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2022 Year in review

2022 was a year of many things...

KittyCAD's first full year as a company, some important announcements, and a build out of the base for your infrastructure for hardware design ~

Team

To start, our team 2x'd in size; we're almost up to double digits :D ! Since Jan 1st, we've added employees from Australia, California, Michigan, Arizona, and even more coming soon ~ .

For the time-being, we're proud to keep a small and mighty crew, focusing on hiring for specific needs. Our reasoning, everyone's work has a direct impact on the day-to-day, and maintaining the speed for now as we ramp up allows us to be more direct with our focus.

As a company of developers by developers and engineers, we keep two main meeting days a week at most to maximize dev time with easy async and even parallel-play setups to work remotely as a team. That is, we maximize getting real shit done and walking that walk1. Also, no matter how fun our company gets, we take work-life balance seriously because we're not here to spark and burn out, we're here to conquer2 for the long-term.

Want to join the crew B) ? Make sure to check out our careers page for any new listings ~

Company

As we build out the api for you, there were a few programs and groups we applied for (and were accepted!) to assist in the coming years.

  • The Nvidia Inception program is Nvidia's startup accelerator program. Unlike traditional accelerators, NVIDIA Inception supports all stages of a startup’s life cycle, including allowing us to work closely with members, the best technical tools, and latest internal resources (including collaboration with internal orgs) as we build out our gpu accelerated systems for you ~

  • The Khronos Group, with its tagline 'Connecting Software to Silicon', was the first of its kind in the computer graphics world to bridge the gap between corporations and propietary hardware, allowing for most of the cross platform applications and formats we have available in the 3D world today. By becoming a member, KittyCAD is now enabled to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, vote at various stages before public deployment and aid in the delivery of our own cutting-edge accelerated platforms and infrastructure tools through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.

  • The Metaverse Standards Forum is an open venue for cooperation between standards organizations and companies for the development of interoperability standards of an open and inclusive metaverse, accelerating their development and deployment through pragmatic, action-based projects. KittyCAD's involvement in this group will foster communication in the infrastructure-for-hardware space adding new life to the industry's possibilities.

Advisors

Additionally, our company has also been lucky to have two great advisors start mentoring us on this journey!

Patrick Cozzi[0][1] is recognized as an expert in graphics and 3D mapping technology, is CEO of Cesium, former chair of The Khronos 3D Formats Working Group3, and a major proponent for advancing the field of 3D geospatial.

Norm Badler[0][1][2] is a legend in the computer graphics field, was inducted into ACM SIGGRAPH’s Academy Class in 20214, and has a multi-decade lineage of Phd students at the intersection of math, geometry, AI, interactive systems, computer vision, and art.

Engineering

At the beginning of this year, we released the initial beta version of our api, finally moving into our official product launch mid July.

Since then we've built out and externally released a file conversion system, beginnings of a math library, a sneak peak at our mesh and modeling libraries, and the start of our tutorials5 and samples. Additionally we've done a lot of major work for our own internal server for larger project build outs, infra to make your interactions as seamless as possible, and pipelining setup for our own upcoming rendering && modeling engine6.

That is, most notably for KittyCAD 2022, it was a year of building infrastructure for your infrastructure.

Check out our changelogs and docs as we add more infra in the coming 2023 year ~

Footnotes

  1. Have a feature request? We're all ears! (^ㅇㅅㅇ^) ↩

  2. KittyCAD Core Value #3 ↩

  3. even receiving in 2019 the Khronos "Khronie" award for outstanding contributions to open standards ↩

  4. considered one of the highest honors in the field of computer graphics ↩

  5. just getting started? check out our beginner or advanced onboarding tutorials that suit your coding comfort level ;) ↩

  6. stay tuned for new endpoints ~ ↩

Hannah Bollar
Hannah Bollar