10 Years at Unity

Turns out, I started working on this “Unity” thing exactly 10 years ago. I wrote the backstory in “2 years later” and “4 years later” posts, so not worth repeating it here.

A lot of things have happened over these 10 years, some of which are quite an experience.

Seeing the company go through various stages, from just 4 of us back then to, I dunno, 750 amazing people by now? is super interesting. You get to experience the joys & pains of growth, the challenges and opportunities allowed by that and so on.

Seeing all the amazing games made with Unity is extremely motivating. Being a part this super-popular engine that everyone loves to hate is somewhat less motivating, but hey let’s not focus on that today :)

Having my tiny contributions in all releases from Unity 1.2.2 to (at the time of writing) 5.3.1 and 5.4 beta feels good too!

What now? or “hey, what happened to Optimizing Unity Renderer posts?”

Last year I did several “Optimizing Unity Renderer” posts (part 1, part 2, part 3) and then, when things were about to get interesting, I stopped. Wat happend?

Well, I stopped working on them optimizations; the multi-threaded rendering and other optimizations are done by people who are way better at it than I am (@maverikou, @n3rvus, @joeldevahl and some others who aren’t on twitterverse).

So what I am doing then?

Since mid-2015 I’ve moved into kinda-maybe-a-lead-but-not-quite position. Perhaps that’s better characterized as “all seeing evil eye” or maybe “that guy who asks why A is done but B is not”. I was the “graphics lead” a number of years ago, until I decided that I should just be coding instead. Well, now I’m back to “you don’t just code” state.

In practice I do several things for past 6 months:

• Reviewing a lot of code, or the “all seeing eye” bit. I’ve already been doing quite a lot of that, but with large amount of new graphics hires in 2015 the amount of graphics-related code changes has gone up massively.
• Part of a small team that does overall “graphics vision”, prioretization, planning, roadmapping and stuff. The “why A is done when B should be done instead” bit. This also means doing job interviews, looking into which areas are understaffed, onboarding new hires etc.
• Bugfixing, bugfixing and more bugfixing. It’s not a secret that stability of Unity could be improved. Or that “Unity does not do what I think it should do” (which very often is not technically “bugs”, but it feels like that from the user’s POV) happens a lot.
• Improving workflow for other graphics developers internally. For example trying to reduce the overhead of our graphics tests and so on.
• Work on some stuff or write some documentation when time is left from the above. Not much of actual coding done so far, largest items I remember are some work on frame debugger improvements (in 5.3), texture arrays / CopyTexture (in 5.4 beta) and a bunch of smaller items.

For the foreseeable future I think I’ll continue doing the above.

By now we do have quite a lot of people to work on graphics improvements; my own personal goal is that by mid-2016 there will be way less internet complaints along the lines of “unity is shit”. So, less regressions, less bugs, more stability, more in-depth documentation etc.

Wish me luck!