Earlier this month, I spent a week in beautiful Copenhagen at what’s called a R&D Training week. The goal is that every new Unity engineer spends a week at the Copenhagen office, learning about the systems we use, and about engineering at Unity. Granted, since I’m on the services side, a big chunk of the stuff wasn’t directly relevant, but I did learn a lot, and had a really nice time getting to know people and working on the project.<\/p>\n
We had presentations every morning about some aspect of Unity engineering, and in the afternoon (and typically, late into the evening) we worked on a project. I won’t give away details, but in general, we needed to write a Unity engine component, and then tune it for performance using Unity’s job system.<\/p>\n
I haven’t written C++ in over a decade (angryweasel pauses to think here if he ever wrote anything but straight C in XBox One…maybe, but nothing other than maintenance<\/em>). Enough of it came back, however to make progress and figure things out. In fact, in the end, I had a solution that ran correctly, and ran quickly. So I guess I succeeded.<\/p>\n A few thoughts and insights came out while I reflected on the week and the exercise. I had to grep through a ton of source code to learn how things worked, and during that process, I learned how a lot of other things worked. I know more about how the engine and editor work than I ever would have figured out on my own. And, as I mentioned above, I completed the exercise, but that was, I think, a false victory, and one that reflects a real world problem – and a missed lesson learned.<\/p>\n I wrote code that solved the problem. It was fast. It was mult-threaded. It worked. But it was shitty code<\/em>. In my effort to hit a deadline, I wrote crappy code. It was overly complex. It was filled with dead code and unused variables. I wrote so much crap in such a relatively short amount of time, that I literally forgot what some of my code did. And no, I didn’t write any comments (nor write many tests) for my shitty code. To my credit, you could say what I wrote was a prototype. And like most prototypes, I should rewrite it before shipping it.<\/p>\n It made me realize how easy it is in the real world for us (software teams) to focus on getting our work out to our customers quickly (by a deadline) vs. getting them great work that we can be proud of (and trust). The exercise, of course, wasn’t about getting something out quickly, but I was surprised (and a bit embarrassed) that I lost sight of code craftsmanship over the goal of a deadline (and keeping up with my better coding classmates).<\/p>\n All in all, a fun and interesting week, with some great learning points that I’ll continue to ponder.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Earlier this month, I spent a week in beautiful Copenhagen at what’s called a R&D Training week. The goal is that every new Unity engineer spends a week at the Copenhagen office, learning about the systems we use, and about engineering at Unity. Granted, since I’m on the services side, a big chunk of the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1059"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1059\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}