Onshape is here! On March 9th, Onshape lifed the NDA and opened up for public beta. For the beter part of the last year, I have been working hard with our entire Onshape team to get ready for this day. I have also been absent from podcasting due to the time constraints and frankly with the NDA in place, it was very hard to speak about the CAD industy when the most exciting stuff, in my opinion, was what we were working on. With the NDA lifted, I am going to try to do some content as time permits.

Since January 1, 2006, I had delivered a weekly show about SolidWorks and CAD tech and it started before my wife and I had started our family. As times changed, so did my priorities and focus. I enjoyed every late night recording, breaking tech discovery and discussion about SolidWorks, technology and watching the web evolve into the platform we see today.

CADDirt was a rebranding on me and my passion for technology, especially after leaving the SolidWorks channel. CAD, however, has always been a passion of mine and obviously one of the reasons for being part of Onshape. I hope to discuss much of the CAD industry, beyond that of just Onshape, and talk about anything and everything related to CAD, technology breakthroughs in computing, engineering and the web.

In the meantime, go and check out the public beta of Onshape. It is important to note that Onshape is developed in an iterative fashion.  This means what you see today will update about every 3-4 weeks as we refine, re-factor, and redeploy bug fixes, improvements and new functionality.  Best part, no install...it will just be there for you.

We also updated after our first week and added a number of improvements to Onshape that you can read about in our forum.

Thank you all for listening/reading for the past 9 years and I hope to post more frequetnly in the near future. Check out the social links as well for the continuous feed of tech articles and interesting tagged blogs as I come across them in my feedly. ~Lou

The past 6 months seem to have flown by and I thought I would update you all on the plans of CADDirt.  As many of you know, I joined the team at Onshape in May of this year to contribute to the next generation of CAD.  The team and experiences have been nothing short of amazing but we have lofty goals (no pun intended) and we have all been heads down since starting our pre-production testing.

I know a few of you have had eyes on what we are up to and I can't wait when we lift the NDA so I can talk more openly about it.  With the focus on work, adjustment in schedules and the nature of our NDA, I have been at a loss for time to record but soon there will be shows again!  I miss talking about CAD related tech and it was very weird to not to record the What's New this year for SolidWorks 2015. 

Personally I have dug deeper into a few tech projects, especially now that I code more at work then I used to.  Life at a start-up brings you back to basics and teaches you to venture out of your comfort zones, picking up skills you might not have had and forces you to brush off the cob webs on skills that have gone dormant.

Lately the best place to find me is on Google Plus and I still tag a lot of tech articles which are posted there or on Twitter @caddirt.  Thank you all for the outreach and I know that 2015 is going to be another stellar year for tech and cad!  ~Lou

Hi everyone! It has taken longer than anticipated to get this transition complete. I am hoping to get the first show out here in the next week after the Independence Day here in the US.

As mentioned before, the focus of CAD Dirt will be to continue to highlight what is new in the CAD, Engineering and Web space. I am working hard to finish up the branding changes and have started a sub-reddit at http://caddirt.reddit.com where anyone can submit and vote on the stories to cover from the week. Here are also the updated social sites as well:

- Google+

- Facebook

- Twitter

So still a work in progress but can't wait to get started digging into all that is new in tech related to and part of our industry!  ~Lou