The Golden Hammer Award has been given out but once in 21 years and was an award that was given to an Autodesk employee for major 3D work in AutoCAD. To my knowledge only 1 was ever awarded and that was to Scott Heath for implementing a great deal of 3D work in AutoCAD Release 10 according to Autodesk founder John Walker.

Looking at where AutoCAD has come in the past few releases leads me to award one unofficial Golden Hammer to Guillermo Melantoni shared with the entire AutoCAD Team for all of their hard work for the 3D enhancements in AutoCAD 2010 and 2011 such as meshes, procedural surfacing, and so much more. There were also many non 3D features that rocked my geeky CAD world like geometric constraints and parametrics, and lets not forget we now have transparency controlled by both objects and layer properties in AutoCAD 2011. They worked tirelessly with multiple Autodesk product and design teams to better all products and workflows. This was no small accomplishment and took a great deal of research, programming, coordination, coffee, beer, meetings, and long late hours to deliver. There is a still a great deal of that work continuing and will be seen for many future Autodesk product releases. Funny enough AutoCAD 2011 was codename Hammer during development, coincidence?

In celebration of this unofficial Golden Hammer I will buy everyone a beer at the Autodesk University 2010 Beer Bust to occur in roughly 134 days!

Thank you,
Shaan