I feel like I should take the opportunity that the holiday break from work affords me to think back over the last year, and share some of the things that brought joy to my life in 2017.

There are so many apps that I could write about here. I spend a lot of time on my iPad, iPhone, Mac and Apple Watch. This isn’t a comprehensive look at what I use, just some high notes. For instance, I probably use my iPad about 35% of the time for reading across Reeder, Instapaper and the Kindle app, but that’s all the mention they get.

I’m writing this using Bear on my iPad. Bear has become the latest in a line of notepad apps that I have used as a junk drawer for my information. I occasionally take a quick look to see where Apple’s Notes and Simplenote are, both served this role for some time after I abandoned Evernote. Both offer the one thing that has made me reconsider Bear, a web interface to my text. (Bear has one currently under development, but with no announced release date.) What Bear does offer is a really nice clean interface, good tagging support, and first class apps on iPad, Mac and iPhone. It also offers a good community and developers who are actively working to improve the apps. It’s a joy to use, and I happily will let my subscription renew.

I’ve used a lot of weather apps over the years, but I have currently settled on Hello Weather. It offers a clean, uncluttered UI, but without redacting any of the information that I want my weather app to include.

I spent a lot of time this year trying out different podcast apps, but ultimately ended up back where I started, using Overcast. What drove me to look at the other options was the lack of a good working web player or desktop app for Mac. Overcast offers the best iOS app, bar none, in my opinion, and in the end, that won out over the presence of better web players from other developers for me. It would be nice if he made some quality of life enhancements to the web player, but I have taken to just always listening from my phone for now.

I have (I just counted.) 45 photography apps installed on my phone. Darkroom has become the default app for editing and touch ups once I have taken the shot and gotten the image onto my phone, if shot with a camera. It offers really clean workflow that matches how I think about editing images. I still also use VSCO, Priime, and am also trying out TouchRetouch.

I currently have a 429 day streak of checking Timehop. This lovely little app lets me look into what I was doing in previous years across social media and the photos on my device. Most of my social time is spent using Tweetbot and Instagram. Tweetbot offers fantastic list support and I use Twitter in a very list-centric manner, so it maps well for me on all my devices. I continue to miss the days of 3rd party Instagram apps for the iPad. I’ve taken to using their web site on my iPad instead of blowing their iPhone app up 2x.

As a lot of this year was dedicated to fitness, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the Activity app from Apple is something I use religiously. My wife and I share our activity goal data, allowing us to encourage each other to do well. I can’t understate the big help that this app and the Apple Watch have been for me as I try to push myself to become more fit and healthy. Late in the year, after I got my Series 3 Apple Watch, I also started using HeartWatch and AutoSleep. Both offer more data than the base Activity app, specifically around sleep efficiency and heart rate data.

In a related vein, since I listen to music while working out, Spotify has become a key app on my phone and my main music app. I maintain a subscription to Apple Music as well, and use SoundCloud and Mixcloud for DJ mixes predominantly, but Spotify rules the day because of it’s device support, social features and better recommendation engine. I could play Spotify through my new living room home entertainment gear on the day it arrived without any additional hardware or effort. If I had to drop a subscription, it would be Apple Music. They just haven’t improved it enough since launch.

Which brings me to games. Two games have remained on my home screen throughout the year, and probably will stay there for some time to come. I’ve been playing Hearthstone since launch, and still enjoy the most recent expansions. Blizzard have done a great job of fostering new content. When I want to get a little more tappy and engaged, I fire up VainGlory. I mostly play their Battle Royale mode. They have built a very responsive MOBA, and I look forward to the release of 5v5 play in January.

It’s been an exciting month. What seemed like a quick casual conversation with my wife turned into house hunting, mortgage shopping, and the eventual purchase of a new home.  As our two boys have gotten older, the existing house was feeling smaller and smaller. The new house is a lot bigger, and is walking distance to the elementary school that my sons will attend.

In the last two weeks, we’ve moved in, and I now find myself wondering how soon we’ll reach a stable state. Our new home is gorgeous, and I can’t wait to get to the point where we feel like we’re unpacked. Right now, most things are still in boxes. I haven’t even unpacked a single box in my home office.

It’s funny how much the first few days after a move feel almost like camping, as you unpack just the most critical items, then less critical ones. It feels like a set of systems that you’re bringing online.

We’ve had a lot of issues, as I guess everyone does in the home buying and moving process. We had three different closing dates as the builder was unable to manage the schedule with inspections to get the CO. We bought a refrigerator to match the appliances our builder had already put in the kitchen, only to discover that it wouldn’t fit upon delivery, requiring some additional custom cabinet work, which he’s now asking us to pay for.  Our washer and dryer do not fit in the laundry room in such a way that the door can be closed. All of these sharp edges will get smoothed out over the next few weeks.

Our address is new, there was no house there before we moved in. This has caused a number of issues ranging from Comcast not even being willing to give us service, to not being able to change our bank accounts and the billing addresses on things because postal lookups were failing.  Comcast thing worked out great because we’re getting Gigabit Fiber from AT&T instead, which is better, faster, and more stable.

Our next big tournament has been announced.

[embed][www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dulRNTz4SCg[/embed])

I’ve been thinking since last weekend that I should write something up about the ELEAGUE CS:GO Major that  just happened. This event was a watershed week for our business, but also a marker in my career.  This is from my perspective, and I should be clear that this is from me, not my employer. Any opinions are my opinions, and not theirs. The facts belong to us all though.

For those who might not be familiar, or weren’t following along, this tournament was one of the most successful in esports history in a number of ways. It was the first CS:GO Major tournament with a televised Final, which was on TBS here in the US. It was a tournament with some of the best and most competitive gameplay in the history of these tournaments, something we clearly can’t take credit for, but which is a testament to the state of competitive CS:GO. A team named Astralis triumphed in the end, and during that final amazing match, we broke the all time Twitch maximum concurrent users record for a single channel, smashing the previous high mark by over 200,000, and becoming the first channel to ever go over 1 million concurrents.  There’s an awesome Instagram video, captured by a Twitch engineer friend, which captures my awkward enthusiasm in the moment that we crested that 1 million mark.

The tournament was held here in Atlanta, first at the ELEAGUE studio on our campus in midtown, with the quarterfinals, semifinals and finals then being held at the Fox Theatre, a venue at which I have attended concerts, plays, and even a movie or two. It was incredibly cool to work an event in my adopted hometown of almost twenty years. While I have worked many NBA All-Star games and golf events while working for Turner, none of them have ever been here in Atlanta. That somehow made this more real and meaningful for me.

In many ways, this  event was no different, from a work perspective, than one of the seven NBA “season starts” I worked on, or an NBA All-Star Weekend, or a PGA Championship, or the Ryder Cup that I wrote the software for onsite the week of the tournament. This event left a huge 14-day gaping hole in my life, every waking moment those 14 days I was thinking about or doing work. We spent well over a hundred hours the week of the tournament getting ready for each day, working the competition, and making sure that things were updated at the end of the night. These kind of hours have an impact of those around us, and I am more cognizant of that than ever these days. I’m not the only one in our home who is exhausted from the long days. I missed my kids and my wife, and they assure me that they missed me. When working with live sports or live events, this is how it is, what it takes to be successful. There are a multitude of details that need to be carefully tended to, and it has to be on a specific time scale that is not negotiable.  I am incredibly proud of the entire team that worked on this event. There were no major outages, our Twitch stream stayed up with no downtime. We ran our Game Command player for more matches in a week than we’ve ever run it before. In fact, I believe we ran it for more hours for the Major than every other time we’ve run it combined.

So with all this background information, what did this event mean to me? To understand that, I need to provide just a little more context. First, it was the culmination of an 18th month journey for me. I was asked to first help with, and then work on, Turner’s esports initiatives. I had an amazing job working on the NBA’s products in the US at the time, and I personally took a big chance on esports because I was passionate about it and ready for something new. I had no idea what it would turn into for Turner, and there were no promises about what my role would be moving forward. We started 18 months ago with a vision for what we wanted to do, and the rest has been a wild ride right into this weekend.

I could have never imagined that Valve, the publisher of CS:GO, would choose us to host a Major in our first year of existence. I couldn’t have guessed, even the morning of the Final, that we would break the single channel traffic record on Twitch. So much of that relies on the quality of the matches, and the interest of the fans. If the match had ended after two maps, we never would have broken the record. In any case, even if we hadn’t broken that record, we’ve accomplished so much in a short period of time, starting from nothing, building a team, hosting events. Not everything has been perfect, nor has every decision been a winner, but we’ve learned from every mistake, and taken all the fan feedback very seriously, and I think it shows. That’s how we roll.

So, this meant a lot to me, more in some ways than anything I have helped build in my career.  I may not work in esports forever, but the memory of this event, especially, across everything we’ve done with ELEAGUE in it’s first year, will always be with me, a reminder that if you just keep going and try hard, and do your best, good things happen.

I’ve been quite busy with work related items for the last couple of weeks. I realized this weekend that my hosting provider had upgraded some of the software that this site runs on, and in the process, they broke everything.  I logged in yesterday, and fixed the problem, but then also realized that I was sick of what the site looked like, and hadn’t updated it in forever.

I am starting fresh with a new theme that I should be able take to places the other one was equipped to go. For a bit, this is going to be a work in progress.