A Ten Year Celebration in Austin, Texas

More than 70 people came out last Thursday night to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of the Central Texas SolidWorks User Group.  It was CTSUG's largest meeting ever, and featured a visit from Rich Welch, SolidWorks VP of Customer Service and Christine Washburn, SolidWorks VP of Marketing.

Bill Casnovsky, who has dutifully led the group for more than four years now, kicked off the meeting by recognizing four CTSUG members who had been at the very first meeting - Rodel Bautista, Rick DuRapau, Jay Jones, and Jim Lowery.

Rich and Christine followed with a lively Q & A session that had the attendees jumping.  There were some issues that were raised and some debate, but all-in-all in was a great discussion.  Rex Jackson had the line of the night when he closed the conversation by explaining;

We ain't switchin', we're just bitchin'

I got my first chance this year to rollout my "What's REALLY New in SolidWorks" presentation, and I think it went very well.  Release time is my second favorite time of the year - a close second to SolidWorks World season.  The crowd was very energetic and engaged, and we had a blast with some of the newer, lesser known functionality released in SolidWorks 2010.

There are only a handfull of SolidWorks User groups that have reached the age of ten.  It's a great accomplishment, and a testament to the group leadcership and the group members.  I thanked Bill after the meeting for taking such good care of "my baby", and inquired about the future.  He thought for a moment, then said...

"I'm having a lot of fun, I think I'll keep going for a while"

Thanks Bill.

Comments

[Todd Blacksher]

I'm glad that I'm not the only one that refers to a User Group as "my baby" - one of the hardest things that I ever had to do was to turn the group over to someone else.