Final Draft Writer Launch Day

I am 90% confident I'm not allowed to love my team as much as I do

Today was, easily, the most exciting day of my career. We released the Final Draft Writer app.

As I write, we are the 3rd Top Grossing iPad app, the 1st Top Grossing iPad Productivity app (beating Keynote and Numbers, and Pages - all Apple apps), the 18th Top Paid iPad app, and 7th Top Paid Productivity app. Put THAT in your pipe and smoke it!

I've been dreaming about this day since I was hired at Final Draft 1 year and 2 months ago.

Seth and I were hired at the beginning of summer 2011, days after we got our Computer Science degrees. Neither of us had any real experience, but Final Draft took a chance with us. I was hired about a month before Seth, and I remember feeling really threatened before he started. All those negative feelings completely went away soon after he joined the team. 

I love Seth like a brother. We argue like siblings (I swear, in planning meetings, he always tries to give estimates that are the opposite of mine), we talk about exciting tech news, we pair program, use each other for rubber duck debugging (which, I realize, totally defeats the purpose), we even juggle during lunch sometimes. Perhaps the most telling fact about our relationship is that I watched all 11 hours and 23 minutes of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, just to see what he found so cool about it. (The answer to that question is still beyond me.)

Seth is awesome, helpful (stackoverflow cred, what up!), smart. He is a caffeine-gum-chewing, app-optimizing machine. He is living the dream with a superstar of a girl and the cutest pup you'll ever meet. Seth is a damn-near perfect teammate and an excellent friend. (I am almost willing to forgive his dislike of Arrested Development and low-brow humor.) I'm so happy we got to celebrate our success together today.