Evan on Engineering Software

In the book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll told the story of a young girl who followed a rabbit into its hole, and discovered a strange world, where the limitations of the outside world no longer applied.  Several years later, Carroll wrote a sequel, Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There, where Alice wondered what the world was like on the other side of a mirror, and to her surprise, was able to pass through to experience the alternate world.

Everyone has their own interpretations of metaphors.  For me, going down the rabbit hole means not only letting go of the things you thought were "true," but also accepting that you may end up somewhere totally unexpected.  Going through the looking glass, you discover that many things are strange reflections of other things -- connected in totally unexpected ways.

So, let me tell you a story.  Once upon a time, in a different lifetime when I was an AutoCAD reseller, I met another AutoCAD reseller who ended up becoming a good friend -- Phil Kreiker, of Looking Glass Microproducts (I guess Phil was a Lewis Carroll fan too.)  We, along with a number of other resellers, used to attend an annual Autodesk reseller meeting called "CAD Camp."  Though we'd attend most of the major presentations, and would spend time visiting vendor booths in the trade show hall, a lot of us would end up sitting around in various places (especially the lobby of the meeting hotel), talking about our businesses, the things we'd seen, our thoughts on Autodesk, and lots of other good stuff.

Eventually, it occurred to Phil that it would be interesting to host an informal meeting, to replicate this kind of environment, but in a more neutral location.  Phil and his wife Joy (who has since passed away) found a resort in Colorado that could host this kind of meeting, and put out a call to everyone they knew in the industry, to see who'd be interested in attending.  Though there were a bunch of us who thought it was a great idea, and planned to attend, ultimately not enough people confirmed, and there was just no way to make it work, financially.  It never happened.  Yet, Phil had planted a seed.

Some years later, I was driving my friend Joel Orr to the airport, after another industry conference, and we got to talking about how the really valuable part of the conference was the time we spent talking to colleagues in the hallways.  I said it would be interesting to have a conference that focused on those kind of interesting converstations, rather than on vendor sales pitches.  I didn't realize it at the time, but I was essentially describing what Phil and Joy were trying to do with their conference.

The world is full of great ideas... but it takes far more than an idea and a bunch of work to make something real.  It takes serendipity.  In this case, the serendipity was that a friend of Joel's and mine, Brad Holtz, had been the conference manager for another trade show, and was looking for "the next thing."  I don't remember who called whom -- it may have been Brad that happened to call Joel on his cell phone at that exact moment, or Joel may have called Brad, but the result was the same:  Joel told Brad about our conversation, and Brad thought it was an interesting idea.  And, from that point on, the idea took on a life if its own.

I just returned from the 8th Congress On the Future of Engineering Software (COFES), the annual meeting that grew out of our conversation.  As much as I'd like to be able to tell you about all the valuable things I got out of COFES this year, the simple reality is that I can't.  The greatest value of something is often very abstract, and doesn't reveal itself until many years later.