On work and clean code

It’s been like 6 months of me working on Unity. So far so good. We’ve done a big new release recently, so after some pre-release insanity we’re a bit more relaxed. I guess not for very long though, we have more stuff planned than we can handle :)

It sure feels nice to work on an actual software product. I think it’s probably the first time in my carreer that I know people are using my work and I do care about that. Having worked on projects before, it’s very different - a project just comes and goes, and once it’s finished you never think about it again. And most of the time you don’t care about “the clients” that much either. Working on a product is much more rewarding (especially if the users seem to like it).

Another interesting here is that we are a very small software shop. So everyone has to be a one-man-army (the others certainly are, not sure about myself). Design, program, fix bugs, decide on features, do support, write docs and even do html tweaks for the website. Of course, it could be Jack of all trades, master of none (*), but somehow I feel that we are managing pretty well. And I like to be involved in various aspects of making a product.

(*) though wikipedia says that the full saying is Jack of all trades, master of none, though ofttimes better than master of one - which looks like a positive thing to me.

A completely different theme: when programming, it’s always good to massage the code you’re working with a bit. Remove unneccessary #includes. Write a comment on tricky code block. Fix warnings. Do small refactorings. Remove unused code paths. It does not take much time and helps to keep the codebase clean. Removing unused code is especially good - for some reason I love removing code. Could do that all day long; probably I’m some kind of anti-programmer :)