Zune Social: 2. What have you learned from your friends at Zune Social? Wow, I have learned so much. I think I’ve seen the passion that we have for our product reflected back at me from all of the people on my friends list and around the Zune Social. It makes me so much more passionate about the Zune as a whole. I think you can see the cyclical process here!
3. Tell us about the origin of your ZuneTag? My ZuneTag is TyrenDes. Tyren was a silly name I made up in high school to be my handle on Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). I liked it so much that I made it my son’s middle name. Now, however, when I signed up for Xbox Live, Tyren was taken… so I just added the first 3 letters of my last name to it. “Des”, and thus TyrenDes was born.
4. What type of music do you listen to (name as many as necessary -- genres/groups)? I listen to lots of stuff, but I like to say my tastes are eclectic. I pretty much like all genres except rap and hip-hop. So: country, rock, classical, new age… the list goes on and on. As far as bands that regularly top my charts? Pink Floyd, They Might be Giants, Enya, Enigma, and cover bands like Me First and the Gimme Gimmes.
5. What's your favorite thing about Zune (favorite feature)? My favorite feature is definitely XNA. I’ve been involved in my free time with the XNA team since before 1.0 shipped and when it first started working on the Zune, I began working on samples that pushed it to its limits. I was fortunate enough to tech review a book for XNA development on the Zune. I really think that this young technology has yet to fully mature and I’m excited to see where it can go.
6. Tell us about some of your day-to-day duties at the Zune offices? I’m a software development engineer (SDE) and I’m one of the rare early birds on the Zune team. I usually get to work at about 8am. Everyone else tends to come in after 10! Slackers!? I always do a fresh build in the morning to ensure I have the latest code. The rest of my day really depends, if we are in planning phases, I spend time documenting and costing the features I need to deliver. If we are in the coding phase, I throw on the headphones and go to town doing the code thing. Currently this consists of working on the catalog API backend that is used by the Zune software to retrieve information for the marketplace. However, I used to work on the Social site. If you have uploaded a custom Zune tile and used the image cropper tool… well, that was me. Finally, the other phase is stabilization. During this stage, I check my bugs and try to work on the highest priority issues. I code up fixes, submit them for review, and move on to the next bug.
7. What are some of your hobbies? What's your life like away from Zune Social? I have too many hobbies, but some of them include camping in the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), playing D&D on my custom built game table (http://livednd.wikidot.com/) and of course Geocaching with the family. I’m a gamer through and through, so I’m always getting some game time on Xbox live playing a variety of games from RPGs to puzzle games. I like to play all kinds of board games too. The surprising thing about my hobbies? I love to spend time coding. I’ve coded a lot of side projects for myself. Sometimes it’s a small, “can I make it do this?” and other times it’s a practical application that my family can use. One example of this is an allowance tool that we can put in chores for the kids, and when they complete them, they go to the page and check them off. Then we get an e-mail that links us to a page to accept this and it automatically gives them credits. Later they can use these credits for cash.
