Vectorworks, Inc Employee Popular Post PVA - Admin Posted August 23, 2017 Vectorworks, Inc Employee Popular Post Share Posted August 23, 2017 Ten. Thousand. Posts. Since I started heavily participating on the forum, that's about 2500 posts per year, nearly 50 per week. It honestly doesn’t feel like that many at all. My hope is that the large majority of them were helpful in some way. Now, before I start on all this, would development have continued without the Forum upgrade and an increase in interaction between employees and users? Of course it would have. I have no illusions that the things we did here were they ONLY thing driving the success of this company, there are hundreds of really clever people doing thousands of really clever things around me all the time, and if I hadn’t ever showed up I’m sure they’d still be making powerful tools and adding new capability at a constant pace. I had been wanting to do something special for my 10,000th post, (almost missed it until @Tom Klaber pointed it out yesterday!) so I thought I’d see if we ended up cashing some of the verbal checks JimW Version 2013 wrote with that big mouth of his. What I wanted to focus on were moments or posts that brought about change in our extremely nerdy little corner of the world: Honest Memory This was one of the first frank discussions I got into with a number of long time forum members at the same time, and certainly seemed to get a lot of attention. To give some reference, this chat took place prior to the full 64bit conversion of Vectorworks and the removal of the 2.5GB max RAM limit: “On 9/25/2013 at 10:00 AM, JimW said: Moving to 64bit will more mitigate these problems than actually solve them. The problem is that a lot of the time (80%-ish id say) when I get my hands on a file that is encountering out of memory errors, its usually some bizarre complication within certain kinds of geometry that is causing Vectorworks to NEED so much memory in the first place. This isn't to say "Oh users are just doing it wrong.", the large majority of the time they are doing everything as they should be. There are just a number of odd cases where changing your workflow could remove the problem entirely. (Creating sweeps when 3D Conversion Resolution is set to Very High for example, creates INSANELY complex objects that you would never suspect of causing major slowdowns and memory use, but fixing those solves the problem for the entire file.) Small things like this, which absolutely need to be fixed, make the memory limitations appear worse than they really are, and in themselves cause many of the memory leak symptoms users are seeing.” At the time of my posting I didn’t have any concept of this, but it turned out to be one of the most candid statements made publicly by an employee in quite some time and a key turning point in a lot of (rightly) skeptical minds that reside here. In Tech Support, when talking amongst ourselves, there is no social wall or barrier to consider. We speak very frankly to one another, we sometimes throw things at one another but don’t sugar coat a single thing. Tools are either Working, or Broken. It is a very black and white world at the Tech 1 level and in some ways, that is an incredible amount of freedom and that is the world I originally came from. However, this conversation and others like it led me (and rapidly, others here) to see how having ONLY marketing communications with users had become problematic. With long time professionals intimately familiar with the guts of the application communicating with each other, “soft” marketing replies and announcements could become frustrating. Change did not come fast, but even just looking back on that era of the forums; the idea of sharing whole features ahead of time, openly discussing UI design both in terms of future development and past missteps, talking about features years down the road, all of this was foreign and together, we have managed to make it the expected norm. I may be a bit of a softy but I freaking love that. The Forum Upgrade In September of 2016, we rolled out the new Forum architecture, bringing to the public a much nicer method of communicating both with us and amongst each other. This specific change was a direct result of responses on the old forums and is one of the few changes I think would have not have come about without our increasing interaction prior to it. There were a few choice lines that really kicked me in the ribs when I first started reading older request threads:Posts circa 2006-2012: “So is this a VW official supported board or an independent board?" “In short, not looking for a closed VW employee answer only, but them showing an interest, actively. “ “It would be nice if we were able to see small pictures to help describe problems and solutions on the nemetchek bulletin board.” “I've long since abandoned the forum search, preferring instead Google site search because it works. eg - a search for eps returns the dreaded 'There are no results for your query. Please try a broader range of search criteria.' really?” “Agree totally, this has to be the least useful tech or CAD site forum front end there is, I mean if you need to place a + before every search string why does the engine not do it for you??” Ouch. The truth hurts. The number of users returning to the forum after its activity spiked in 2013/2014 and the rekindled access to answers directly from employees directly drove registration and participation up, not to mention the completely merited criticisms of the positively ancient board technology we were still using, gave my team the leverage we needed to secure resources for a major reconstruction and in my humble but exceedingly biased opinion, we knocked it out of the park. This project is still ongoing, but even as we implement new features and release more information, the user feedback and visitation metrics keep providing additional support to our efforts and smooth the way for further community enhancements. It was a long time coming, but it was one of the most visible and widespread improvements we have made to date and I am still quite pleased with it. VGM and Navigation Graphics There was a moment during a meeting with I think a few engineers and their managers, where a similar statement to this came from one of the Techs. Not sure if it was myself or not. I think this moment was around 2014, just prior to the introduction of Fast Navigation Graphics, which I believe was the first splitting off of tasks from the single CPU thread to the graphics card. (This was the same single CPU thread that today still handles all geometry calculations, the last major piece of the multicore puzzle remaining.) “Users are repeatedly asking what kind of hardware they can throw at Vectorworks to make it faster, and we have to keep telling them “Nothing.” We need a better answer.” That got some attention. It changed the problem of how Vectorworks was not able to take advantage of superior hardware from only a technical limitation, to a glaring political/marketing problem as well. Having a few techs having to tell a user “No” on occasion is just a fact of life in support, but having to tell every single user that there was nothing they could buy hardware-wise to match the performance of other applications was a serious issue. Post circa 2009: “OpenGL is the ONLY part of VW that uses the graphics card. Every other rendering mode (including wireframe, hidden line, etc.) does not use the modern super fast graphics cards we have today. NOT even 2D navigation uses it (vw11 used to have hardware acceleration but because of their negativity, they stopped it since). Every other modern 3D application uses the graphics card and even entry level cards are super fast, so why vw doesn't use it, is beyond me.” Again, ouch... but fair. Today, more and more of Vectorworks has split off that single thread and started leaning more heavily on other hardware components, with the VGM driving the majority of this. Now, if you spend the cash on a great GPU, you can really tell the difference. It can easily be forgotten, but any time I pop back into 2012 or a prior version and try to use OpenGL or the walkthrough tool, it becomes instantly obvious how far things have come, and brings into focus how important it is that we keep going further. While the advances in this area of our tech were driven heavily by Tech Support’s feedback, the volume came from emails and phone calls, but the in-depth discussion and specific needs to be addressed came from the Forum. Came from you. History Repeating Then, while pulling up some old quotes from the older board, I came across this. Look at the dates on these posts and their content: Sound familiar? I am not the first to try and champion more interaction with users. I was actually trained by the techs mentioned here personally when I started sometime around the launch of Vectorworks 12.5. This means that we went backwards. Times were good before and they are again today, but at some point between then and now, we forgot how important the conversations we had here were. If nothing else, these 10,000 posts have taught my department to do everything in our power to never let that happen again. Forward, not backward. Thank you all for everything, and here’s to the next 10,000. 14 Quote Link to comment
Gadzooks Posted August 23, 2017 Share Posted August 23, 2017 (edited) The first to congratulate you! Well done and many more. I thought it would be like the speedo on my car - I'd look down expecting 10000 and Id've missed it and it would be showing 10001 Im waiting for the next milestone obviously. Too many noughts! Just had to edit it in my excitement. Edited August 23, 2017 by Gadzooks Too many noughts!! Quote Link to comment
Kevin McAllister Posted August 23, 2017 Share Posted August 23, 2017 Jim, Congratulations on your 10000th post! I sincerely appreciate all of the influence you've had and all of the work you and your colleagues put into improving VW. These forums wouldn't be the same without you. Kevin Quote Link to comment
Administrator JuanP Posted August 23, 2017 Administrator Share Posted August 23, 2017 Congratulations Jimbo...looking forward for 10K more. Beers on me. Quote Link to comment
Christiaan Posted August 23, 2017 Share Posted August 23, 2017 Geez, that's more posts than me Love this post Jim, thanks for everything you and your team have done. For a time there I really wasn't enjoying my work, and a lot of it was down to Vectworks, it just wasn't getting out the way. And communicating this was mostly like hitting a brick wall. So I find it quite interesting that you've identified exactly the three the things that has turned all that on its head. How times have changed. Some days I wake up and can't wait to get into work because of something I'm working on and Vectorworks is helping me do it. 1. open honest tech talk (priceless) 2. stability (beta testing is the only place I encounter a lot of crashes these days) 3. navigation graphics, especially the way OpenGL now works These are the main reasons I'm so positive about the future of VW these days P.S. it also helps that Biplap removed that bane of my life "Display viewport cache" for me. My god, the amount of work I lost because of that bloody option!! haha Quote Link to comment
unearthed Posted August 24, 2017 Share Posted August 24, 2017 Congratulations and thank you Jim, your input and relaying of information is really helpful to us out here. When I'm seeking software an active, well-designed user forum is (almost) as important as the software itself. Most of what I know of VW has come from this group. Again thanks. And just for once I've come in the top five - whoopee; in 2014 unearthed posted "“Agree totally, this has to be the least ..." The site is so much better now. VW is still 'in spite of ware', altho' I'm still on 2008, but it is really the only good software for landscape work. Quote Link to comment
barkest Posted August 24, 2017 Share Posted August 24, 2017 13 hours ago, JimW said: I have no illusions that the things we did here were they ONLY thing driving the success of this company nope its just us To quote Donald 'T' "An extremely credible source called my office and told me Jim W is doing a great job" Quote Link to comment
zoomer Posted August 24, 2017 Share Posted August 24, 2017 Congratulations ! Funny, I already have forgotten that there was once an older Forum that didn't look and work like the current one. 1 Quote Link to comment
Markvl Posted August 24, 2017 Share Posted August 24, 2017 Congratulations @JimW! Your balanced and charitable responses keep, I think, everyone a little calmer and more constructive. I've only been using VW for 3 years now, the same for the forum, and it's been fantastic. I've learned so much and continue to do so. Most recently because of the "DRAWING LIST ADJUSTING DATA" thread, I'm going to look into that end of things more closely. Cheers for 10,000 posts and cheers for the next 10,000! Quote Link to comment
bcd Posted August 24, 2017 Share Posted August 24, 2017 Thank you Jim we know you know we know Quote Link to comment
RGyori Posted August 24, 2017 Share Posted August 24, 2017 As my ever patient wife frequently points out (which says more about me that her), "Dear, there are no problems , only solutions". And Jim is a proven master of directing us to those solutions. Much appreciated! Quote Link to comment
Andrew Davies Posted August 25, 2017 Share Posted August 25, 2017 You do a great job Jim - congrats. Nemetschek are lucky to have you. Quote Link to comment
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