Review

<span style="line-height: 1.538em;">For many, 2013 has been an intense and not always good year, but personally it&#39;s been pretty good and I&#39;m looking forward to building upon the foundations from this year into 2014. Here&#39;s some reflections and highlights for you all to enjoy/endure.

2014 was quite a year, especially for technology and how it affects everyone. Here are some of my highlights, lowlights and observations on the year and how it maybe affected developers.

Continuing my reviews of research I have just finished the classic "Kobold Guide to Board Game Design<img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=gregamamma-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1936781042" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" width="1" />" and can highly recommend it as a good overview of board game design advice. It is a collection of essays more than an end-to-end guide, so some essays will hold more relevance with you than others. However I picked up enough nuggets of advice to make it a worthwhile purchase and have a long list of 'todos. it includes essays from some stalwarts of the industry such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Garfield" target="_blank">Richard Garfield</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jackson_(US_game_designer)" target="_blank">Steve Jackson</a> (who created large parts of my childhood) and is divided into sections of the design process. One of the encouraging outcomes of reading the book was realising that I am currently on track and already doing a lot of what was recommended, but also realised I have a long way to go yet!

As part of my research in projects odtwe I have been reading some classics of utopian and dystopian fiction. Most recently I completed Jack London's The Iron Heel.

2016 has been an eventful year in many, many ways. I don't want to dwell on big global topics in this post, but review what I got up to.

Last year at IFA I came across a small stall lurking within a gathering of startups. The booth was full of blinking small blocks, motors and switches that aimed to help children learn to code.

After using macOS for over 20 years I was interested to get new perspectives and try other operating systems in my daily work. In this first part, I spend a month with Windows.

After using macOS for over 20 years I was interested to get new perspectives and try other operating systems in my daily work. In this second part, I spend a month with Linux.

I began my round of 2016 with how eventful it was, and 2017 continued to deliver major world events that shook countries, cities and people. Despite this, I had a largely positive year, switching from an employee back to a contractor again, which was a largely positive move. I changed my major outlet from SitePoint to DZone, added a handful of others, wrote a lot of content marketing posts for tech companies, wrote a book and (nearly) finished a video course. On top of all that I travelled to many places, including cities and countries I had never been to before.

Slightly late on my yearly roundup, which was the catchphrase of the