We’ve hit that time of year where everybody’s doing a “top games of 2016” write up. I’m not going to differ.

12th December 2006. The day the world bid farewell to disk drive pioneer Alan Shugart, and grumpy grandad Frank Barone (Everybody Loves Raymond). A Tuesday. Also the day I unlocked my first achievement on my brand new Xbox 360.

A lot can happen in ten years. People can forge a career, a relationship, move house, raise children, or simply end up turning tricks under the bridge due to bad life choices.

In addition to some of the above (I’ll let you figure out which), I’ve somehow managed to rack up 100,000G on Xbox.

Late last night, Amazon announced that their proprietary AWS data visualisation tool, Quicksight was now generally available in the US and Ireland. Quicksight aims to be a PowerBI-esque drag and drop visualisation tool, that allows you to access your data from AWS (and other sources) in seconds, regardless of scale. I’ve had a very quick go this morning, and visualised some data from a modest 1TB Redshift cluster after just a few minutes. The biggest challenge was finding out the correct IP range for Quicksight to enable access to my VPC (Thank you serverfault).

I cower in a crater, left in the middle of the Egyptian desert by some recent artillery barage, and drop a medkit by my feet. Heart pounding, I look left and right to make sure nobody is following me. My vision is blurred, breathing heavy as the medicine starts to take affect. Cautiously I peek my head over the lip of the crater, scanning the distance for some sign of the sniper. I work up just enough courage to sprint to the next crater when out of nowhere, a horse thunders past and it’s sword-wielding rider cuts me down, just as a biplane loops overhead. This is World War One. This, is Battlefield 1.

The biggest adjustment with having a kid is just the sheer amount of time they take up. And I don’t mean that in a bad way at all. Especially after they start walking and needing constant supervision. I regularly find myself recalling pre-child times and wondering just what the hell I did with all my time. The following tips are just a few things that I’ve learned throughout the last year and a bit, that are mostly common sense. I thought I’d share them anyway. Some of you may relate, some may find inspiration, some may be able to add more!

Video games are based on rules. To quote my man Morpheus, “what you must learn is that these rules are no different than the rules of a computer system. Some of them can be bent. Others can be broken.” The more that a game attempts to give you, the more variables are introduced, and the greater the scope for bugs and other general weirdness.

For several years now I’ve considered creating a gaming blog. I’ve toyed with the idea of adding gaming content over on picnicerror.net, and have even posted a couple of articles on there in the past. But I really wanted to keep the focus separate, and have a dedicated area with more of a “gamey” feel to it, and leave picnicerror.net to Business Intelligence, data, and other related stuff. I’m an avid gamer, but have struggled in the last year or so (coincidentally since my daughter was born) to make as much time for gaming as I might like. I’ve also got plenty of opinions and thoughts on the industry that I feel like sharing.

Microsoft’s Build conference for 2016 took place a couple of weeks ago, and true to form, there were a number of killer announcements and reveals for a number of services, tools, and frameworks, many of which are available today. Not one to ever really post something when it’s actually relevant, here are a few of the things that jumped out at me from the event.