University all over again for me. Soit was just a dream.
4:24 I didn't get a job in Switzerland straightaway. I started in the UK, but then after two and a half years of fairly constant pressure, I managed to convince my boss to move me to Switzerland. So in 98, I moved to Switzerland, still in a technical role at that time supporting different products, part of it was AutoCAD. So, when I say support, it was developer support, which at the time it meant speaking at conferences, giving seminars, doing API support, giving training.. So there's a lot of aspects to the role that were interesting to me, because I didn't really want to be a classic programmer who's just focused on code. I wanted to have something extra. I wanted to travel, I wanted to meet people. So it was really a good role for me, I really enjoyed it.
5:08 Then, by the time I'd done a couple more years in Switzerland, the manager of the team that I was in, suggested to me that his counterpart in the Americas was leaving, and that I should apply for that job because he thought I was ready for it. At first I kind of laughed because it really wasn't something that I had in my plan, to move to the US and to become a manager. But I thought about it for a while, because after my initial reaction, I sort of settled down and thought "Well, somebody is suggesting this. There's probably something to it, and it's worth at least considering." I did apply, and I ended up getting the job.
5:43 So I moved across to San Rafael, in the North Bay, and worked there. Sort of helped build, and manage a team in San Rafael during the tail end of the .com boom, which was a an interesting time to be recruiting and hiring people. It was very challenging, nobody wanted to come and work for a company like Autodesk when there was all these cool internet startups available. So it was interesting, but that was when I started in a management role. I did that how many years? Three years I was in San Rafael? It was a strange time to be in the US, in the sense that we moved there just as George Bush Jr. became president. Strange things did happen in the US around that time, with the aftermath of 9/11, the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, it was a difficult time for us in some ways to be in the US then. When I say we, I'd moved across there with my girlfriend—who's Swiss—and it was in late 2001, sort of not so long after September 11 that we got married. So by that point we were a proper couple, and we decided that we didn't really want to stay in the US to have a family. That was our main thing at that stage.
6:57 So we started to think about other opportunities to move away, mainly back to Europe. That was always my goal, it was to come back somewhere to Europe. But in the end, I ended up getting a job for Autodesk in India. I was asking around for possible jobs, and the director of consulting at the time said "Well, good news is I have a job for you. Perhaps the less good news is that it's in India, and we'd like you to go there for two years, and help set up this team." Again, it was one of those questions where I was like, "Well, on paper it's maybe not so good." Not so good in the sense it's not exactly what we were looking for, but there were definitely some advantages in the sense.. My mother is actually from the town—the city—where they wanted to send me. She grew up in Bangalore, and that was where the Autodesk office was in southern India. So I could actually go there and spend time with family. It was kind of a strange opportunity—in a sense—because my grandmother was alive, living not so far from the office. And I had uncles and aunts there too.
7:55 So we talked about it, and decided to take the plunge and to go to India for a couple of years, which proved to be challenging and interesting. Again, sort of hiring and managing in the tail end of the.com era was pretty good preparation for hiring and managing people in India with a huge booming IT sector. It was difficult, but it was interesting. The other aspect to it was that when we arrived in India, we found out that we were expecting our first baby. So that was a little bit of a surprise, because we weren't necessarily planning on having kids in India. But again, that's somewhat water under the bridge now.
8:36 We did our two years in India, helped raise a healthy baby boy, and then we moved back to Switzerland after that. That was 2006. I suppose I'd done 11 years at the company by then, I suppose it was five or six years in management. And I had the opportunity—or actually—I was asked to take on the role of senior manager for that group, the Developer Technical services team. So that was then a worldwide role where I was managing managers around the world. So that was again.. It was very interesting, but it was getting me further away from technology. So at that point, I was getting further away from technology, further away from our customers. And we had an initiative inside the group to try and increase membership of the developer network. We had a brainstorming session like, "What could we do to gradually continue to build the network?" And one of the suggestions that came up was that we should start blogging. So I think Shaan Hurley had had his first Autodesk blog by that point for a couple of years. We felt it was time to start exploring the possibility of having developer centric blogs, blogs that specifically addressed the developer community out there.
9:44 I volunteered, I thought that would be an interesting role to have, because I also felt that as a senior manager, the trap I did not want to fall into was this need to make work for myself. Because I see that again and again, when people have.. They're leading organizations where things are running smoothly, what I wanted to avoid was this possibility that I'd start building initiatives because I didn't have something better to do. So I thought "Well in this case, having this will just soak up any excess capacity that I might have." And sure enough, I ended up being able to write three posts a week for many years, even as a senior manager, and it helped me stay connected with the technology, with the development teams and with the community. And over time despite me.. I would argue, being an OK manager, and even enjoying it—I enjoyed the management work—over time, I realized that I was getting so much enjoyment from the engagement that I got from the blog, that I kind of would have to make a choice sooner or later "Do I want to keep climbing the ladder? Or the greasy pole as they say. Do I want to become a director etc., etc., or do I want to focus on the things that ultimately make me happier as person?" And also, provide a certain degree of freedom that as a manager, I didn't necessarily have.
11:09 Folks on the technical side gave me the possibility—depending on the role I had—and I kind of thought to myself that "If I can get into a Senior Technical role, where I have this freedom and flexibility to be able to work on projects that are interesting to me when they're interesting to me, then that would be really the perfect situation." So as it was, I think it was from my blog that I ended up working on a few projects with others in the organization. It was actually with Dr. Robert Aish when he came into Autodesk, our CTO at the time—Jeff Kowalski—was helping get him connected with people that may be able to help further his exploration around what became known as DesignScript. And he suggested "Oh, you should speak to Kean, he's the perfect person to help you get integrated—get something integrated—inside AutoCAD." So sure enough, we worked together over the course of about six to eight weeks prior to Autodesk University.. Oh, I want to say it's 2007—probably—I think that sounds about right. Autodesk University 2007. And we put together a demo of DesignScript that ended up being shown on mainstage. And I gave a demo of that to Amar Hanspal at AU. And we had a really good discussion about the future, and one thing that he put on the table was the possibility that should I want to grow beyond ADN (Autodesk Developer Network), or do something different to ADN—the Developer Network role I was in—I should speak to him.
12:42 And sure enough, it took me a little while to make the decision to do that, but come around—I want to say 2011, 2012—I reached back out and we had a discussion about my future. He essentially very kindly welcomed to me and offered me a couple of opportunities. He said "Do you want to go behind door number one, which is to become a product manager, and focus on that aspect of your career, or would you like to double down on the technical aspects and become a software architect?" And I was like, "Oh, software architect. Door number two, please. That sounds great." So I ended up as a software architect on the AutoCAD team with a particular focus ultimately for our AutoCAD-based Verticals. So AutoCAD Electrical, AutoCAD Architecture, Mechanical—actually it was electrical there—I think it was more AutoCAD Architecture, MEP, and AutoCAD Mechanical. So those were the products that I was responsible for. And ultimately they were fairly mature, so I did have to worry about architectural questions such as "Are there base changes in AutoCAD that will impact these verticals?" You know, how to manage those. But as there wasn't a huge amount of new feature work, I still had time to continue engaging with the community via the blog, which was gret.
13:58 Come 2012, there was a change inside Autodesk. There was a reshuffle, and I think the AutoCAD Verticals team was changing dramatically. So that was actually the moment where it made sense for me to shift across into research, which was something I was lucky enough to be able to do. And that has been where I've been since then, since 2012, to.. Did I say 2012? 2016 by then. Yeah. So 2016 to today, I've been inside research, which is really—you could argue—it's my spiritual home, in the sense that that's the place that's allowing me to continue my explorations into technology. And it's also given me the possibility to continue to engage with the community, both of developers but increasingly the computational design community as well, and reaching beyond my roots in that sense.
14:48Nono Martínez Alonso: How do you think that blogging changed your career at the time when you started?
14:53Kean Walmsley: I have absolutely no doubt that blogging—or having some kind of activity related to social media—was critical for my career. And really I would not be.. I probably.. I don't know, I'd be in a very different situation today if I hadn't started the blog. I'd like to think that I'd probably still be able to be with Autodesk. But I suspect, I probably would have stuck on more of a management track. I have a feeling I'd probably be living in the US still—it's really hard to say—but I can only be, at least where I am at this stage in my career and the way I'm feeling about life, I have to say I'm very happy that I did start the blog. It—for sure—from my perspective has led to me having the freedom to make these changes and to do what I do now.
15:41Nono Martínez Alonso: And how do you think it changed the way that you think about your career right now?
15:45Kean Walmsley: I think deep down—in me somewhere—I always had this vision of me being able to work remotely in—and when I say remotely, like really remotely, in some remote place, not just remote from a team—but in some remote place, not necessarily.. I certainly don't have a dream to go back into an office on a regular basis anytime soon. That's something that.. I highly value my ability to telecommute, and to be close to my family. And I think in the last few years—particularly—where I have been, officially, and permanently a home office worker, I do miss.. It's nice to have more personal contact with people in an office from time to time, there's no doubt about that. But increasingly, I've sort of made more of an effort to get my interpersonal contact outside of work, and then focus on work at home. And anyway, the engagement that I have with people through the blog and Twitter etc., is also really important to me to stay connected with humanity as a whole, I would say.
16:50Nono Martínez Alonso: You mentioned three blog posts per week. How do you manage that? Was that something that just happened? Did you schedule it yourself to at a minimum, I want to have three..
17:00Kean Walmsley: Originally, when the whole blogging thing started at Autodesk there was.. I think there was a Word document that was circulated with these social media guidelines in there. Somebody had said "In order to engage with the community effectively, it's important to write three blog posts a week." Or at least I have this memory of there being this number in there, it may have been a different number. But in the end, I set my goal on doing this, on having these three blog posts a week. And it just over time became ingrained to the point that if I knew that I was risk of missing it, I'd start to feel some level of anxiety around it. It was a bit of a treadmill in the sense you really feel like you have to keep on cranking out these posts, but over time, you also build up some automatisms that help with that as well. You end up being able to mix it up with really short blog posts relating to events that are coming that somebody asked you to mention, because there was something that they felt maybe hadn't got people's attention. So I was able to include things like that. Also splitting up longer technical posts into multipart posts to say, "Well, there's no point posting 10 pages of content in a single blog post. Let's break it up in segments over three different posts."
18:20 So I think there's lots of things that you end up finding—or developing—in order to make it work. In fairness, in the last few years—and maybe the last four years—I've scaled back quite a bit. So these days I aim at two blog posts a week rather than three, which I still more or less happen. There's the occasional week where it's one, but wherever possible, I do try and do two posts a week.
18:41Nono Martínez Alonso: Yeah, nice. Have you been building over time subscriber base? Do you have like a mailing list or something? Is there any way that you can get a feeling of how many people are behind that audience? Or to engage with the audience?
18:56Kean Walmsley: It has shifted. At its peak, I was probably getting three or four thousand—sometimes 4000—page hits a day, on the blog. These days—in fairness—I don't look at it as much as I used to. There was a time where I felt it was important for the business—and for for me—to understand how well the blog was performing, so I'd stay on top of it a bit better. I think that's definitely gone down. I think blogs in general have become perhaps less of a visited thing. I think there's a lot of things that contributed to that, including the death of RSS, the rise of micro blogging, and sites where people can blog more directly on to, such as LinkedIn, etc. I mean, one thing I do do, is to is to make sure that I post on Twitter and LinkedIn when I have a new blog post. And I used to do that for Facebook as well, until for some reason their AI decided that I was a spammer. I now can't post anything to Facebook anymore, which is really not a problem for me because I kind of dislike Facebook anyway, so it's not an issue. But I do post links to Twitter, and LinkedIn, and I engage much more these days with people through Twitter and LinkedIn than via comments on my blog, because people really don't comment much on blogs these days.
20:10Nono Martínez Alonso: Can you talk a bit more about that? Is that something that actually blocked your account? Or is it just thath that the algorithm was ranking your post wrong? How did that work?
20:20Kean Walmsley: Do you mean for Facebook?
20:21Nono Martínez Alonso: Yeah for Facebook.
20:22Kean Walmsley: Yeah, so they didn't block my account—I still have an account—though I never post anything to Facebook. It's just that my business page.. I created a business page that would automatically pick up my posts to my blog.. I forget whether it was via RSS, I think I was using—there's been different tools that I've used over the years—either to read the RSS feed of my blog, and then post automatically. For some reason—at some point—the Facebook algorithm just decided that anything that was coming from my blog URL or from my domain with spam or something. I don't know whether that was because I was on typepad. I don't think so, I think it's because—specifically—they'd found something they didn't like in my blog content. Maybe it was common linkage to sites that were commercially oriented. I have no idea. Ultimately, when it happened, I couldn't find out who to speak to about it. I tried to send off a few emails. I still get emails from Facebook business saying "You haven't posted to your page in a while." And I'm like, "Well right. I can't. I can't post links to my blog, so what am I meant to do?"
21:28Nono Martínez Alonso: I have a feeling.. Some people I've talked to, and on my own accounts and stuff that when—I don't know if it was just back in time, or if it's when you start—that the posts that you put on a Facebook page have more visibility. I think the same was happening with Instagram, but as they roll out their program to just you pay for for ads, and to spread your content more, I think that content is taken over people's attention. Whereas free content, you gotta be a really loyal reader for the feed to show it to you with priority. I don't really know how it works.
21:59Kean Walmsley: I see..
22:00Nono Martínez Alonso: They might know their own thing. But who knows? Yeah, it kind of bothers—at some point—that things go down and you can see it and you don't really know what it is, right? You don't have a feedback loop where you can understand what's going on behind.
22:11Kean Walmsley: No, exactly. But in fairness, the whole CAD blogging scene has definitely reduced over time anyway. There's a lot of things that are a bit different, people who are engaged in blogging in the CAD community, this is not just me who's seen this kind of effect—not talking about Facebook now—I'm just talking about things kind of descending. So there's lots of contributing things, it's hard to separate things out. One other thing—as I've shifted my attention across from blogging almost exclusively about developing things related to AutoCAD—I've talked about other things as well, which may engage people less. So I've tried not to worry about this, in the sense that I'm really doing it because I think it's a value to the community, to my employer, and to myself. I think that it's one of these things it just makes sense to do. And if it's the right thing to do, you should do it irrespective of engagement. But even now, I guess.. So where it was up at three or four thousand—maybe it was up at one or two thousand hits a day—so it's still quite a lot of people who come and visit. But as I've said, you see less comments directly on the blog, and more people will comment on when it's been shared via Twitter or LinkedIn, because that's just a more common way for people to engage these days. And that's perfectly fine by me. I'm happy to have those discussions there.
23:30Nono Martínez Alonso: Yeah. It spreads around a bit, right? You don't have a single place where everyone can see those comments.
23:36Kean Walmsley: Yeah.
23:36Nono Martínez Alonso: I want to go back a bit to something you mentioned at the beginning. Why do you have an interest on living in a French speaking country?
23:45Kean Walmsley: Huh.. Wow! Well, when I was growing up, my dad was a huge Francophile, he loved trips to France. We used to play "boule" or "la pétanque" a French game—balls—when we were growing up as well. He was definitely really into France, and I had quite early exposure to it as well. And then as soon as I started studying French, it's just something that I really, really enjoyed. And ultimately.. I also enjoyed learning German—to a lesser degree, but still—so I knew that I had either an aptitude for language or an interest in learning languages. That I think was really what drove it. I just always enjoyed French language, the culture, the lifestyle. It's quite interesting now living in French speaking Switzerland, which of course is not France. In many ways being in this environment where there's almost—I don't want to say the word antipathy—but I just did. French speaking Swiss have an interesting relationship with France and the French in general, so that can be quite interesting. But I certainly feel very at home in Switzerland and specifically French speaking Switzerland. It's a fantastic environment. I have made it my home, I've become Swiss. And I'm very happy to have done so.
25:05Nono Martínez Alonso: Talking about languages. What about programming languages?
25:08Kean Walmsley: Right, yes. I have a very, very soft spot—I don't know if soft spot is the word—something that's really dear to my heart is Functional languages. So Functional programming. It's something that I immediately took to when I was studying it in the early 90s. I was at a university in the UK that really made Functional programming a core part of their curriculum back then. At the time I was learning a language called Miranda. I suppose it's a commercial predecessor to Haskell, in that the person who wrote Miranda was Dave Turner. And it was a commercial enterprise, I think it was licensed to the university, he was a professor there. Ultimately, it influenced the development of Haskell, which continues to be a popular functional programming language today, but I loved the fact it was so closely connected to mathematics and that connection—with the purism of it—really appealed to me.
26:02 In fact, my Master's project for when I was at university was—along with another person—but it was to essentially map the functioning of a Motorola 6800 processor to insight a functional language. That was really interesting, even down to the point of creating an assembly language to generate the machine code instructions, that would then get executed against this virtual machine that was replicating the functionality of a relatively simple microprocessor. But this idea of being able to simulate the capability of hardware using a functional language was very, very interesting to me.
26:42 And ultimately, I didn't do anything much with functional programming once I joined Autodesk. Because it was really wasn't something that was common in the community until F# started—I want to say in 2008—but that's when I started to sort of reengage a little bit with the functional side of things. And of course, Functional programming has definitely influenced all the mainstream languages now. And very often I use a functional style when I'm writing TypeScript code, JavaScript code these days. It has definitely influenced me in my thinking. I'd actually really love to go back and do a large scale project using Functional paradigms. It would just be really fun. And it's something that I still have as a little itch that I need to scratch at some point, whether personally or professionally. We'll see what happens.
27:33Nono Martínez Alonso: It sounds like you get passionate about these things, and that you enjoyed them. I wanted to know as well, how did you get started teaching? And what do you think you gained from it? I mean, I guess you're still—in some form—you're still doing it from time to time or maybe actively. But yeah, what do you get out of teaching?
27:51Kean Walmsley: Yeah. So my earliest experiences with teaching were even before I was at university. I mentioned that I was working at a local software developer in the East of England, where I was asked to do.. I actually went abroad, at that point I came to Switzerland for the first time to give a training related to the software that they had. So that was my first ever experience. And it must have been.. I must have been 18 or 19. But then when I joined Autodesk, at the age of 23 I want to say. Was I 23? 22, 23, it became really part of my job to give API training. I enjoy helping people. But for me, there was also an aspect of it, where of course, in order to teach something, you have to learn it, you have to know it a lot better. But then in the course of teaching it as well, you also deepen your understanding of things, of lots of things. And there is this feedback loop that you create when you're seeing people progress, and you're really getting a genuine sense that you're helping people. It was very important to me and very, very beneficial. So for me, it was always that I've enjoyed.
29:01 I do less hands on technical training now. I still mentor people—which is actually an interesting activity as well—because it's less about training, but it is about engaging with people and using a different part of your brain to solve problems than purely technical problems. So that's still something that I enjoy quite a bit, especially as having moved out of management, it allows me to kind of scratch this itch related to personal development and helping people grow inside their careers without necessarily having any direct responsibility for their careers, and their salaries, and all the tricky things that come with being a manager. So for me, it's actually quite interesting. I'm able—through mentoring—to satisfy a certain—or to keep certain things active—without having to have them as a core part of what I do.
29:53Nono Martínez Alonso: Yeah, I can relate to that. I don't have as much experience teaching, but I really enjoy it. I think you deepen your understanding as you're explaining things to other people, and then you realize that that reinforces. Sometimes the exercise of telling people what something is, is an effort for you to see how much you understand and try to put in words. And that really.. I think that's a really transforming experience. There's one thing that you mentioned before on a previous conversation, that traveling around the world, you started with family and trying to do a reduction of travel at the beginning. But then you started traveling locally, and then intercontinentally or internationally. On these trips—I guess—you moved to the US, and to India, and to all these places with your girlfriend, right? How did she adapt to this? And how has family affected—or changed—the way you've tailored your role for what's best for your family lifestyle?
30:54Kean Walmsley: Yes, so travel has been an interesting one. Because it was quite early on in my career that I had to travel for Autodesk, like from pretty much the beginning. I traveled—not just within Europe—but internationally as well. And it was something that I enjoyed, but I don't think I really ever had the desire to.. I mean, honestly I probably could have stayed in Switzerland—if I'm honest—in terms of whether I wanted to move to other countries. I don't think, I don't regret the decision to move to the US. But I thought—and it was it was a fantastic experience—but I am happy that we were able to do it for a relatively short timespan, like for three years. Because I think that was a good experience to do.
31:38 You know, interestingly, my girlfriend—who's now my wife—is a much bigger traveler than I am. She absolutely dreams of travel and would probably move to another country tomorrow. She is Swiss, but I'm the one who really wants us to be in Switzerland because I am probably more Swiss than she is at some level. But I just really appreciate life in Switzerland, and I love being here. At some point we might consider moving again.
32:07 I mean, our kids are getting a little older now, they are 15,13 and 10. They also love to travel. Two years ago—and I'm really glad we did that now—we took six months off and travelled around the world, the five of us, and we visited 15 countries in six months. And all of that is documented on my blog. I was still working at Autodesk, more or less half time during that period. But that was really a good experience for them, they absolutely loved it. They love to travel. And I think that they will probably end up living in all sorts of strange parts of the world. So my wife will be happy, she'll have the chance for us to get on the plane regularly to go and visit them. And though of course—who knows with the current crisis—things are going to look very different once we come out the other side of this—in terms of travel—so I'm not making any predictions about what's going to happen. But yeah, so I will say that in spite of them loving travel, we have kind of made the decision not to disrupt their childhood friendships, and studies, etc. for the sake of a career decision. From my side, I think I'd be more likely to—well I never know—given the fact that my wife would love to go and live somewhere else again, I would err on the side of working for a different company locally before I moved country for Autodesk again, just thinking that through. But on the other hand, I can well imagine that we'd have a discussion and decide to go for it anyway. But yeah, right now I'm happy here in Switzerland. And having the ability to work remotely means that for now, all is good.
33:50Nono Martínez Alonso: Can you point out something that has been hard?
33:54Kean Walmsley: That's been hard? About working remotely? Or..
33:57Nono Martínez Alonso: Yeah, I mean about this flexibility, and travel, and moving places, and getting to where you are right now.
34:04Kean Walmsley: No. I think the biggest bump was.. Well, but you know, I really hesitate to call any of these things difficult, because everything's a mixture of experiences, right? So there's always good and bad in everything. For me though—I think for us as a family—the two years in India were challenging. It was really challenging for lots of reasons. We had our first baby there, but it was also at exactly that time that my father got sick and ended up passing away. He ended up passing away a month before his first grandson was being born. So that was a really difficult period for us and for me personally. But yet at the same time, I was there with my Indian family—members of my family in India—able to spend some really special time with them. So it was really very, very emotional—I would say it was challenging—but ultimately there was a lot of positive aspects that came out of it throughout anyway.
35:10 And then otherwise—generally—there've been some sort of big decisions to make over the years, I would say. But nothing.. You know, I've never really had a master plan for my career, or I've never had a three.. You know, people, in during my performance reviews I've been asked "What's your three year plan? What's your five year plan?" This sort of question. You know, often it's related to an evolution rather than revolution in terms of the job that I'm doing. I've kind of liked to continue developing, and growing, and doing interesting things, but it's mostly about enjoyment and less about having a goal in mind. I do have—as an overall desire—I prioritize the flexibility that I have from working at home. I've said this to a few people before. But for me, it's like the three F's: fun, freedom and flexibility. But there's also probably a fourth F, in the sense that family is extremely important as well. But fun is an ultimate driving force for me, in the sense I do want to have fun at work on a regular basis. And for me, that means challenging myself technically, engaging with people in the community.. All of these things give me immense pleasure and satisfaction. So it's really been about steering myself towards those aspects of my career.
36:32Nono Martínez Alonso: Well, thanks for sharing that. And regarding remote work, you maximize flexibility. So what else do you get out of this? I know in a previous conversation, we also talked about the game being leveled out because of this COVID situation that is going on right now. So yeah, how do you think that remote works, change the work that you do and others?
36:57Kean Walmsley: Remote work for me is again—just like everything is a mixed bag—there's definitely positive things that you take out of it. This main one being freedom and flexibility. The ability to say "This morning, you know what, I know I've got meetings this evening going until 8pm. I'm going to go for a bike ride this morning. I'm going to spend some time doing something interesting." That is a something that I really, really appreciate. This ability to be able to manage my time, to have that kind of freedom. And sometimes it's personally for me, but very often it's for the family. I can run errands, do things like take the kids to places, etc., etc. So for me, that's really valuable. But also just to be to be present with my wife and kids, I'm here a lot. And I think for them—having grown up with both parents in the house—we've been very lucky in the sense we've never had to use childcare services. I feel a real closeness to my family, which is something I don't think I'd have if I was spending 8 to 10 hours a day in the office, or commuting to an office. So I think that that's really the main one, this sort of proximity to family.
38:18 On the downside—of course—it's the social contact. For me, something that's also really important—and that's been really hard during the last couple of months—is I have a really strong need to do sport. I would say it's a physical need, but it's actually more of a mental need. If I don't do some kind of competitive sport—and when I say competitive, I don't mean at a high level—but it could be kicking a football around with friends. I also play a sport called Unihockey—or Floorhockey—which is a lot of fun as well. But if I don't do that on a regular basis—like twice a week—then I really start to feel the demons come. It's very difficult for me mentally not to have a regular sporting exercise, It just allows me to release tension. And working out—or doing some sort of physical exercise—helps to some degree but I honestly feel much happier once I've had the chance to engage with a group of other people chasing a ball, and trying to hit it, or kick it. That's just what makes me.. Grounds me and makes me able to then carry on with everything else that I do. So that's sometimes difficult, getting that integrated in your routine. I have managed over the last—well many years—to have it part of my day to day activities, but the last couple of months have been challenging in that front, I would say.
39:36Nono Martínez Alonso: And how do you think the COVID situation is affecting your work and lifestyle?
39:41Kean Walmsley: This is an interesting topic because.. I mean, I know that it's really hard for a lot of people out there, so sometimes it's hard for me to talk about because I don't.. I have actually really enjoyed the last couple of months. The fact that I have my family at home with me. As I mentioned before, this sort of level playing field aspect of telecommuting, where all of a sudden instead of being one of the few people remotely calling into calls, and everybody else is in a conference room, everybody is just a window in the zoom gallery. Everybody else is having to deal with this in the same way and it's much more even. So for me, it's been actually really okay. Especially as I I'm used to working from home, I have the—I don't wanna call it discipline—but I have the ingrained behaviors that help me work from home, so it's not something I've had to..I haven't been thrown into the deep end. And yes, having my family around, it's just been great. I've really, really quite enjoyed that aspect of it and we've also not been in a severe lockdown. I know in Spain you've you've had it a lot harder, in terms of not being able to leave the house—or apartment—unless you have a really strong reason. For us it's always been a guideline. It hasn't been quite as open as in Sweden. The schools here were closed, the shops were closed—most of them anyway—but mostly it was around guidelines rather than around any sort of formal lockdown. So it's really been okay for us.
41:20Nono Martínez Alonso: You mentioned that in some way this is relaxing for you because it reminds you to the world trip that you did before, where you're sort of living with your kids at home, or traveling with them and stuff. How was that world trip? How did you deal to work for Autodesk? Your kids, did they go to school or not? How were the actual world trip logistics?
41:46Kean Walmsley: So that's interesting. We essentially homeschooled—or road schooled—the kids for those six months, which meant we scanned a whole load of coursework material into PDF format, and we had it on.. We had a couple of computers with us. So we kind of committed to the school that we would at least do that. It's really interesting, because I honestly didn't think the school would agree. I remember speaking to my boss at the time saying, "Look this is the project that we've talked about at home, but I don't think the school will agree. So it's a low probability event, but in case it came through, how would you feel about me working half time for Autodesk from around the world?" And Azam—my boss—was like, "Oh, yeah. I don't see why not. It sounds great." And I was like, "Oh, okay. Fine. That's one hurdle over." And then we got the letter back from the school. And I honestly didn't expect them to go for it. But amazingly, the director of of our kids school said "What an amazing project, you have to come in and talk to us about it."
42:52 And I think it was at that point, I kind of realized, "Oh dear, this might actually be happening. I think we're going to have to think this through and make it work." So we went in and spoke to them—and we were very lucky—in the sense that all our kid's teachers were extremely supportive of the fact that we wanted to do this trip. And it was quite amazing in the sense some of them even turned it into a learning opportunity for the rest of the classes. I just always think back to my daughter—gosh, eight at the time?— anyway, seven or eight at the time. And both she and her older brother were kind of roving reporters for their respective classes. They would film on video and send these little video updates to the teachers through WhatsApp. And they would then show these videos.
43:39 Now there was one time where just by chance we were in a camper van going through New Zealand, and we ended up camping on this beach. And in the morning while we were making coffee, and sort of thinking about breakfast, we just sort of kicked the kids out of the camper van and said, "Go down and play by the water, have some fun while we start the day." And they did that. And we went out and found them, and it was really fun. This whole beach was covered in volcanic rock—but they would look like normal pebbles, they didn't look like chunks of volcano or anything like that—but they were obviously, pumice [stone] or what have you, but they'd been rubbed down to look like normal stones. They were throwing them in the water—sometimes these really big chunks of volcanic rock—and they were just floating away. So we were like, "Oh, this is amazing." So we just had so much fun videoing this, and then we send it off to the kids or to my daughter's teacher. And later on we found out that.. She told us about it after, she said "Oh, it was so amazing." We saw this as an opportunity to help the kids think about why this might be happening.
44:49 So the first thing they did was to show the video with no sound and say to the kids "Brainstorm what it is that's happening here. You're seeing these rocks floating away on this lake. How is it even possible?" So they had this whole sort of class where they were speculating, and coming up with theories, and hypotheses about what was happening. And then it was only the next week that they were shown the video with the sound on, so that they could understand what was actually going on. But it was really nice. There's a number of examples like that where our kids were in a role where they were helping their school friends experience the world, and see things a bit differently as well. So it wasn't just about our immediate family.
45:38 So yeah, overall it was a really great experience. It was a bit too.. I would say it's a bit aggressive doing so much. We knew that we may not get the chance to do another big trip like this. So rather than focus on a few places to a high degree of quality, we said "Well, we're going to do a lot—as much as we can—even if it means staying just a few days in some places, but give a really broad overview." And so we did a lot, we really did a lot—15 countries—. For me, it was extremely tiring. I think back to the logistics involved in both working for Autodesk half time—though I did end up using quite a bit of stored up holiday that I had—but also dealing with the travel needs, the Airbnbs, the campsite, all these bookings that needed to happen, and thinking about moving every couple of days for six months. It was just a lot of energy. So, by the end of the six months, I don't think I could have done a week more. I think it was really.. I was at my limit by the time we came back. But I'm super happy that I had the chance to offer—or we had the chance—to offer that to our kids, because I think it's going to.. We know that it's changed their outlook. But of course what we're seeing now is that—in this current crisis—they're very autonomous, and self motivated. They just get on with their school work, we don't need to always be looking over their shoulder. So there's a lot of positive aspects from that perspective as well, that we're already seeing two years later.
47:16Nono Martínez Alonso: Do you remember what part of New Zealand that was?
47:18Kean Walmsley: Oh, that was on the South Island, for sure. I want to say.. I mean, it was really an obscure little beach. It was probably called Fish beach or something like that. But it interesting because there's a lot of.. One of the things that struck me around about that lake and the and the waterways around it was there's a lot of black swans, which of course everybody's talking about black swan events now with the current pandemic. But literally in New Zealand, they have black swans everywhere. So that was interesting. I could probably find it on a map for you—and I can do that afterwards—but I I can't remember off the top of my head exactly where it was.
47:58Nono Martínez Alonso: And what about the countries you visited?
48:00Kean Walmsley: Yeah, so we started.. We basically kept going west, throughout the period, pretty much. With these round the world tickets, they often want you to keep going in one direction, they will accommodate it to some degree. But you also have to be quite clear about your routing, because that is what's going to drive the price, and you can't really change the routing very much. You can theoretically change the timing, like you can say "Well, okay. We want to change this segment, in terms of timing." But in reality, when you're a family of five, it's not quite so straightforward to do that. So in the end, we mostly kept to our plans.
48:39 We started in Eastern Seaboard, the United States. I think we landed in DC, went from there to New York, Boston, and then from Boston to Toronto. We used different modes of transport. So, I think DC to New York was the Amtrak, and then from New York to Boston—or to Hartford—it was Greyhound bus. We flew to Boston, and then I spent a few days in our Toronto office with colleagues there, and then flew from Toronto across to Wyoming. Then we rented a big SUV and drove down through Yellowstone, spent a number of days in Yellowstone. And then through Colorado, we did a load of parks in Colorado and Utah, eventually getting across to California, so all this was by road. We had all our camping stuff with us. Interestingly, we carried camping stuff with us for six months—70 or 80 kilos worth of luggage—most of it was camping stuff for the whole six months, but really, we only used it in the US and then at the end in South Africa. What I should have done—with 2020 hindsight—is just shipped it directly from the US to South Africa and not carried it, but we didn't know. We thought we were going to do more camping in South America, for example. But for lots of reasons, it didn't prove to work.
49:54 Anyway, carrying on with the tour. We went from San Francisco to Lima in Peru, and then did Machu Picchu and Cusco.. Then after Peru, we flew to São Paulo in Brazil, we drove from Sao Paolo to Rio, we then once again flew to Iguazú to see the waterfalls, and then on the Brazilian side and the Argentinian side, and then flew on from the Argentinian side to.. Anyway, I shouldn't go into the individual towns, there's probably too much detail. But after Argentina, we went up to.. I want to say we went from there to Bolivia. So we did a three day Jeep tour in Bolivia to the Salar de Uyuni, and then after that we ended up in Chile, in San Pedro de Atacama. And then after that, we went down through Chile to Santiago. We visited Valaparaíso, and flew from Santiago to Easter Island. Easter Island to New Zealand, landed in Auckland and then rented a camper van to go all the way down through to Queenstown in the bottom of the South Island, and then flew from there to Sydney for a few days. We flew to Brisbane—I think—from there and then we did the cold Gold Coast in Australia for another week in a camper van.
51:09 My son wants to become a marine biologist, so it would have been a bit criminal if we hadn't had at least taken the chance to visit the Great Barrier Reef while we were there. So, from Cairns we went out to the Great Barrier Reef and then after that, we flew back via Sydney to Malaysia to Kuala Lumpur. Then, Kuala Lumpur to Singapore, where we have some very good friends we stayed with for a week. And then Singapore to South Africa, I think. Did we go by South? I think was.. Oh India, we definitely went to India sometime. So Singapore to India, we spent some time in Bangalore, and then in Tamil Nadu as well. And then we went across from there to South Africa. We landed in Johannesburg, again rented a rented a big car and drove through. We spent some time in the Drakebsberg, went to Lesotho, whic is a little country that surrounded—is landlocked—within South Africa. And then after Lesotho, down to Port Elizabeth, and along the Garden Route to Cape Town. And then Cape Town to home, back to Switzerland.
52:17Nono Martínez Alonso: Well that's.. I would say that's awesome. That's an awesome trip. I think one contrast—I'm here looking to the right out the window—and there is a huge contrast—I think—that's happening to me and my girlfriend now, when we watch something on TV. We see all these people in TV shows, and movies doing plans outside—and things like that—when we have been forced to stay at home for one and a half months, and now we're slowly facing out of that situation. And I think that—at least—that is making me jealous in some way. And I think my girlfriend would be jealous as well, because there's so many places you've been. I've actually been lucky, I've been able to travel the many of the places you've mentioned. I was meant to go to Peru—I think a month ago—but it got canceled due to the COVID situation. And yeah, it just sounds awesome. I think people listening probably think like, "Wow, I really want to plan something for the summer, or for next year, or something to do. Something similar to what you're mentioning." How do you think the COVID situation—or the post COVID situation—is going to be—not only in terms of travel—but also work and, and lifestyle?
53:26Kean Walmsley: Yeah.
53:28Nono Martínez Alonso: It's gonna be really relevant. It's an ongoing conversation—I don't think we should obsess about it—but it's definitely going to be something that's going to stay with us for long. I don't think we had seen so many masks—or any masks at all—on the streets here in Spain before before this situation. It would be something super foreign that you'd see on news that were happening maybe in Asia—like China or Japan—where it's really common to see scenes of the city, and just see people walking with masks. I just wanted to know what's your.. What are your thoughts on how the life post COVID is going to be?
54:02Kean Walmsley: Yeah, I think it's a little hard considering where we are in the crisis to sort of project forward too much, because people are struggling to start re engaging with other people in person. When you meet people in the street, it's really hard to—even adapting to that level of face to face interaction—to project forward and imagine traveling to another country stuck in a plane. I mean, I've seen these pictures of people flying at the moment. Everybody's wearing gloves and masks, and it just really feels like something out of a bad sci-fi movie. It's hard to imagine going back to normal, but I do think that the normal will be a bit different. I think there's going to be—for sure—some structural changes in the airline industry, in the sense that I don't expect we'll go back to traveling as much as we did. Even just my professional perspective, I have been traveling quite a bit for work over the last few years—mostly in Europe—but still, I expect that to reduce quite a bit.
55:09 Even after things go back to normal—I would say—because people people are going to be more tolerant—or open—to doing things through video conference, etc. I just think that that door is open now, and I think that people are going to be quick to go down that path and to use virtual techniques to hold events, etc. I think it's going to be very interesting. I think they'll still be travel. I don't think that that's going to go away. I wonder whether it's going to be easy—or inexpensive—to travel for personal perspective. It makes me a little sad to think that that's going to become harder. I am glad we did the trip when we did.
55:48 One thing that I didn't mention is, it's quite interesting when you do a round the world trip like that, the biggest amount of jetlag that we had during the six months, was when we arrived in [Washington] DC. To go from Europe to DC. Other than that we had no jet lag at all, because you're just doing little trips, which is really interesting. So I don't know whether they'll be things like round the world tickets or whether these things will exist. I think what we'll end up doing is perhaps traveling.. And we already said that, if we do another trip, we will go to fewer places, but spend more quality time, and really get to know the place a little better, rather than just sort of skating across the surface all the time. But yeah, I honestly don't know whether this kind of travel is going to be feasible. But I am—as I said—I am hoping that that's just because where we are at the moment, it's just a little bit difficult to imagine things going back. And of course—thinking about the planet—we don't want things to go back to the way they were. But again, how do you draw that line? And how do you.. I've had business trips where I've traveled to the Bay Area for two or three days. It hasn't happened recently, but it has happened in the past, this was many years ago. But hat kind of trip, you have to question whether it makes sense to fly from London to New York to give a presentation and then come straight back. There's got to be a better way, right?
57:09Nono Martínez Alonso: Yep. Yeah. And do you have any thoughts on what's lost when we go virtual?
57:15Kean Walmsley: So what is lost? Let me see. Again, it's a mixed bag in the sense you lose and you gain, right? I think that that is.. You do lose that sort of face to face interaction, you lose that human need to be able to sense people other than through vision and sound. It's a trade off. At the same time, you can engage with more people, you can engage in some ways more effectively, because you're not having to deal with jetlag, etc. There are things that are definitely positive—I think—from going virtual.
57:56Nono Martínez Alonso: What about the serendipitous encounters, and networking, and interpersonal things that are happening in those events? Maybe customer visits, or conferences.
58:06Kean Walmsley: Definitely something that is going to be challenging to.. At the moment there's no real substitute, but I have to think that some people are working on some.. And you see a little bit, things like Discord, and these sort of environments, where it does encourage the possibility to have some sort of remote interaction with people that you didn't necessarily know but have shared interests with yourself, that kind of thing. I think we're going to see more of these tools that allow those encounters to happen remotely. I don't think that being there in person necessarily is a prerequisite for serendipity—somehow—or serendipitous encounters. I think that this will evolve the technology that we use, to the point where that can happen anyway. But yeah, overall, I don't think I'd be losing much by not traveling, I have to admit right now. It is true that things will be different, but I I'm mostly just seeing the positive aspects for the moment.
59:12Nono Martínez Alonso: What about telecommuting for other people? How do you think that's working?
59:15Kean Walmsley: I hope that some of these behaviors that we're learning—whether organizationally or individually—will open the door to more people being able to telecommute. I think that there are a whole.. I mean, even our customers. You are an architect, right? Originally?
59:30Nono Martínez Alonso: Yeah, I was trained as an architect. Yep.
59:32Kean Walmsley: So I imagine that architectural customers, and architectural offices around the world, are seeing things very differently now with the post COVID and people having to work from home. And I do hope that people have more flexibility to work remotely, because it can really impact your work life balance positively. I haven't had to commute any serious distance in my.. I mean, I think even in my 25 years, the longest commute I had.. Yeah, it was probably in the Bay Area, and that was cycling 10 minutes across the Marin County Civic Center to get to the office. I've really avoided telecommute—commuting in general—because I just have always felt that it's a complete waste of time. But I've been lucky enough to be able to do that, because either I've been living in places for short periods where I've been able to take an apartment or a house near to where I've been working. But now it's also just because of telecommuting. So for me, I can't imagine going into a situation where I would have to travel an hour and a half or more—even an hour—on a daily basis to get to work.
1:00:41Nono Martínez Alonso: Yeah, it really becomes part of your life. To the note that you mentioned before, I think many architectural offices—or any type of office really—are starting to understand what works like VPN or RDP or things like that, right? They didn't.. They were not in their vocabulary before, and in some way they've been forced into thinking differently for this situation. But the question is, will they continue doing that later or not? That's the doubt right? It?
1:01:08Kean Walmsley: Yeah,
1:01:08Nono Martínez Alonso: I think that the important thing is planting the seed and having everyone—in some aspect—going through that process so they now know what it is, and they know it exists. I've heard people saying "Oh, remote work exists." And they had never tried it before in their offices. I think that's going to be a really good.. The things that we can take out of this situation. It's sad that we had to be forced to do this, and it's not something that just happened as common practice before. But you know, it's there.
1:01:39Kean Walmsley: Yeah. I mean, as a species—the human race—I don't think we're very good at doing uncomfortable things because they may help. I mean, the same thing with the environment, right? We've all known that there's a climate crisis—it's not a surprise—but it's actually our self interest that needs to come into play in order for us to stop traveling. So that's—I think—just very, very sad. It's an unfortunate truth that we're not mature enough to do those things.
1:02:08Nono Martínez Alonso: Okay, before we continue, I would like you to tell us where people can connect with you online.
1:02:14Kean Walmsley: Great. I mean, the easiest way is either.. Well, actually, it's pretty easy. It's keanw, K-E-A-N-W, whether it's keanw.com, or twitter.com/keanw, or [LinkedIn/in]keanw](https://LinkedIn/in]keanw). It's always keanw. If you google keanw, you should be able to get hold of me that way. And then I think if you also look at aboutme/keanw, then it probably has a list of all the different ways you can get hold of me as well.
1:02:43Nono Martínez Alonso: Sounds good. Yeah, and we'll add links to that on the show notes.
1:02:47Kean Walmsley: Okay.
1:02:47Nono Martínez Alonso: One thing—before we move into the next section—I would like to know if you want to share with us any of your ongoing projects? Or any of the projects that have been exciting that you've done lately?
1:03:00Kean Walmsley: One good thing about the confinement is a lot more time to spend on these projects, which has been pretty good. But in recent years, since I joined Autodesk research, my main focus has been in two areas. One is on a project called Dasher, which when I joined it was a desktop application. Part of my role inside research was to reimagine it using the Forge platform. It's really a tool that integrates IoT data—so sensor data—into a 3d context. Often it's taking BIM data from Revit, and pulling in IoT data, and overlaying it onto the 3d model. People these days are often calling them digital twins. Now it's —again—a very hot topic. I tend not to use the term digital twin—occasionally I do—but it's not something I've really talked about Dasher is a digital twin, because there are other aspects to digital twins—such as control actually making changes to the physical environment—which is not something thing that we're doing from Dasher. Even if it's feasible that we could, we don't. It's not really a digital twin, but that's an easy way to categorize it.
1:04:08 And then the other type of project that I've been working on in recent years has been around generative design, which is another term that is potentially overused. The use of optimization technology with parametric models that have been created using more typical computational design techniques. You mentioned that sort of COVID related stuff.. So I've been working over the last month or so along with some colleagues from our AEC industry futures team, that's part of Autodesk research on some sort of post COVID office layout tool people could use from within Revit—or inside Dynamo—to essentially make decisions around how best to optimize their office spaces for reduced occupancy. Which desks they should deactivate.. That kind of thing. So that's something that's kind of ongoing at the moment, but hopefully by the time this podcast is being listened to, we'll be talking about it a bit more.
1:05:03Nono Martínez Alonso: Thanks for sharing that information about your projects. The next section we're going to talk about is what I call the The Getting Simple Section. You know, this is just about learning who you are. They say that you become what you do. Or—through habits—you forge an identity. To start I would ask you, how does your day to day look like?
1:05:23Kean Walmsley: My day to day.. It's an interesting time to be thinking about day to day activities, because things are quite different at the moment than they would be normally. But working from home, I do admit that I probably spend more time working than I probably should. But that's also, because—in a sense—I'm lucky enough to be doing something that I enjoy so much that I would probably do it even if I wasn't being paid to do it It sounds awful. Well, it sounds great, but I don't want anybody to listen and think they can stop paying me.
1:05:59Nono Martínez Alonso: Haha.
1:05:59Kean Walmsley: I enjoy what I do, and there are so many aspects of it that bring me sort of deep satisfaction that I often get what.. I mean, I wouldn't say that I work super early, especially at the moment when the kids aren't waking up quite as early as they need with the confinement. But typically, when I start my day, I do lean across, and pick up my phone, and check email, social media, different things.. And I often do that for half an hour to an hour before moving too much.
1:06:29 And then in the morning—these days—I don't do breakfast. I tend to just have tea. As I'm English, I'll have milk in my tea, which probably isn't the best, but I like it that's what I do. I have typically about three cups of tea in the morning. And then the kids are home at lunch, one way or another we have lunch together almost always—especially at the moment—.Then it really.. It's during the mornings before lunch that I actually get most of my project work done, because come three o'clock clock in the afternoon, that's when things—the meetings—tend to start. Meetings can often go from either two or three in the afternoon through to 8pm. Usually not later than that, but occasionally, it's later than that. Now, it's not always solidly booked, but I am finding increasingly in the last couple of months that things are getting booked up in the afternoons quite quickly. And I know that there are people who have it worse. At least, I feel I have the morning to at least get on with stuff. And typically until about three, but then it's really until three till six—and sometimes three till seven or eight— then I have meetings.
1:07:42Nono Martínez Alonso: Do you consider your life simple?
1:07:44Kean Walmsley: Um, I do and I don't. I think it is. I'm always.. I'm a relativist anyway. I think that there's always people who have simpler lives, and there's definitely people who have more complex lives. I have worked to be in a position to have more simplicity in my life. Part of that is career choices around management versus non management or technical aspects, the prioritization of location over career, and family over career as well ultimately. And also, just deciding to do things that are more core to who you are and what you enjoy. That's given me a certain simplicity of outlook, I suppose. But I consider that to be a privilege really. I try not to take it for granted.
1:08:33Nono Martínez Alonso: What could be easier?
1:08:34Kean Walmsley: Well, part of easier.. It's a blessing and a curse. The two projects that I work on are very interesting to people, right? So, on the one hand, if they were less interesting to people, I would have to spend less time talking to people about and etc, etc. I could just spend more time working on the projects themselves or doing other things. But because there's quite a lot of interest in both digital twins and Generative Design.. And there is this connection between them, which I think is increasingly valuable in this kind of space that you're exploring as well around machine learning, and the use of data to help drive the generative process.
1:09:14 That intersection is extremely interesting, so having people who are working in that space is valuable. So I will say that what could be simpler is if I was somehow in complete isolation from reality, unable to just work on my thing without having the annoyance of having to engage with actual people about it. But in truth, it might make things simpler, but I really enjoy that aspect of what I do as well. I enjoy talking to people—as you probably can tell from the last hour and a half or so—I enjoy engaging with people, so I would feel something was missing if that level of simplicity was brought into my life, I guess.
1:09:52Nono Martínez Alonso: Do you have any daily habits of 30 minutes or less than you do daily?
1:09:57Kean Walmsley: Well at the moment—because I'm not being able to get much exercise—there are a few things that I do try and do on a daily basis. When I get out of bed, I do my best to sort of get down and just do 30 press ups. That's something that I've been trying to do for the last few months. It's certainly not enough exercise, but at least I know that that's something that I've done. I boug ht some kettlebells some time ago, and I do an exercise called.. I have to get the term right, because I think it's a kettlebell snatch. Anyway, it's one where you kind of swing it upwards and above your head. Takes a little bit of practice to not hit yourself with it, but it is something that I tend to try and do between meetings when I get the chance. And then I was certainly doing a better job of that before we were all confined at home, because now it just feels a bit awkward for me to walk off and suddenly start swinging these things around when everybody's there working. So I've not been as good at that—I have to admit—in the last couple of months.
1:10:55Nono Martínez Alonso: Do you have any activities that you do that you feel are like meditation? or do you actually do meditation?
1:11:03Kean Walmsley: The closest I get to meditation, in and of itself, is when I'm doing some kind of physical activity. It's interesting in the sense, I feel that I could—or should—do more meditative activities, but—at least in recent years—with the priorities of family, and etc, I've tended not to. So it's not a habit that I've gained. It's something that I do actually find myself becoming a bit more introspective and think about these things a bit more. One of the big influences on that front has been my collaboration with Simon Breslav, who does meditate on a regular basis, on a daily basis. So usually, he's meditated by the time I speak to him. And and even though he's no longer working with Autodesk, I do speak to him almost every day or very, very frequently. So he's certainly been—indirectly—an influence on me on that side of things. But for the moment is not something that is part of my routine, or something I do regularly.
1:12:06Nono Martínez Alonso: Can you mention any hobbies that you have, that don't have to do with exercise?
1:12:11Kean Walmsley: Well no, I suppose. I always feel like a big part of what I do professionally is a hobby, which is a really dangerous thing—ultimately—but it's something that I do for fun as well. So that's a bit challenging. But I have fairly varied interests when it comes to technology. One thing I do wish that I did, was that I was more musical. It's not something that I did when I was growing up. I was in a choir, the church choir when I was much younger. Now, my kids are all learning instruments and taking various lessons for different things. So I kind of feel like I'm vicariously engaging on that side of things. I do wish that I had that as something to unwind, the ability to play an instrument of some sort. I do listen to music. I enjoy cinema I read a lot actually, that's probably the biggest one I should mention. I'm a massive consumer of science fiction. Of late, I probably spend more time on Netflix than I should. I do quite like binge watching the odd series as well. So there's.. Yeah, there are lots of ways that I consume content, but I suppose if I had to choose one that I would do, I could only choose one between listening to music, or watching Netflix,etc., it would be reading. That's something that I know I can.. That could keep me engaged, and happy, even if that was the only thing I could do.
1:13:38Nono Martínez Alonso: Do you have any book recommendations?
1:13:41Kean Walmsley: Oh well, you know. I kind of have a really soft spot for.. I like these kind of epic, sci-fi space opera type things, but with this slightly positive outlook. So for me, Ian Banks is always the master of this, genre. He is for me a master. But there's a lot of.. Yeah, I have to think.. There's lots of.. I mean, I'm a big fan of Neal Stephenson as well, I love his books. But at the moment, I have to think I'm reading.. I mean, I like also Alastair Reynolds, Ken MacLeod.. So yeah, there's a number of really good authors out there who write things that I find meaningful. But science fiction is also something that I think all people involved in technology should at least attempt to engage with. Because for me, it is a leisure activity, and it's something I do for fun, but it also helps you imagine the future and think about possibilities. And that's another thing that I get out of it as well.
1:14:43Nono Martínez Alonso: Do you read any non-fiction?
1:14:44Kean Walmsley: I have my periods, and I still do have periods where I read non-fiction. I think, as I as I've gotten older, I've gravitated back towards sci-fi. I used to read a lot of fantasy and sci-fi growing up. And then when I was at university, I figured "Well, you know, I should probably grow up a little bit and start reading more serious stuff." And I did. And then that carried on for some time, and I still read the odd piece of either serious fiction or non-fiction. But in truth, it's almost always sci-fi. And I will actually admit, I have a lot of trouble reading actual non-fiction. Perhaps I struggle with reality a little, maybe that is my problem. But I also tend not to read things like business books, or self help books—I have done—but it's not something that I choose to do for pleasure.
1:15:39Nono Martínez Alonso: Would you have any recommendations of other sorts of media? Might be Netflix shows, or other shows, or podcasts, or anything?
1:15:47Kean Walmsley: There's this great podcast called Getting Simple that I've discovered.
1:15:51Nono Martínez Alonso: I'll check it out. I'll take a look.
1:15:53Kean Walmsley: Haha. No—actually—there's one that my mom has sent me lately. She's really into true crime. But this is a podcast that is called This is Love, that is actually by the makers.. I assume that they make a true crime podcast, which is where she got interested in them. But it's a very interesting podcast that.. We've only listened to a couple of episodes, sometimes we've put them on—as a family—while we're having dinner, we can just sort of play it on the sonar system in the kitchen. And there's one episode about a.. So most snails have clockwise shells. I think it's that way or the other way—anyway, one or the other way—but one in a million has anti clockwise shell. And these snails can only—and they are hermaphrodites—but they can only mate with other one in a million snails, because of the way their genitalia works, or what have you. So this was about some snail enthusiasts who managed to get a couple of these nails—or three of these nails—in the end to get together in order to help them reproduce.
1:17:00Phoebe Judge: All he needed was for someone, somewhere in the world, to find another left coiling snail. Then, they'd reproduce, and Angus might be able to figure out what makes some snails coil left, and some coil right.
1:17:15Kean Walmsley: Ultimately to study whether genetically, their children are going to have the same.. So it's super cool. And there's another one on the same series around a woman who, when she was younger was swimming—I think she was in the Pacific somewhere—but she's one of these crazy endurance swimmers. And she was swimming above a baby whale that had got lost, and the whale kind of stayed with her. And she just swam, and swam and they stayed together until the baby could reunite with the mother. It's just a very touching story. But so these stories—I'm guessing from what I've heard so far—they relate to wildlife. It's a series called This is Love, and it's something—I can send you the link to it later so you can include it in the notes—but I found that to be very charming.
1:17:57Nono Martínez Alonso: What do you think makes you more creative?
1:17:59Kean Walmsley: Ah, so what makes me more creative? Actually, and I think a lot of people find this, is when you've been sort of noodling on a problem for some time, and to feel like you can't see the wood for the trees, as they say. I think often doing something else, going for a bike ride, doing some sport, just changing your mind completely, very often leads to some insights sort of bubbling up and coming through, it gives you another way to look at the problem. So often just actually thinking about something completely different helps with my creativity, and sometimes sleeping on things as well. I find that a little bit more difficult, because once you've got a nice challenging problem to work on, sometimes it can be a little bit difficult to put it down, so you can end up sort of working through until the early hours. But I think if you can put it down, and think about something else, that's actually—very often for me—where the brain somehow is working on it in the background, and will come up with things that help you move forward.
1:19:04Nono Martínez Alonso: I actually just finished reading Why We Sleep, by Matthew Walker. What you mentioned "I just sleep on it" there is a lot of science backing why sleeping on something helps reinforce—not only learning better, or remembering better long term—but to actually make random connections of things that maybe you didn't come up with when you were awake. I would really recommend that. Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker.
1:19:28Kean Walmsley: Okay, cool. Yeah, I'll check it out.
1:19:31Nono Martínez Alonso: It doesn't enter in your fiction category, so maybe you just want to listen to a summary or something.
1:19:38Kean Walmsley: Yeah, you know.. I mean, occasionally I do.. Volume wise, I don't read many, but it does happen occasionally. So I will check that one out.
1:19:47Nono Martínez Alonso: Is there anything that you do that you consider deliberate practice?
1:19:52Kean Walmsley: I guess the closest oneis probably the fact that during the winter—it's not every day—but every weekend we go up to the mountains and I snowboard. So that's probably the closest example to sort of really trying to get better at something, and actively working on it. Otherwise, I kind of do with football, but it's not really the same thing, and I definitely don't practice every day. In terms of deliberate daily exercise, where I'm just sort of trying to increase my skill level. Yeah, I don't really.. I tends to be very opportunistic, in the sense that when things come in..
1:20:29 And I saw that this was a question that came in from Jacob on Twitter is how do I choose the projects that I work on? As I mentioned already, I have quite a lot of freedom to decide what I do on a day to day basis. But a lot of the time, it's driven by requests from within the business and from our customers. And even now—I'd say on a day to day basis—whether I'm working on TypeScript coding for Dasher, or whether I'm working on a Dynamo script for a Generative Design project, it tends to be something that is driven by the needs of the project, rather than whether it's me actively trying to improve. Though, if I don't spend time on one side or the other for any significant amount of time, I do sort of feel an itch and a need to spend time back there in order to sort of keep skilled, or continue working in that space. You have to kind of make sure that you maintain a certain activity level.
1:21:25Nono Martínez Alonso: What distracts you?
1:21:27Kean Walmsley: Netflix, I would probably say. I mean, it can do—at least—but not not so much. I tend to be something that I'll occasionally watch at night. But no, distractions.. Actually, when I'm in a good book, it can be hard to put it down. That I find difficult as well.
1:21:44Nono Martínez Alonso: How do you deal with email?
1:21:45Kean Walmsley: Oh, well. I'm actually okay with email, in the sense that I'm quite interrupt driven. I'm okay with managing and dealing with interrupts and then carrying on with them. I do get occasionally distracted when all of the sudden, I get something that I have to look at, and then going back to what I was doing before becomes a little challenging. But honestly—mostly—the context switching thing is something that I've managed over time. And particularly with email, I've got into fairly good habits. And the same is true for social media as well. I try and keep on top of the correspondence aspect, and sort of responding to people. I hope that people feel that I'm responsive when they try and get hold of me, because it's something that I feel that I've integrated. And partly it's about being responsive to people and not letting things get old. But it's also just about.. The quickest way for me to keep on top of things is to deal with them straightaway, and then just move on, because there's always something else coming in. I'm not obsessively, responsive in the sense if I get an email in the evening, I can very easily sort of wait until the next day—and even during the day if I'm busy—then I have to wait till the next day or the day after that to respond. But I do try and make sure that I always respond.
1:23:03Nono Martínez Alonso: How do you define success?
1:23:06Kean Walmsley: Success for me is doing something that you love, and in the same way, having the ability to provide for the needs of those who depend on you. So I think for me, it comes back to this thing where in a sense, I do something that I would do for free, but yet I'm in a privileged position to be paid enough that there's a roof over the head—over our heads—there's food on the table, the kids can go to their music lessons, etc. We're not having to make major compromises in terms of their upbringing, despite the fact that I'm the only—I don't really like the term sole breadwinner—but between my wife and I, we've chosen to focus on my career rather than hers, in that sense. She's been the primary care giver, and has always been here looking off—because she does other things as well—but it's mostly been about my.. It's mostly my income that supports us financially. So yeah, I would say success from that perspective, at least the way I tend to define it is.. I see a lot of successful people who, because of the demands of their job—which is just inevitable in certain roles—they've not had the time to spend with their family and invest in it, to the point where they've succeeded on the domestic front. There's a lot of senior executives who go through divorces. I don't feel any level of jealousy for people who have all consuming careers that mean that they don't get time to spend with their families.
1:24:44Nono Martínez Alonso: Who are your role models?
1:24:47Kean Walmsley: That's a difficult one. But I mean—again—it's one of those ones where—and this isn't a [pural], or trivialization of this—but people always talk about Musk or Gates, right? I admit that I come down on the side of Gates on that front. Elon Musk is doing some amazing things for humanity—for whatever reason, I think—but he's doing good. I probably wish—and I imagine a number of people also feel the same way—that he didn't have access to social media as much as he does. But Gates, from that perspective, I think that he's doing amazing things. I think that he is, if anything more of a role model, or the type of thoughtful philanthropist for our dream of in some way.. I don't wanna say following. I'm trying to think of the word. His behaviors are things that I tend to think of as being admirable and yeah, a desirable way of living.
1:25:49 Now, on the other hand, that makes it sound like I'm only interested in billionaires as role models, and that's not at all the truth. I was just taking those two as a kind of an example to help you understand a bit the way I think versus being actual examples.
1:26:03Nono Martínez Alonso: Who's someone you know that you consider successful?
1:26:06Kean Walmsley: Oh, that's pretty an interesting one, because I do know a number of people who have gone off and done their own thing to some degree. I've been with Autodesk for so long that most of my—many of my close friends—are current—or former—Autodesk employees. It's not completely true. But if I think about some of the examples.. People who have left Autodesk to create their own businesses, to do different things. I think of them as being successful, although right now is a very challenging time for people who are running small businesses. So the success may not necessarily be a financial, a near term success. And so there are some challenges that they're facing around making ends meet, but they're doing something that they love, they're doing things that make them want to get out of bed in the morning. I think that is something that's really important.
1:26:56 I just think that if I go back to my previous—perhaps slightly narrow definition of the bread on the table thing—that may be not quite fitting that categorization that I used. But yeah, so I do know a number of people I consider to be role models in the sense that they're following their heart. It's not necessarily a path that I want to take for myself, because I've chosen to prioritize the needs of my family, and their long term happiness—and frankly—ultimately, my own happiness. While I enjoy exploring, and discovering, I don't feel very happy, I don't have a strong desire to be in a startup. I know that there's a lot of upsides in terms of experience, and enjoyment—potential enjoyment—and potential financial rewards as well, but it's not a risk that I find appealing in terms of my career, and my family. And maybe one day that'll shift. But at the moment, it's not something I want to invest the time in doing directly.
1:27:55Nono Martínez Alonso: What would be your message to the world?
1:27:58Kean Walmsley: I think if I was good.. And this is not going to be nicely succinct and well phrased, but it would be along the lines of..
1:28:06 You can be happy and successful by helping other people and doing good things. Let's avoid greed and selfishness and do what we can to improve the situation for people on the planet. It's not something that's incompatible with success. In fact—I think in many ways—the most successful people are the people who have found happiness through that way of thinking. I overall like to think that you can be—you can do good in the world—and make a difference to people without blindly chasing your vision.
1:28:48 And I think we need visionaries, it's true, but we also need people who are.. The ideal for me is that that vision is somehow tempered by a respect for humanity and desire to improve the situation for people.
1:29:00Nono Martínez Alonso: Can you summarize that in one sentence?
1:29:03Kean Walmsley: No. No, no, or i can. So so let's see.. Yeah, so if I only had one sentence.. Oh look, you know what? There you go, it all comes down to Bill & Ted's "Be excellent to one another."
1:29:18Nono Martínez Alonso: No, I relate to that. I think you're on the right track. I try to have that present. On a really quick note—I don't want to spend a lot of time talking about this—but in some way at architecture school I was.. I think I would say we were trained to protect our IP. On the projects we do, it seems like that's your value there. But then on the software world and trying to go to the opposite spectrum, trying to be Open-source—where I can contribute—I think it makes me happier. Or at least, I see things that happen that make me happy when people engage with my projects, and I can have conversations, then when it's all about "Wow, look at how nice this thing I did is." It's more about helping the other and "I've already spent the time doing something, why don't you start from where I left it off, and just focus on what's original, what's different from what you want to do about it." And it's not always easy. It's easier said than done, but I definitely aim for that. And I think it relates to—I hope it relates—to what you just said.
1:30:23Kean Walmsley: Yeah, yeah, totally. I didn't specifically think about Open-source, but it's absolutely there as well. I completely agree with you.
1:30:31Nono Martínez Alonso: What would be a recent purchase of $100 or less that you've done lately that has a positive impact in your life?
1:30:38Kean Walmsley: Wow, $100 or less.. Positive impact.. It's difficult, because I haven't been spending much money lately. Ah, it was a little bit more than $100, but the microphone that I'm using to record this podcast that we actually bought for my daughter's singing lessons. She's actually singing—and singing beautifully—but we decided that we needed to get her—I wouldn't say professional grade—but you know, relatively high end microphone.
1:31:04Nono Martínez Alonso: Sounds pretty good.
1:31:05Kean Walmsley: Yeah. So there you go. Something that's directly meaningful to this podcast. It's much better than if I'd been just using my earbuds with integrated microphone to do it. So I think that's been a good investment.
1:31:18Nono Martínez Alonso: Would there be any favorite apps or services that you use daily?
1:31:22Kean Walmsley: I actually don't want too much dependence, or I don't have many apps that I use on a regular basis. I do use Google Maps a lot—like a lot of people—to get from one place to another when I need to. Despite being involved in projects related to IoT, I'm not really a big measurement kind of guy into optimization of performance, and health stats and stuff like that. I tend not to. So no, I actually don't.. My use of apps and services is actually fairly mundane. So now I'm
1:31:55Nono Martínez Alonso: Okay, so let's move into one of the latest sections, we're close to the end. This time was the first time that I asked in advance online to see if people from Twitter or LinkedIn had any questions for you. There were two people that wrote questions. One was Alvaro Pickmans and the other one you mentioned Jacob Small. Alvaro asked you "What routine do you follow to always have such a neat beard?"
1:32:22Kean Walmsley: Yeah, so as I replied on Twitter, I said that my wife would laugh long and hard at that question. And the reason is not because of the routine itself, is because of the fact that she spends a lot of time quite close to my beard and realizes just how untidy it mostly is. I don't have much of a routine. Especially at the moment, I'll shave intermittently. I use clippers with—zero grade clippers—just to shave the top of my head, and then I use the same clippers to sort of trim a little bit on the beard. But honestly, it's never been a huge priority for me. I think with Alvaro.. I've met Alvaro a number times, but it's almost always at events where I've been presenting, or what have you. I may be have made a little bit more effort just before those. So somehow I've been in a slightly tinier shape than normal.
1:33:14 Otherwise the other aspect of it is when you always see the same photo of me on social media—which has my beard in fairly good shape—then maybe that's the impression you get that I always look like that. It's not at all the case. But I will say one thing actually on that topic is that I've always kind of—and this is getting back to the simplicity thing—I have a absolute loathing of spending time in hairdressers. Ever since I was 18 I've absolutely strived to reduce that as far as possible. So, when I was 18 I had long hair—so nobody had to cut it—and I just shaved myself. Just for a little period, I had it cut—and this is soon after I joined Autodesk, I think this is about 97—I had it cut to about the same length as your head Nono at the moment. And for a little while, I did have to go to the hairdressers on a regular basis, which drove me crazy. So in the end, after I'd moved to Switzerland, I ended up shaving it off. And then that for me has just been very easy.
1:34:11Nono Martínez Alonso: Yeah, no, that that sounds good. I just try to let it grow a lot and then cut it so I don't have to visit the hairdressers too much. I will thank Alvaro for the question. This is A-L-V-P-I-C-K-M-A-N-S on Twitter. That's a hard handle there. And then the next question that we already replied—sort of—but we're just gonna treat it again. Thanks to Jacob small. So that's @jacobwsmall on Twitter.
1:34:40 How do you decide which project to focus on at which time?
1:34:44Kean Walmsley: So yeah, at the moment, it tends to be driven by—I wouldn't say the urgency—but the requests that come in. Because a lot of the projects I'm working on—some of them are deadline driven—but a lot of them are not. So it's a matter of choice. I have a certain degree of freedom to move forward on things as I see fit, which is great. But it always comes down to other people who are waiting on things for you, and how to prioritize those relatively. So a lot of it is just like an instinctive prioritization process. It just depends on the people around you and what they need from you.
1:35:19Nono Martínez Alonso: Yeah, one thing I wanted to also discuss today. I think almost one year ago—or like, 11 months ago—is the last time we saw each other. I think it was mid June 2019, when we were discussing over breakfast in Dublin, that maybe this conversation could happen. And well, I'm really glad that it did. The last thing that I will do today is ask you if—I don't know—if you want to comment on anything else on this interview, or if you want to ask me something, or if you have any other little thing that you want to discuss before we go.
1:35:56Kean Walmsley: Yeah, I've really enjoyed this by the way Nono.Thank you. Thank you once again for asking me to participate—and I'm listening to me—for two or so hours. So you know, that's been really great. I'm actually curious about your motivation for the podcast series, and how you managed to keep that motivation high after so many episodes, and so long?
1:36:21Nono Martínez Alonso: Yeah. Well, I ask myself repeatedly, over and over. I think it's not easy to find, because—I don't know if many of the people who listen know—but I don't get any income. I don't get any revenue. I'm not really trying to push for that at moment with this project, with The Getting Simple project. I think this is more of a personal growth project. Against—or in contrary—to what you mentioned, I've been only reading English non-fiction for the past, maybe 10 years,or five years. I maybe read some fiction, but not too much. I leave fiction for movies, I would say. For me, one thing that started with the blog—I've commented this on previous episodes, I think in Tatjana's one I talked in depth about this and some others—but it's about me being.. Becoming a better communicator, trying to share what I do that.. There are many things that I do on my own. I spend many hours a day on the computer that are for myself, but I'm trying to share that passion and motivation with other people.
1:37:19 way that also the podcast is helping me do that is connecting with others, the actual engagement that—as I've previously mentioned—was in person. I've done, maybe 35 or 40 interviews—or something—not all of them are released. But I would say 98% or 95% they were all in person, and that implies scheduling some quality time—maybe three hours—that I'm going to spend with a guest. Sadly now, we had to do this online. It's a lot harder to schedule that on the go, so when you're traveling—or when you're going somewhere—but as I did with Adam Menges, or Tatjana Dzambazova I scheduled this quality time in San Francisco—which made my trip a bit more stressful—but it also made it so much better, richer. I spent one week with Tatiana at her awesome house in between the woods, with all sorts of animals visiting the place in Mill Valley. I also went to hike in Sonoma, and Fairfax with Adam. Just to summarize—I think I'm extending too much—but just the fact that this lets me be introspective about myself and connect with others in a more in depth level that just maybe with you I wouldn't have been able to talk to you in this depth for months—or years—now with the COVID situation.
1:38:46 So, first thing is connection. Second thing is learning from others. I'm actually trying to mold my thoughts and gain more worldviews about the questions that worry me—or interest—me in life. And also as a way to share the knowledge that I think that I'm acquiring by reading, by learning more programming things, or by doing all the optimization and workflow things that really I'm passionate about. So yeah, I hope that answers.
1:39:17Kean Walmsley: Yeah, yeah. Thank you. That's great.
1:39:18Nono Martínez Alonso: Thanks for asking that question.
1:39:20 So yeah. Without further ado, I think this is it. I think we covered a lot. I hope, if only this was an exercise for you to think about your life and sort of put it together in words.
1:39:35 Thanks so much for your time Kean, again.
1:39:37 And thanks to everyone who has been listening with us. Hopefully you stuck to the end. And again, if you have any comments, any questions, anything you liked or anything, just reach out on Twitter. I'm @nonoesp. So nonoesp, and Kean is @keanw. Thanks so much for listening and we'll see you next time.
1:40:00 If you enjoyed the show, remember that you can find a detailed list of episodes notes, transcripts, and previous episodes at gettingsimple.com.
1:40:08 I'm also starting to upload learning videos to YouTube to teach how I do things. And we'll start live streaming in the near future, covering topics from computational design and creative coding, to design automation, machine learning, workflow optimization, or even how I make this podcast. You can find these videos if you go to gettingsimple.com/youtube and look for my Learning playlist.
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