NZXT PODCAST - #134 - Special Guest: Amanda from CAM Team!

Episode Date: September 8, 2022

This week on the podcast, we have Amanda, CAM Software Product Manager, answering all of your CAM questions! Also... is Tetris the most perfect game of all time? Tune in live every Thursday at 10AM PT on twitch.tv/NZXT and send your questions to: [e-mail]

everyone and welcome to episode 134 of the NZ60 podcast the official podcast of the NZXT community. This is for podcast recorded live every Thursday at 10 a.m. Pacific Center time on the official NXC Twitch and is available to stream on demand on Apple Podcasts, Google

podcast, Spotify, and SoundCloud. My name is Mike and with me as always is Ivan. Ivan, how are you doing? I'm doing good, man. Happy Friday, Jr. I'm not with you always, but I'm with you today. And I'm very excited to be here today because we have a very special guest the one the only homie Amanda York Amanda how are you

doing? Hey what's up y'all I'm doing awesome how's everybody doing today doing good very we're actually to be I know you don't believe us but we are excited to have you on this podcast I'm really excited to be here too so thank you all for having me yeah because um like Mike said before we started recording We do get a lot of questions about CAM, not just in the podcast, but on social media on a daily basis. Not a day goes by where someone doesn't ask us something about CAM. And we only know so much, so it's awesome to have the brains behind CAMs so we can ask you some of the questions that people are asking us. And hopefully the people listening get their questions answered. And if you are tuning in live, please also drop your questions into the Twitch chat here,

and we'll save them to the end of the show. So first question for you, Amanda, is going to be a doozy. I hope you're ready for it. All right. What exactly is your job title and what do you do at NST? Sure. So I'm the CAM product manager. I want to be clear, not project products.

So I work in product management. And what my job is kind of on a sort of week to week or kind of month-to-month basis is most importantly, I'm responsible for setting the vision and the roadmap for CAM. So really, the vision is such an important piece because it dictates what you do and more the day-to-day in the week-to-week basis. So what is it that we're trying to accomplish? What are the goals that we have as an engineering team and as a business? And how do those pieces fit together in order to bring things online at the right time and in order to capitalize on the things we're trying to do strategically? as a business and how do those translate into CAM into software and then thus into the week-to-week decisions we make or the things we put our time into. So most importantly, working on the vision,

working on the roadmap, working through how we're going to accomplish those goals is the most important piece. And what I'll say particularly about the roadmap is really the roadmap comes from the community. So every time you all are posting on Reddit or y'all are throwing comments to Ivan and Mike on socials. Our roadmap is largely built by the community and the things that people want to see in CAM. So there's a lot of information to take in. Every time we all post something,

I'm there in the background reading it and taking a look at it and saying, okay, how do we bundle these ideas into kind of one bigger project that we can kind of really get our hands around and really accomplish. But in general, the biggest thing I'm responsible for

is the vision in the roadmap. And can you clarify with the differences between a product manager and a project manager for software? Sure. So a product manager is, like I said, explaining that vision piece. I'm responsible for the vision and the roadmap. Project manager is responsible for making sure that the team is executing against those dates,

executing against those deliverables, removing obstacles that are in the team's way. So product is responsible for saying, here's the things that we're going to do. And then project is more responsible for saying, okay, here's how we're going to get there from kind of a planning and organization perspective. perspective. You sound like you have a very important job. I do. I do. It's a very important. It's a very important job. It's largely because of how much the company values CAM really as a business. We really value CAM and what we're able to accomplish through software. It's a very important piece of bringing together our entire ecosystem. So you've seen that we're watching all these peripherals

and putting new products out into the market. It CAM is really the centralized place that brings those things together and really makes a nice beautiful ecosystem of tying those features together, tying those integrations together so that your entire desktop is managed under one beautiful piece of software. And how long have you been working on the CAM team? I've been working on the CAM team for about a year now, right out of a year, a year in one week. So I've been with the CAM team itself for about a year. And how long have you been at MDXT? I'm about to come up on my two years. at NZT. Did you do anything for NZXT?

Before I worked for NZT, I worked at this tiny little company called Blizzard Entertainment for 12 years. Oh, who's that? And then I went to... Sorry, Kate. How do you spell that second? Google it? Blizzard, like a snowstorm or like the Dairy Queen, delicious treat, Blizzard.

So I worked there for 12 years. And then I had a little stopoff at a League of Legends analytics company called U. U.G if anybody needs leader boards or ranks, definitely take a look at U.S.GG. Really nice product there. And then I came over to NZXT. Interesting. So if you can, can you explain like your day-to-day, like how your day-to-day looks like for your job? Sure.

So, I mean, pretty standard start to the day. I'm sure most people, you know, wake up, check messages, check email, check kind of things coming in. some of the unique parts of product for me day to day. Number one, I'm always keeping up with what we have coming in on Reddit, whether that's a post about some of our hardware or post about maybe something in firmware layer or something in software layer. So it's been a pretty good chunk of time looking at the comments that are coming in through Reddit and through Twitter and anything we've got in our Discord as well.

Just stay in tight with the things that people are seeing and thinking about, maybe if there's some weird cabling situation that somebody's in, is there some way that we can optimize user manual or is there some way that we can optimize that installation process? So it's being really connected to what people are seeing and what's going on at NST as a whole. And of course, focused in on anything that comes up as it relates to can, but also some of the hardware specific pieces that come up. A lot of meetings, there's a lot of people to keep in the loop. So I spend a pretty good chunk of time meeting with even Ivan and Mike and finding out what things they've got and sharing things that we have coming up.

So a lot of people to keep informed and responsible for making sure that our customer service teams and our BLD teams and marketing teams know what's going on. And we're working towards the same goals. Then I usually get a couple hours in the afternoon where I get to just work on things that I need to work on, whether that's, you know, if we're working on maybe a new product or something, I might need to take a look at some competitor products and see what features they have and what their software looks like, do some competitive analysis. Or other times I'm planning out projects that we're going to be working on down the line. It's like a little chunk of time there in the middle of the day that I get to kind of focus in on the things that I need to get done. Then usually wrap up the day with meetings with the different cross-functional teams that we have. So we've got folks all around the world.

So generally come in, start of the day, got a bunch of meetings and kind of looking at what's going on overnight. Get a little chunk in the middle of the day, do whatever I need to do to move us forward. And then in the tail evening meeting meeting up with some of our folks in other regions. When do you check your fantasy football team? Every day, all day, every day. Who do you have on your team right now? I would say my biggest stars right now. I got Pat Mahomes, number one.

We'll see how he does. I'm not sure how I feel about that pick. But I've also got Alvin Kamara and Derek Henry. Hopefully Derek Henry. Yeah, you're okay. So you're running games. You got a good receiver. And then I'm a Packers fan, so I have the entire Packers receiving core

because I'm not sure who's going to be number one. So I got them all. He's picked them all up. Nice. Going back to Work Talk real quick. you did not always work on the CAM team as a product manager, correct? Yeah, yeah. So actually, when I first started at the company, I worked in the design team.

So I was a design project manager. So that was a really, really fun role. Really helped me kind of get really in depth with the design team. Design is always a very instrumental part of a lot of things that we do at NST. It's also a very important part of product management. So how are we laying out our UIs? How are we laying out our buttons? how are we communicating statuses?

How are we making our UX work for people? So I started in the design org and worked on all kinds of different stuff with the design team. The design team here does so much. All these pretty little podcast assets that Ivan uses come from our design team.

And then there's a lot of involvement with the packaging work that we do as well. Pretty much every project at NST has some element of design. So I started out over there. Mike's outfit was a compliment to the design team actually they picked out that shirt for him today from a small company called it Adidas I don't know if anyone knows what that is either a lot of small companies you know how did you get into product managing like what made you want to make that transition yeah so

product I think product is a type of role where you don't people don't necessarily go out and hunt out and say like I want to be a product manager. It's kind of the type of job that finds you. And the reason for that is because it requires some unique personality traits and some unique experience. And so every company I've ever worked at, I've always kind of worked cross-functionally. That's always something that's been really important to me is to really understand the full depth and breadth of the entirety of the business. That's a really key part of working in product. You have to be able to go in and talk with engineers and then go in and talk with designers and then go in and talk with marketing. You've got to be able to have a good understanding of a lot of different parts of the business.

Sorry, go ahead. No, go ahead. The other piece is my background is largely in leadership. So leading people, managing people. And so a lot of parts of product are not necessarily about, you know, making decisions and really like, you know, calling the shots. It's more about getting the best out of the people that you're working with, which is generally what the goal of leadership is, too. So product found me and I've had the fortune to work with some really good product managers here at NZT and it was a place where coming in, I said, I wanted to be in product for a little while. And now, you know, this opportunity is here with the CAM team and within ZXT to make that transition.

But I had always had some little part of product and maybe wasn't, you know, just in a place where I had a job title around it. I've always done things even at my time at Blizzard where I was essentially doing some product management for our internal tools. because internal tools are largely about speed and efficiency. It comes down to how you lay things out, same very similar to CAM. So it kind of just found me and the opportunity came up and now we're here. That's awesome. What has been the hardest part of your job so far as the CAM product manager? So I mean honestly there are a couple challenging parts about it.

It's hard to pick one. Okay, just pick 10. Just put 10. All of my job responsibilities, and that's the hardest part. No, I think this is probably going to sound pretty cliche, but it is true. The hardest part is that there are so many hardware configurations out there. There are so many different Windows versions. There's so many different software suites out there.

And the hardest part is seeing somebody who's in the situation where something isn't working right, and they can't figure out why. And it really, like, honestly keeps me up at night. I hate every time I see somebody's got a Reddit post about a crack and not working. And just knowing that I play a part in that is the most difficult part. It's knowing that somebody out there is struggling with the thing that I'm responsible for, and I'm causing them frustration. It's the hardest part.

I kind of want to go into that. Like, for a lot of people don't know how difficult it is. to work in this type of field. Do you want to give like a baseline of like, what happens when there is a problem and how much goes into, like it's trying to find out that problem at the first part and then also trying to solve it?

Sure. So I mean, I think the, the Cracken example is probably the best example where you've got the most complexity and you've got, you have a lot of elements going on, essentially. So for a Cracken to show up in CAM, the device needs to be detected in Wendon.

Windows. In order for that device to be detected in Windows, the Windows USB driver needs to be functioning. In order for that Windows USB driver to be functioning, that USB port that you're plugged into needs to be functioning, that USB port needs to be on the correct BIOS and identify correctly. And so that's just the Windows layer of it. Then you go into firmware. So there's firmware on pretty much every hardware device that you've got. And that's little bits of software or little bits of code that run on that device at all times, whether or not you're running a piece of software or not. So that firmware has got to be working correctly as well. And then once all of those stars align, then a product will show in CAM. And so the complexity really comes from the various different levels that you have to be integrated at. When you start talking about Windows, it gets very complex because you're talking about really the lowest level of work or lowest level of engineering code that exists. And you generally don't have any control over it. So there's times where I'll troubleshoot with somebody and we'll find out there's a Windows issue. well, I can't very well get, you know, Windows to be like, oh, we've got to fix this because

NZT cam doesn't see this crack in. It's very difficult to get those things fixed across the entirety of Windows. And then there's all types of things that are essentially competing for being able to control each one of these devices. So if you're running, you know, multiple RGB programs, especially for motherboards, you're, essentially opening up your system to want to talk to multiple different things. at one time. And Windows doesn't want you to do that. It doesn't want you to do that for security. So it's doing the right thing and saying, hey, no, no, no, you can't have three things trying to

access this layer of your motherboard. Only one thing at a time can have it. And so that kind of ties in with, you know, why that's the hardest part of the job is because it's a really difficult concept to grasp, honestly. It takes people years and years. You have people who are highly specialized, just working at that Windows level, working at the kernel driver level. There's just a lot of things that have to line up in order for things to work correctly out of the box every single time. I always think it's hilarious when people, like, messages on social media telling us, you know, why does Cam not work on my Windows XP computer or something like that? And it's like, I want to tell them like, dude, like, you know how hard it is to actually get this to work on Windows 11? the last thing I'm sure Amanda's thinking of is like how do I retroactively get this to work on

someone's 20 year old PC or whatever so yeah it sounds really hard I'm sure it is we we do our best we try to support as many operating systems as we can but you know at the same time the unfortunate reality is you know by supporting some of those more legacy operating systems it actually holds us back is in order to support something like a window 7 or Windows 8 we need to use older APIs. When you're using older Windows APIs, they're not built to work on Windows 10. They're not built to work on Windows 11.

There's more modern APIs that are available that are much more clean and much more approachable and much easier to work with. And so I will be transparent. You're hearing it first on the podcast. We will be making some deprecations around operating system here moving forward because we really want to make sure that Windows 10 and Windows 11 experiences

as solid as it can be. So now people may, actually figure out how difficult it is to basically work on this specific project. And a lot of people, I think, have issues with understanding how quick or how technically slow it could get for them for us to fix these problems. What's like an average time do you think of like, depending on this situation, like how long it is take for us to resolve a lot of these problems? Sure. I mean, in general, we sit around about 30 days.

for a bug fix in general. Some of the really in-depth ones, so some of the ones that are like very, very low level, like these very particular Windows issues we're talking about, sometimes honestly we can't fix them. Because again, it comes back to what we've got this Windows interaction.

We don't have any control over how Windows works. So there are times where we know that we can't fix something. Then you've got kind of a middle level where essentially when Cam first started, cam first started as a PC monitoring piece of software, then layered in the ability to control fans and control lighting. Now we're layering in things like the keyboard and the mouse. So you're adding these extra complexities,

which is really cool. It's really fun to work on. But when a problem comes up across that thing, usually you're getting a bug report at the very bottom of a chain. The very last part is being able to change a drop-down or being able to change a mode on the crack-in. But in order to fix it, most of the time you have to work all the way back up and say, okay, is this a problem at the windows level?

right so those can tend to take us longer because generally the fix means we need to refactor a critical part of the code base and anytime we're going in and we're refactoring something like that we want to make sure that we test as extensively as we can and make sure we don't create a different problem so for the most part we're about around 30 days as it relates to something like maybe a visual issue or some kind of like text spacing or something along those lines and that's that 30 day time frame usually just comes from the the cadence of our deploy more than anything else. The work itself to fix it is generally pretty quick, but we're not always deploying because you don't always want to be deploying. So usually 30 days for something real simple, something more complex, like some of these really in-depth windows pieces. Sometimes we can't fix them. That's very rare, but it does happen. Then you've got that middle ground of pieces where we know we've got to go back in and refactor a piece of the code base and test it extensively. Those will generally take us anywhere from about two to three months. So people understand that there is a lot that goes into it.

They don't just ignore it. They have to go through a lot. That's actually one of the biggest things that I wanted to like mention because a lot of people, I think a lot of people don't understand how much goes into a lot of things, especially even from our side, from social, let alone the actual software side of going into the code and breaking into it and making sure everything works. I think people, I hope people do learn that there is a lot of. lots that goes into it and then they're always working on it honestly these guys work

tirelessly day in and day out trying to fix stuff so I just want to let that one I would say two things about this number one sometimes the longest part is being able to replicate something so there are times where we'll get a bug report and it takes us a little while to figure out exactly how we can replicate it generally you've got to be able to replicate something so that the engineering team can take a look at what logging we have and what information is there to tell us exactly what's going on. Sometimes again, we've got to get into that windows level, and that requires that we're able to get a system into the place

that somebody is reporting a problem at. Number two, and I saw this at Blizzard, I saw this at U.S.EG, I've seen this with internal teams, external teams. A lot of times people will assume that something is known just because, like, well, I open my app and I see this every day, so they must know. And we don't. We don't know if people don't tell us.

And again, it's just because, you know, as much as we would love to have every single hardware set up in the world in this massive warehouse where we can test on every single system. It's just not realistic for us to have all those setups. So the biggest thing I want to stress is anytime you see any problem, whether it's big or small or whatever you've got going on, please, you know, shoot me a message in Discord, shoot me a message on Reddit, whatever, let me know what you're seeing. You know, if you are in a situation where you've got something you really need to get fixed

urgently, like maybe your Cracken's not being displayed, certainly contact our customer service team because they're awesome. They'll help you troubleshoot through that. They'll let me know if there's something there that maybe we don't have in our system them to account for. But please, yeah, the more that people can report to us, the more that I can make sure we fix. So how can people help you make Cam better? I know you mentioned contact and support, but is there anything else people can do who are Cam users that are having issues and want to, you know, help you fix it? Yeah, it's just let us know. And, you know, whatever channel works for

you, you know, I'll find you. I'll get there. So we've shared my Reddit hand here, my Discord handle as well so that you can message me directly if you need to. But the biggest thing is just kind of raising that flag for us and let us know what you're seeing. In terms of, you know, information that really helps us from those reports is just as much as you can remember. A lot of times, situations that we're in, people will say like it worked yesterday and now it doesn't work today. And so just kind of sharing like, it worked yesterday, I did this and this and this and now I'm in this state. And again, that's just so that we have as much information as possible so that either our engineering team or our QA team can replicate it

and get into that state so we can fix it as fast as we can for you. Yeah, lately I've been telling people to just straight up send their cam logs via the via the app itself. Yep. The logs are very important for us. They give us a ton of information about what's going on there and what could be causing it. Tons of information there. Yeah. So to go along with that, is there anything you want to tell people about if they have issues with CAM. I don't say contact, but is there anything you want to say? Like, as you, as someone that has actually worked on the team and actually leading a lot of the stuff,

is there something that you want to tell them, like, if they are having issues with it? And that's a big question. It really depends on the type of issue. So there's like, because CAM is used for multiple different things, right? There's multiple different things that people use CAM for. That answer is very dependent on what you're trying to do with cam. So like if you're going into cam and you're, you know, trying to adjust an NXT device and

you don't see it, number one first step to do is take a look in your device manager and see if that device is there. If you're not seeing that device and device manager, Cam can't see it because Windows can't see it. And so that gives an indicator that we've got some kind of Windows piece that we need to work through. Whereas if you're seeing something like a graphic display issue, maybe your CPU load isn't functioning or something along those lines, those are situations where honestly you're probably not going to be able to do any troubleshooting and be able to fix that on your side. That's one where we've got an issue with the app that we need to fix.

There are sometimes where a window setting can interact. And so generally the information that we're sharing to you, particularly in the PC monitoring section, you know, that's information that's coming from Windows. And so if you just take a quick Google search and just say like GPU load numbers inaccurate, you'll generally find that there's some kind of window setting behind that that causes an interaction with certain statistics and it can get you a real quick. fix. But again, I want to be clear, I'm not pushing anybody away. I'm just giving some tips for people

if you want to, you know, take a look on your side and maybe spur that troubleshooting a lot a little faster. Night modem just gave you a nice little shout out. He says, Cam always surpasses by expectations. Thank you, Amanda. Thank you. Thank you. We do. I know for some of you, especially those of you who are having issues, I know it probably doesn't seem like it, but we do work very hard. We do work very hard to give us high quality experience as we can. So I'm going to ask, you a very difficult question here. It's actually that. It's not actually difficult.

This one is actually like a hard question. Like I don't even want to ask it, but I'm going to ask it. And I'm just going to be as blunt as possible with it because I know you yourself are a very, you know, blunt person. You tell it how it is all the time. I do. So my question is like, you know, if you're responsible for cam quality, you know, why is it so bad? And I mean that in the way that like, not that it's bad, but why is it like, you know, not a, not as good as it could be or should be right now. Sure. I thank you for asking that, first of all. You know, I appreciate being honest. I thank you for being honest about it. I mean, there's probably about three, I would say three core reasons for that. Number one is kind of that device complexity that we were talking through. That's a really complex piece.

Now, in order for us to make progress against something like I go into CAM and I don't see my crack in, we've got to fundamentally shift the way that devices are detected in CAM. So I will be honest in saying, you know, this is a project that we are working through right now. It is very complex. It is very difficult because we're changing the way that CAM talks to Windows. We're changing the way that CAM talks to all sorts of APIs. And so truthfully, one of the biggest reasons, Why is because in order for us to make a really big shift that fundamentally changes our quality,

it takes a very long time. It takes a lot of in-depth work. It takes a lot of in-depth and very highly specialized work and expertise to be able to do it. Luckily, we do have a very strong team, a very good team of cam engineers. So that type of program is, it's a six-month-long program. It's a really long program to really make some strong strides that will make a big impact across the quality at this level. So that's a piece of it.

Number two, I will say, I mean, you all have seen it. We've got, we've had a lot of expansion at NZT in terms of the product lines that are available. So something like a keyboard and a mouse coming out. Those have been, those have taken a lot of time. Same for monitor. Those took a lot of our resources because of the complexity of them. And again, it's because CAM wasn't really built to work with those products. So we've had to kind of slide them in and do some significant refactoring to make those

products work for us and work in CAM. They're really nice integrations, and they work well, but it took us a long time to get there. So now that we're at a place where those really big, you know, long, complex products are complete and they're out the door, then now we're able to go back into these more technical heavy pieces and really focus in and refine them at a very deep level to make some really big quality strides. The other thing I'll say is, you know, kind of like what I was talking about earlier, it's very difficult to test all the hardware configurations that are out there, very

difficult to test all the software configurations that are out there. So there's generally, you know, if you've got one particular CPU on one particular motherboard with one particular piece of software running, then you run into problems. It's very difficult to catch those. And so we've been putting a lot of work in time into just expanding the amount of systems that we have, the amount of systems that we test on, as well as the time that we spend in quality assurance passes. So that's a big focus for us. I guarantee you all are going to start to see the rewards from that. So those of you that use cam, you know the last couple of deployes that we've put out or not this one that we've had or not the last one. We've had to roll back.

Right. So when we roll back, that's because we put something out into the field and we find a critical problem that we need to fix. And so the root of that is really having very robust and very sound quality assurance processes. And that's really been a big focus for us. And I guarantee y'all are going to start to see those higher quality deploys that we need to be getting out. So we're not having to roll back. Ironman Gringo makes a good point though He says

Well maybe if you weren't partying in that rooftop bar behind you It could be a lot faster It would be It's a good point Iron Man Very good point I was also saying I was just going to say One thing our last couple of rollbacks

They obviously don't look good to the community When we have to do that But the reason why we did them is because A very small amount of users Like one or two users We're running into a problem that we didn't want people to have to experience. And that really came back to some accessibility issues.

So the last rollback we did, we rolled it back because screen readers weren't working. And so, you know, that's a place where this is going to sound a little, I don't know the right word here. It might sound like we're tooting our own horn, but that's a place where some other companies might just say, you know what, it's for screen readers, we don't care. But we chose to make that rollback because we care about accessibility.

And we want people to have the best experience possible regardless of their situation. You love to see it. And to kind of go along with that, since we've kind of been on a little bit more of like the complaint side of it, what is actually, like you said about accessibility, like what's actually like a good part, best part about like working as this job? Sure. I mean, the best part is at the end of the day, like especially around like things like the Cracken, we're building fun stuff. And we're building really cool stuff. We've got a lot of ideas in the tank that are going to be coming out here for the Crackens. And so that ultimately is the fun part.

And it's seeing the community engaging with something like when we put the clock face out, those interactions really lift us up and bring us a lot of positivity when we're, you know, we are right in the middle of the grind and we are right in the middle of refactoring a lot of parts of the code base. But when we put out something like the clock face and people, you know, share pictures and say, hey, thank you. Or put in a request and say, hey, I like the clock face, but can you add this? Those are the parts that really lift me up. and seeing, you know,

seeing people who will post pictures of their setup. I love to see the setup pictures and people talking about their lighting schemes. Those are the parts that are really fun and really positive and really, you know, bring light to some of the less fun parts of the job. And what has been the coolest project you've ever worked on? At NCXT.

Let's just go, yeah, at NCXT, both NSXT. Well, at NSXT, honestly, the coolest part has in our monitor implementation. It's very complex what we were able to do. So for the monitor, if you have an NST monitor and you run CAM, you're able to change all of your settings in CAM.

You're able to have profiles that will sync with your games. And so when you go to launch Call a Duty, for instance, boom, it'll run your FPS profile that you have. Pulling that off was pretty much an entirely custom integration that we built because monitor technology under the hood

is actually pretty outdated and pretty archaic. It doesn't usually work that fast, doesn't usually work that well or that reliable. And so a monitor was a ton of fun of working through some technical challenges and getting to a place where we've got a really nice feature set that is awesome, truthfully. It still sounds weird to me to say or hear the phrase NZXT monitors. Right. Yeah.

I'll get used to it one day. I remember Greenwatchy says like, wait, y'all make Mars. Yes, we actually have, they are called the Canvas monitor. So take a look on our website. Yeah. I know. like Ivan said, I'm just like, monitors?

Like, aren't we just like case company back then? Well, yeah. I mean, when I first started, it was literally just cases and coolers. And then this last year, you know, monitors, keyboards, mice, capture cards, and microphones. And it's just like, everything is with cab. So it's awesome. I see a couple of people in the comments being like, what's Cam? Let's just take a minute.

Talk about what? That's a great segue into the next. section of our show, which is the community questions. So, yeah, I know Geeky Cassie asked this. I think Iron Man, Greengo asked this as well. You know,

what exactly is Cam and what does it do? Yeah, so Cam is a standalone piece of software. You download it on our website, nzxte.com slash software slash cam. Or you can just Google NZXT cam and head up to our website and take a look. But the biggest parts

that people use it for, number one is PC monitoring. So you've got a really nice single view of all of the most important statistics of your computer. You can see your temps. You can see your clock speeds, your fan speeds. Just get a really good, quick look at how your system is performing. I also really like having it running while I'm gaming, so I can take a look at kind of how the numbers relate to each other. I just find that really interesting and kind of keeping an eye on, okay, how is my cooler doing? How is my GPU doing? How am I doing while I'm in this game. So number one, PC monitoring, that's a piece that you're going to get with CAM. Number two, for folks who own in ZXC hardware, that's the one-stop shop for being able to

configure lighting, so RGB, all your settings in there, your different modes that you have, your different colors. And then for products like the keyboard and the mouse, you can go in there and add your key bindings or make macros and make adjustments to the settings of your peripherals. Same for monitor. Also, we have a capture card too. Well, so, now, sell a capture card just to continue to blow Ivan's mind. We sell a capture card. And in Cam, you can see the readings of what your capture card is capturing at. Amazing.

What's the acronym Cam stand for? Do you know? That's your hardest question. I always thought it'd be funny to come up with something clever for that, but I haven't in a long time. So I'll keep thinking. Customization and monitoring. Boom, there you go. specifically just for monitors stuff just for monitor yeah we knew monitoring your your web searches

i don't think we should talk about that we're not monitoring your website yeah i thought yeah death rage asks any plans in the ambicing space for or more integration with synapse last time there was a partnership it broke down not sure what the current status of that is yeah you're absolutely right um honestly that integration was not done in a very great way to be very honest it wasn't very sustainable it wasn't uh wasn't built in a way that we could add to it very easily very much a a one-stop kind of piece um and even the the features that were available with that just were not very robust not very good um so i don't have anything to share on this right now um we don't have any plans to to restart that partnership and kind of go down that same route.

But we can talk some more about this maybe down the line as we start to build out some different things. Ask me that again next time I'm on the podcast. Okay, I will. One of the next questions is actually from Jack, who actually works in CS. Do you guys have a plan for making it so that Cam does an auto updates? They actually get that. And actually, I worked in CS for a little bit as well. I actually saw that a couple times for auto updates.

Is there a way to stop it or to make sure it's not an on-mag like checkbox? Yeah, we don't have any plans for it right now. It is something that we talk about pretty regularly. It's an item that we kind of go back and revisit. There's a lot of reasons why you don't want to have that. I know people probably just, you know, don't want to deal with it. What I would say is, you know, especially for those of you that are really passionate about not wanting to update, we need to fix the reasons why you don't want to update.

So I know that's not a great answer. Please, that's the type of thing. Hit me up. If there's a reason why you don't want to update, please let me know so that we can fix the problems that you're seeing. But honestly, you actually don't want to be in a position where you're not updating. And the biggest reason for that is because there's a significant amount of times where the updates that we're doing are actually security updates.

So it would be the same as choosing not to update your windows. It would put you at risk. It reminds me like, I visit my parents every other weekend, right? and I swear on my life, every other weekend, both of them have problems with their laptops and their phones. Nine times out of ten, it's because they haven't updated something. I'm just like, here, you just have to update this. And then I look like a genius to them because they don't update their stuff. So, yeah, I agree with you, Amanda.

It's something like primarily you have to kind of make it so people, you know, want to update this thing. Sorry, I can't fix the adversion to change, y'all. That's not something I have the power to fix. We generally don't change too much, though. Generally, we're changing, like, adding new features. We're generally adding, not necessarily taking away. All right. Chick-Dan asks, any plans to open-source parts of CAM?

It would be great if the community could make plugins, for example, a community bridge between CAM and CINAPs or G-Hub. Yeah, that would be really cool. No plans right now. No plans right now. And again, that's largely because of the amount of refactoring work that we need to do. It's a ton of work for us to get to a place where we could do something like that. So no plans right now. Maybe it changes in the future. But right now we're really hungry about making sure we do things like fix those deployes and make those high quality updates for people. Death rage. Another question. Is there any bug tracker log, which we can refer to, which we could know if the bug is known and being worked upon.

So we do have an integration on the, I'm trying to think about how to explain it. It's basically like a little forum, a little board, AHA, Ideas Portal. We have some login issues with it right now that we're trying to fix, but generally when we have a known issue moving forward once we get this login issue fixed with this provider that we use, that's where I post up about it. I also spend a lot of time on Reddit, so if you make a post on Reddit and you're reporting something that's known, I certainly will let you know.

Mike and I even also do the same. They'll hit me up and say, hey, is this something that's known? And most of the time we're working on that. That's planned to be in our next deploy. But we do also have a public portal that's available where you can see both known issues that we have going on, as well as voting on other people's ideas.

So both of those things are out there on our aha portal. You can actually see it if you go into settings support. there's a link in the upper right that will take you to that portal. Oh, and then I guess one of the final chat questions, if everyone else has any other questions, please if you feel to ask. But the next one from Death Ridge, do you like donuts with or without holes? With?

With holes? Correct. That's a correct answer. Correct answer. Correct answer. I feel like without, like if it's just the thing, it's not really a donut, that's more of like a bun at that point. Yeah, it's a different pastry at that point.

Maybe that's our next. Maybe that's our next question, you know, instead of like, is hot dog a sandwich is a donut without a whole a donut? No. No. That's a pastry. Yeah, it's a pastry. Yeah.

It might even be a sandwich. Is it a dog sandwich? Is a pastry a sandwich at that point? No, it's a piece of cake. That's not, actually. I'm stirring a pot, but it's not a sandwich. It would be a cows zone. There you go, Calzone.

That's actually a really good quote. Let's see. It actually kind of segues into the rapid fire question. So we usually try to go for some fun questions. You know, we had a little bit of serious time, but now we're going to have a little bit of fun with some of these rapid fire ones. So you can answer these as simple or as complex as you like, but we'll just be going through a lot of these.

So the first question is, are you a gamer? And if so, what games are you currently playing? I am a gamer. I'm afraid I'm going to get trolled if I answer what games I play. But I'll answer. Just please be nice to me. So I am, I mean, I worked at Blizzard for a while. So I do play the call of duties.

I am one of those people where the new one drops and I take a look at it and play it for a little while. Sorry. You're playing Call of Duty or you're playing Warzone? Warzone. Warzone. Okay, that's fine. I do play the Culled Duties. But I mean, obviously, just play those whenever they kind of come around or there's something new.

But right now, the game I'm playing the most is a game called Pulsar. It's basically like a Star Trek kind of a simulator sort of thing. So you've got a group and you're out in space and you're trying to make money and fight other people. And it's just a little sim game. I tend to play a lot of sim games. I'm very excited to check out Played Up. Yeah, I'm looking at this game right now. The graphics are very interesting.

I'll pull it up with you. Very interesting graphics, but... Which one, Pulsar? Is it Pulsar Lost Colony? Yeah. It's like a... It's like a... No-Man sky.

It's like a crummy-looking no-man sky. Basically. Yeah, I don't want to say the word crummy, but the graphics do a little... Do look a little outdated. It's okay. It's a three-good game, so you can't go wrong with that. Okay, so it's a little one.

It's a baby. Next question. What is a game you've never played, but you wish you did? Silent Hill. Oh, you never played Silent Hill? No. I am very terrified of scary things, but everyone says it's a great game. So I wish I could play it.

Okay. What is your least favorite game of all time? Why is that the hardest question? I guess you're not going to remember the ones that you didn't like. True. Or ones that, like, displeasing. disappointed you. I'm straight up drawing a blank y'all. That's not a bad thing. That means you really haven't played any games that were like bad. Oh no, I definitely have. I just can't remember them.

Oh, honestly, that's even better. Yeah, I've pushed them out of my brain. Yeah, I'm just like, I know, I know we have had like some questions that. Oh. I got it was, um, Tiger Woods 99. Okay. at some point all of my clubs went away and I only had a putter. So I'm like on the driving, trying to do a drive with a putter. The game was entirely broken for me. That's 100%. That's the worst gaming experience I've ever had. So you would lose clubs?

Yeah, I just lost all my clubs. I just had a putter. And that was one where the company was like, yep, no an issue, no fix. I was like, okay. All right. Interesting. But on the other side, what's the favorite game of all time? Favorite game of all time?

Oh, that's also hard. It would either be Dr. Mario or Destiny. Destiny 1. Destiny 1. Oh, okay. What was your favorite? I thought you were going to say football. Or Packers versus Patriots, 2017.

Do you remember Blitz? Oh, yeah. That was awesome. This was a great game. That was a really nice. nice game. Yeah. But were you going to ask me, Mike?

A favorite game of all time, of all time. Like, that is, like, you think is 100% like perfect. Tetris. Tetris? Ivan and I, yep, Tetris. I've actually had this argument with people. The reason why Tetris is the perfect video game is because you can, there's nothing you can do to make that game better.

Yep. That's my argument. Anyone can play it? Yeah, exactly. So you're saying Tetris is like a perfect game. Yeah. It's easy to learn, difficult to master. Great music.

Great music. Challenging. I mean, it even worked in Battle Royale. Yep. The PlayStation 4, the VR Tetris. So good. Yeah. The way they built it.

It was so good. Yeah, that VR Tetris is awesome Yeah The way that the level like builds around you And like the music gets more intense As the level progressed Like they just built it really well Isaiah actually asked

What's the hardest game And I think this question for all of us What's the hardest game you guys have played? hardest game I've ever played Dark Souls 3 for me Probably Probably Ikaruga

Which is featured in the NXT Canvas monitor launch trailer? Probably Dark Souls, I would say. I guess that depends on your definition of hard. Because some games I've had to like, it was hard to like power through it. Like, sorry, cyberpunk. It was hard to like play that. It wasn't like hard like in terms of the mechanics,

but it was like hard to power through. Right. But Dark Souls 3 for the mechanics. 100%. I think Dark Souls 3 was probably like I played Dark Souls 1 and 2. 3 was just mechanically impossible for me. I literally, I think I was stuck on one boss for at least three days, like, during summer. Like, literally three days I would spend trying to beat it, and I could not do it.

Maybe also Isaac's binding. Do you guys are related? I don't think that's a, I don't think that's harder than Dark Souls. But I think in terms of, like, in terms of, like, difficulty of, like, understanding, like, bosses, yeah, I think that's pretty difficult. You mean the blinding of Isaac? Or, yeah, sorry. Yeah. Same thing.

Isaac's blind. Yeah, I get it though. Sorry. That reminds me the other hard game I've played is a super, super meat boy. Oh, yeah. Not in Cuphead. Cuphead, yeah. Cuphead was a hard one to.

Yeah, like I don't rage much. Or I guess not just video games, but in life, but. Yeah, I didn't remember hurting rage. I legit remember throwing my controller when I was playing Cuphead. Wow. And it's hard. Ooh, actually, from,

Hey, Karen, Sensei, what game, and this is a question for all of us, what game were you guys regrettably late to the party with?

That's a great question. Oh, I know mine. Mine's Witcher 3. I didn't play. I saw it. I know how good the game was. I was just like,

now I'm good. And, you know, I kept playing like Skyrim and stuff like that. But then when Witcher 3, like the ultimate edition, whatever, the thing is where you get like all the DLC. It was on sale.

I decided by it and dang, yeah, it's a good, it's a good game. Mine's probably Horizon 1, the first one. Oh, interesting. That was a great game. And I waited and waited. And then I bought it and was like, what was I, what was I doing? Why did I wait? How about you?

I mean, any of those games that you're just late to the party with? I'm pretty much late to all of them. Like, seriously, like, um, like, for example, I'm still playing Red Dead Red Dead Redemption 2. Still? Yeah. I think you've been played that for a while now. I haven't played it for like three years, man.

That's like, that's what I mean. Like if I, if I like a game, I'll get fixated on a game and like I won't play anything else until I don't know. So someone tells me like, you should play, you know, this game and like I'll just make a mental note. And like three years later, I'm like, all right, I'll finally play GTA5 or whatever it is, you know. I don't play as much these days as I used to either, so that's the other thing. How many hours do you think, or days have you spent playing poker? Oh, you mean Solitaire? Or Solitaire, sorry.

Yeah. Yeah, Amanda doesn't know this about me, but a little fact about me is my favorite pastime is after I put my daughter to sleep, I play Solitaire while I listen to baseball games. games on the radio. I fall asleep. All right. So you're at about three hours a day. Yeah. That might be addiction level, buddy.

We got to help him out. Seriously, I'll get like sparkling water. I'll turn on the baseball game and I'll just start playing solitaire until I fall asleep. I'm an old man. I remember ski free. Yeah. That game's awesome. Mike might be a little too young for that one.

I played a lot of ski free. Love that game. Yeah. That game is awesome. The little, like, abominal snowman. Yeah, you can never get around that guy. You can play it. Here, I want to drop a link in the chat.

You can still play it on a web browser. Oh, don't tell me that. I'm going to work to do. You should try playing it right now, Mike, on stream. See what score you get? C-3? Yeah. Okay.

I'll throw this up real quick. Okay. This is Windows 3.1. Wait, Mike, have you ever played this? Have you ever heard of it? I have not played this before. Ivan, how do you think he's going to do? You think he'll do well?

He's going to die right away. Oh, my God, Windows 3.1? Yeah. I'll see it. Okay, so how do I play? Probably with the down arrows on your keyboard. Okay. I think.

Oh, those, it's this. There you go. There you go. Yeah, so. You can also jump. How do I jump? Click the mouse. Ah!

Oh, okay. Wait, so what do I do? Do I just keep... So, I see those are jumps right there. There you go. Oh, okay. Yeah, so you got to avoid the obstacles. Oh.

Yeah. So I just... So what's the objective of this game? You're not... Downhill, baby. Just going down the hill. How long do I have to go downhill for? A long time.

No one knows. This is it. This was prime time. Back in our day, this was prime time. True, true. If you timed the jumps correctly, you can use the rocks to, like, launch you further. I remember that. Yeah.

You just did it right there. And then there's like a, there's like a snowman that pops out, like starts chasing you at a certain point. Okay. All right. Well, it's addicting. It's an interesting game. Very interesting. I'll give you guys that one.

Oh, okay. We'll do this question because I actually do really want to ask this question. Isaiah underscore X2. What are you guys' favorite hidden gems? Honestly, it's probably my favorite game. It's super mega baseball three. Not many people play it. But it's, to me, it's like a awesome game.

because it's like NBA jam, but for baseball. But it's a very realistic baseball simulator. And there's not many baseball games on PC. So if you like the show, which is like the most popular baseball game, you're going to love Super Vega Baseball 3. I think people are put off by it because it's very cartoony. But once you play it, you realize, oh, wow,

this is actually like a really good baseball scene. So probably that game for me. I'd say golf it I know I talked about a golf game earlier so I do like golf games but that is a game that non people who don't like golf play too it's just a good like friend

playing with your friends and seeing how they interact with the maps and that's a good one this is a cheap I think it's five dollar in real life no well I play disc golf we're not regular golf she she just caddies yeah

mine mine is I think people have seen from last week's stream a hunt showdown. Everyone should play this game. Fantastic shooter. Probably the best thing in the game. Best, best shooter, honestly,

that I've ever played. Play it. Buy it. But do the DLC. Do everything. It's sucked into the game. Now you have like 400 hours to do it like.

I didn't know you were a fellow for Amanda. I love this golf. Yeah, I love it. Krisby golf. Frawl. Also Pulsar.

Talking about that earlier. That is a hidden. Yeah. But you do have to have a, you gotta have homies for that one. That's a friend game. Oh, and I can't play it. Sorry. Yeah, sorry. Sorry, Ivan. I'll play with you, though.

Oh, we're homies. Yep. All right, I'll play. All right, Amanda. Oh, yeah, does it? No, go for it. Amanda, who is going to win the Super Bowl this year? Oh.

We're taking our predictions right here right now. It won't be. I actually think it's going to be the Chiefs. You think he's going to be a Chiefs, really? I know really after Tiger Hill and all them left. Yeah, I think their defense is stronger this year. And I think they're hungry. They know what it feels like to win the Super Bowl.

They want to get back there. I think it's going to be Chiefs. I'm not on this like Bill's like still on an upward. I'm not. Bill's Wapia, baby. I'm on the train, sorry. You just said that because Patrick Mahoney is on your fantasy. Yeah, I need him to win the Super Bowl.

I need it. no i do i think the correct answer was raiders next question mike ill the raiders are like the most overrated team right now so overrated they're i even in Oakland anymore so ronty adams 500 receiving yards this year wow okay sorry sorry i mean we'll see what happens we're taking our predictions right now if any of these two don't win

they had to lose something i I'm going to make them do something on stream. So you guys better help they win. I know who's losing this one. That's not me. And the last- You can all agree that the Packers would not be winning it this year.

Yeah, I hate to say it, but no. Aaron Rodgerson's starting, isn't he? He is, yeah. Oh, he is. Okay, okay. I thought he's got back. He's throwing to himself, though. Got a new hairdoes, got a new tattoo.

He's ready to rock. The last question, Amanda. are you happy? Why does I feel like an attack? Like what is... No, it's just, it could be as deep as you want. You're just say, yeah, I'm happy today. You'd be happy in general.

Happy life, everything. You don't have to be happy. Yeah, I'm happy. Yeah, I'm happy to be on the stream with y'all. I'm having a good time talking to y'all. I appreciate the questions in the chat. I'm definitely happy. There you go.

I always like asking this question because it's just like, Yeah, so people go, what? Like, weren't we just talking about, like, some random, would you rather or stuff like that? This one was, like, a very fun question to see. Keeps on their heels. It's funny because on the Trello board, we have this checklist of questions.

And next to that question, he wrote in parentheses, this may be a little too deep, but it's one of my favorite questions. Oh, no, that's when I usually get a dock out, I usually tell them, like, these are the questions I'm asking, but since it's Amanda, I'm like, I don't know. It's fine. That's fine.

Yes, I'm happy. I'm happy to be here with y'all. I'm happy to take questions about cam. I'm happy to help people work through issues if you're seeing them. Just happy. All right. And I think that's it. Do you guys have anything else before I get into announcements that you want to talk about?

Anything Amanda that you want to say? No, I guess the biggest thing is just thanks to everybody for the support. Just appreciate, you know, like I said earlier, appreciate everyone making posts about your computers, letting us see your builds and, you know, sharing cool stuff that you got. So just also, you know, thank you to Mike and Ivan for supporting such a strong community, too. They do a lot of work to give you all opportunities to interact with those two and telling us things that are coming in. So thanks to you too and thanks to all of you, you know, watching out there too.

Yeah, and thank you, Amanda, for joining us on the podcast. You know, you can always kind of on Mike and I to be the middlemen for the community when it comes to CAM. So I'm glad that you listen and take our feedback. And one of the feedback we pass along seriously and keep up the good work. You're doing a great job. Thank you. I guess I'll go into announcements. And before you guys leave, make sure to stay for the secret code.

That will give you 500 extra entries. So first, I want to talk about the announcement set for NXT. We have a deal with Marvel's Spider-Man remastered. If you guys purchase a PC with a qualifying RTX 30 series card, so any a limited amount of Vida 3,000 series cards, if you purchase a PC, you'll get that game for free. So please check out the promo. Let me take that in a chat right now.

You guys want to take a look at that. Next, we also have very, very, very amazing people during our partner program. If you guys want to join the NCXT family, please take a look at the partner program. We will be giving you guys an acceptance or rejection email. If you guys don't, please wait. We only have really a few people working on this, and we get hundreds and thousands of applications. So please, please, please, be patient.

We are launching, like Ivan said and how I'm so surprised, but we were launching a bunch of different stuff from canvas monitors, capture cards, new cases, keyboards, mice, thermal paste. Like, we are launching a bunch of other stuff. So please check out n60.com. You're making me hungry. You're making me hungry. Don't say that.

Thermal paste, man. I'm just saying we can just start a whole like N60 food court, like how IKEA does it. You know, they come in, they ask for a PC, and at the end there's a food court, and a lot of its thermal paste. Just saying. I'm just saying. Throwing it out there. We could do it. Spinkles? Thermal paste was sprinkles.

Ooh. Oh, thermal paste sprinkles? There's just gray sprinkles. Wait, that's actually... Write that down, Ivan. We got to write that down. Running it down. Going to call them camcakes. Camcakes. Like it. All righty. Any other announcements? Anything you guys want to say before I end off on the secret code for everyone.

Go to Raiders. Please don't eat thermal paste. Don't do that. Don't do that. Yeah, yeah, please don't say thermal paste. Or don't eat thermal face, but it's okay. Even if it's delicious, please don't. If it's delicious.

All right, so thank you guys for listening to the podcast. For the secret code on the gleam, please make sure to refresh your gleams too. A lot of times I add in the code as we're going through it. So please refresh your gleam before you type into secret code. For those I don't know, if you are here, there's a secret code that is really set to end of the podcast. It gives you 500 extra entries into the giveaway.

And honestly, every time I pulled a winners, guys, a majority of them come from the secret word. So this is a thank you guys for staying with us, asking Amanda awesome questions, anything like that. So just a thank you to all of you. The secret code word is cam and a all caps, camanda. That is the secret code for the gleam entry. as a thank you for Amanda for being on this podcast and also thank you for thank you to you for joining in. So secret code is CAMC-A-M and a A-N-D-A.

Good luck, everyone, for the STEAM giveaway. Code works, great. Just make sure to refresh it just in case. Sometimes there's a little bit of bug in it. But go ahead and throw it in there. And I guess that is it for the podcast. So thank you guys for joining us. I remember to tune in live every Thursday

at 10 a.m. Pacific Center. time on the official nzxc twitch and don't forget to listen to previous episodes on apple podcasts google podcast spotify and sound cloud please leave us a positive review if you like what you hear and even if you didn't got any question for us send an email to podcasts at nzcc.com or you can tag at social media at nzxd on all social media platforms see guys next time