I had so much fun watching Christoph Neumann's (@enigma2a) Clojure/conj talk on his work enabling live sports and e-sports programming. I haven't watched e-sports much, but I did watch the documentary of Google DeepMind’s AlphaStar, where it played some of the best StarCraft II players in the world. The event was so brilliantly done, and was hosted by professional commentators, who helped explain and give context to what we were observing. It was so good that I made my kids watch it, and I’m not ashamed to say that it actually made me cry! (As did watching the documentary on Google DeepMind AlphaGo — holy cow. Move 37 FTW!) (I'll include the links to those videos at the bottom of this tweet.) Christoph gave an amazing talk on how the code he wrote enables these types of live e-sports broadcasts of some amazing gaming brands: - Heroes of the Storm (including the draft tool to facilitate team hero selection in real-time, as well as enabling the commentators to do their job, too) - Hearthstone (including tools to analyze and display the game state live on-air) - Overwatch (including integrating live game statistics for the Overwatch League) He also describes some of the work he did to help brands such as Blizzard Entertainment (home of StarCraft II, which was obviously the game that AlphaStar competed in), NFL, Overwatch League, Heroes of the Storm, Activision, Call of Duty League, Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, NEP, Twitch, Wimbledon Championships. One reason I was nerding out so much during Christoph’s talk was because he had hinted at so many of these things in his awesome Functional Design in Clojure podcast (@clojuredesign), but never really elaborated on what he actually did. I’ve listened to every one of their 100+ episodes that he did with Nate Jones, @ndj, and always hoped they would go into more detail about what they’ve done in e-sports. Wish granted! It’s such a cool talk. Among other things, he talks about the high stakes involved in live events — mistakes are seen by everyone, and could actually jeapordize events where hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people are watching! Christoph: "You have hours of boredom followed by seconds of terror." Ha! Everything he's built is done in Clojure, whether it's a event in front of an audience, broadcast over the airwaves, or streamed to a channel. "My hope is that by the end of this talk, you're going to have an idea of what's involved in pulling off a live sports production, and then how to build a system using it." Yes!!! 1/n Source: youtube.com/watch?v=kIhY4VDa… Also: the amazing video of StarCraft II AlphaStar live broadcast: youtube.com/watch?v=cUTMhmVh…