Category: Projects

There wasn’t much fanfare, really. In fact, there were only a few of us left in the office at 3:00am Wednesday morning, November 30th, when the new MP3tunes site was rolled out. The east coast was just starting to come to life, and the initial articles would soon be hitting news sites. The speculation would come to an end, and the scrutiny was about to begin.

After verifying the deployment of the new site, I logged into my locker, already full of music from months of development and testing, then clicked on a track in the web interface. A brief pause, and the music started playing. Countless man (and woman) hours of development time, many meals in the office, nights and weekends away from home, all leading up to the moment when Project Oboe would become a real product. Quite satisfying, actually.

Bleary eyed, everyone still hanging around dragged themselves out the door and headed home, knowing the work was not ending, but in many ways just beginning. The Michael’s Minute would soon be published, picking up the story of Oboe where the press release left off. I spent a little more time verifying everything was working, taking note of the traffic starting to trickle in. The sun was already up as I pulled out of the parking garage and headed home.

Back in March, 2005 I joined MP3tunes, a new Michael Robertson company, to head up the development team. The initial site was developed by the Linspire web team, and soon after launch the site was spun off into a separate company. My initial team was pretty small. Including myself, the team consisted of, well, one person. The development team quickly grew to three, lost one, and has now grown to a half dozen or so developers.

The most recent addition to the team, one Jon Lech Johansen, has garnered us some media attention (and here and here, among other places). The most mystery was perhaps generated by Michael’s personal site, where he talks about our latest project, code named “Oboe.”

So what is project Oboe? From Michael’s site:

Oboe is the code name for a significant new project we have underway that will launch before the end of the year. It’s as momentous as anything I’ve ever done in my technical career, but I won’t say more since I despise vaporware. I know this project will be even better with Jon on board.

Indeed it is interesting, and indeed it will be significant. Although Jon has the highest profile of any member of the team, I can say first hand that it is only due to the effort of the entire team, which also includes the infamous Cody Brocious, that this project will succeed.

Stay tuned.