> Curious, what was the attitude like on the early Band team?

I wasn't allowed to tell people I was interviewing what the job was for. (Most people figured out that an entire floor of HW and Firmware engineers were working on Hardware.)

I had to convince people to join me by telling them about the team and about why they wanted to work there.

I said things like

"this is a classic Microsoft team, we're going to take something that is elite and expensive and make it affordable for everyone, fuck elitism, Microsoft makes products everyone can use."

"We are understaffed and underfunded, this will be the hardest you've ever worked in your life, but we are making something that is fucking amazing and you'll be telling stories about this for years to come."

"Want to build an OS? How about an entire graphics system? Say yes and I'll have you at a desk next week doing stuff you never thought you could do."

The Band was critically under funded, I was told that it was under 60 million across all the years we were active. Apple Watch famously had a billion.

The energy was insane. We were a startup within MS, no one else knew we existed but the C-level leadership and maybe their directs. My team went to Ikea and got our own desks and put them together late one night. We stole (!) a TV from another team someplace in the building, wheeled it into our work area, and watched Twitch Plays Pokemon.

The firmware team wrote a runtime from scratch. Then my team took an off the shelf UI toolkit, rewrote almost all the drawing routines, rewrote the font rendering, and rewrote another ~60% or so of the remaining code, and made a butter smooth v-sync'd UI.

We had 96 MHz and 256 KB of RAM. 30 FPS locked, the UI could run at well over 60 but we had limited bandwidth to the display controller.

One day I read an article about touch latency on various mobile OSs. I said fuck it, we can do better than any of those. We optimized our touch system, max of 2 frame latency, min of 1. An amazing team from MSR came in and wrote us a machine learning gesture recognizer that also did motion estimation so that the screen tracked your finger almost 1 to 1 compensating for errors in the touch sensors.

Very understaffed, everyone did many things. Early on a bit of dead weight tried to attach itself to the project, it got cut eventually.

Lots of bad decisions. The team spun out of Xbox Accessories. No one there knew software except Firmware, I was hired on because I knew UI, all their other software engineers had no idea. UI was the green light on the Xbox 360 controller. Amazing firmware engineers though. Lots of issues around the cloud and mobile apps, they were started much later than the rest of the product and never had time to go through proper planning, esp. for the Band 1 launch.

Our design team was balls to the wall amazing. Our lead designer put so much thought and care into everything that was on the screen, it blew me away. It also taught me how much a real designer cares about their work. If I am lucky I'll get to work with a designer like that again in my life.

The battery life would've been a day longer on Band 2 but we had a shitty accelerometer chip that couldn't do step counting on its own (or maybe it could but it required a lot of programming to get it to that stage, I never was made 100% clear on that), so we had to take raw data and process it with the CPU. Horrible waste of power, I always was sad we never were given the time to add that extra 16-20 hours of battery life.

Everything we did we wanted to do better. We had very limited hardware, so everything had to be magic in code. The EE team did magic in hardware for sure, the screen portion of Band 2 was less than 2/3rds the thickness of the Apple Watch v1, so they had very little space to work with.

Every decision was "how can we do this better than anyone else?"