Covering The Autodesk University 2025 Trade Show
I got to cover the Autodesk–creator of AutoCAD, Fusion 360, Maya, etc–University 2025 trade show + MUCH more event. It was huge and a bit overwhelming.
In September I attended the Autodesk University 2025 show. It’s sort of a cross between a high-energy Apple event where they reveal the latest iGadget(s), and a traditional trade show where vendors are happy to talk to you about their various wares and/or services. Such vendors seem to be mostly in complimentary industries to Autodesk1, if not representing an actual Autodesk faction like Maya or AutoCAD itself.
First off, the venue and food were both excellent. I’m not sure how they coordinated ~20 simultaneous buffet lines with incredible food (e.g. salmon was served for lunch on Tuesday). To be fair–and to humanize things a bit–they did run out of tortillas on broadly Mexican-themed Wednesday.2
I was there on behalf of hackster.io, nominally to report on the show, but also to meet potential customers and generally represent their brand and that of parent company Avnet. I have been told that I did a good job, though, to be fair, my video isn’t out yet. You can judge for yourself in a week or two when it comes out on the Hackster YouTube page (though documentation on my 3D-printed guitar that I built, brought, and… no longer own ☹️3 is already live).
Since the video will document the show itself, THIS article aims to explain NOT so much what was at the show, but WHAT WAS IT LIKE? And WHAT DID I DO RIGHT coverage-wise? What I might change for next time?
What was Autodesk University 2025 like?
The TL;DG of the keynote presentation was: AI tools + collaboration. Also, that AI is here to amplify human creativity, not replace it. Maybe that’s true, but I suspect at least some people’s jobs will be/are in danger. Hopefully it will all work out for the best on a macro level.4
Gigantic: This is part credit to Autodesk, and part due to a huge venue, the Music City Center👇. While I’ve been to other trade shows, this may be the biggest one I’ve attended, or at least the biggest one in proportion to the city itself (I went to an automation show in Chicago years ago, which was very big, but the city is also massive).
A great venue: The Music City Center is absolutely massive, covering 1.2 million square feet of space. I don’t even think I saw the whole thing, but there was a huge trade show area where I spent most of my time, an (also huge) presentation/meals area, and (surprise) and auditorium that would dwarf most mega-churches in which I saw a presentation on my final day there. Since you’re wondering, it opened in 2013 and cost $623 million to construct, or close a billion dollars today.
Just ONE room at the Music City Center Security was tight: I tried to walk into the conference on the second day I was there without my badge. A well-dressed bouncer immediately stopped me. He was polite as I rifled through my bag, even apologetic (which wasn’t necessary as he was doing what he was doing his job). However, I didn’t think it was necessary for them to rip my good Solidworks shirt off and throw it into the “banned things” fire barrel that they had going.5
Was the TOWN of Nashville a good venue? Mostly. See Airport adventure section below.
Advice for covering a gigantic trade show
Advice is maybe too strong of a word here. More like what did I do right, and what should I improve?
I need to work on my mobile filming setup: It was difficult to tote my Sony A6600 around, and while audio was good most of the time, it did sometimes cut out. Also, my cheap selfie stick didn’t quite seem up to the job. Maybe I need to spend some more money there.
Will Donaldson, the other person from Hackster covering the show, had dedicated filming smartphone (“phone”) with various grips and accessories, plus a neck strap. That seems like a good option for portability.Make sure business cards are updated: I grabbed a bunch of old cards out of my desk that had some outdated info on them. I thought I was out of my PCB business cards that I prefer to distribute, but ended up finding a big stack of them when I got back. That would have been far better.
Covering a show is exhausting: Be prepared if you’re in a similar situation. Also, wear comfortable shoes if you can. Boat shoes are my go-to for just about everything as they can be casual, fancy, or in-between, and don’t even require socks. Score.
Expect a lot of upfront and after-the-show work: Whether someone is paying you to cover a show, or you’re simply paying in opportunity costs, realize that you’ll spend significant time packing/unpacking/uploading footage/recovering/booking flights/etc/etc. Consider this in your $$/time calculus.
The show was in Nashville, which might be nice, but I didn’t see any of it.6 If you plunked the Music City Center down in Tampa, my experience would have been largely the same. Traveling for work sounds exotic, but unless you really plan and take time to see the sights, the location itself matters little.
I took Uber for first time. Seriously. I live a pretty suburban lifestyle and try to avoid excess apps on my phone. Anyway, it was a good experience. I left a tip both times, which may or may be normal. Let me know in the comments. See note 4.
Often networking is the real point of shows like this. Sure, there is plenty to lean and see, but it’s also a huge opportunity to meet people that could advance your career or teach you something new themselves. Whether you’re attending as a normal person there to learn, as an exhibitor, or someone there to cover the show as a technical journalist, embrace the opportunity. I certainly tried to make the best of it!
Airport Adventure Getting to AU 2025
To be ready to cover the show on Tuesday, September 16th, I flew out of Tampa at around 5:00 PM, on a flight full of Nashville Predators rookie showcase hockey players. Being in a highly Canadian influenced industry, they were very polite, and my flight on Southwest, with a one-of-a-kind 3D-printed guitar went smoothly. Then I touched down and things got weird.
As I exited I found that my Hackster counterpart Will Donaldson (who I had yet to meet) was still in the taxi line, even though he was supposed to arrive an hour or two before me. As I hurried to catch him and hopefully share a cab, I saw a massive line, both for taxis and Ubers/Lyfts, but was able to get close to the front per Will’s prior time investment. Being from Canada and/or Australia himself, he is also quite a pleasant person.
Even with this head start, it took ~twenty minutes to get a cab, which we ended up sharing with a nice lady who was in town to see a a friend and go to an event later that week. It took something like an hour to get out of the airport parking lot, during which time many theories about what was going on were posited. Apparently it was a combination of construction and trade shows, but when you put four strangers in a car in a weird situation, you never know where the conversation will end up going.
Also, we passed the Predators players I had ~met earlier as we were making our way out of the airport in the cab. They were still waiting around. Not being a hockey aficionado, I was only pretty sure the team was called the Predators. So I didn’t yell “Predators” at this group of young, in-shape men for obvious reasons. Interestingly, they didn’t look as large or gruff as I would have thought, but maybe that comes after a few years of experience playing hockey and/or fighting.
From there, we dropped off our bags at the hotel and met Shawn, our contact with Hackster at a casual restaurant with live music. It was nice. But then we went to a different restaurant the next night. Which also had live music, and it had the same menu. Also a good experience, but it seemed like we were in some sort of musical version of Groundhog Day. Or maybe it was a chain. Chain or not, You’re apparently required to have live music at all restaurants in Nashville, a fact that was was even consistent at the airport as I was leaving.7
Great, exhausting experience
All in all, I’m so glad Hackster invited me to go on this trip. I met some really neat people, and got to see some interesting stuff. Who knows, maybe I’ll get to attend AU ‘26, which is reportedly taking place in Las Vegas. While there are some downsides to having a convention in Vegas–i.e. you should probably leave your kids at home–few places rival their capacity for gigantic events. Should be fun!
Thanks for reading! I hope you will follow along as I post weekly about engineering, technology, making, and projects. Fair warning: I am a native Florida man, and may get a little off-topic in the footnotes. Maybe I even had an alligator or two as pets growing up. Perhaps they are alive today and could be used to test earth-wormhole pet friendliness.
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Addendum/Footnotes:
In other words, you won’t find a Solidworks booth there. Actually, I heard one year a guy showed up in a Solidworks shirt and they forcibly ripped it off and made him stand in the corner of shame. And if anyone asks, my neighbor Jason told me that, but it was already third-hand information.
Did they serve Mexican(ish) on Wednesday to avoid the oh-too-easy Taco Tuesday pun? We may never know. They had tortilla chips, so not having actual tortillas wasn’t a big deal.
Yes, sort of ☹️, but also 😁 since they paid me for it. I hope it goes to a good home.
TL;DG - too long; didn’t go, to twist an abbreviation. Consider if you told practical special effects people something similar about computer graphics in the mid-1990s. They’re still around I think, but not in nearly the same numbers. OTOH, automation replacing jobs isn’t always a bad thing - do 75% of us want to be pre-industrial farmers (with a life expectancy of somewhere around 30 years)? If you wanted a physically less taxing job, you could become a scribe, copying letter after letter, day after day, into books that cost far more than the average family could afford.
Bringing it a little closer to home, do you really want to be the junior animator, copying the senior person’s drawings by hand to generate that smooth transition between one frame and the next? Probably not. Just thinking about this and scribe duty makes my wrists hurt. Though you might logically ask where the experienced people come from when the menial jobs are automated?
The second part didn’t actually happen. I don’t have such a shirt, and haven’t used SolidWorks much. It always seemed like a superior product to ProE when I was using it, but the grass is always greener as they say. Also, h/t Jason for the root of this joke and since you read and like being mentioned in the footnotes.
And yes, this is nearly the same theme as footnote #1, which I wrote at a different time. I’ll send a postcard to the first person who gives me a hard time about this in the comments.
According to an Uber driver (and verifying a previous conversation) Nashville is the bachelorette party capital of the US. Maybe the world. Who knows? He also said that they often ask where the guys are and he has no good answer. It seems if you’re a single guy (which I am not) there are worse places to live.
Of course, if you met someone you liked from such an event, you’d have to be OK with a long-distance relationship, since I doubt Nashville natives are the primary bachelorette party-goers. That’s where my advice/observation ends. Do with it what you may.
OK, there were more restaurants at the airport than live music acts, but there were at least two musicians there.