Today I want to acknowledge that this blog is up just slightly over 2 years now. Hurray… I want to take a look back on the blogs I wrote and lessons learned. So let’s take a look:

Enterprise Architecture

When I look back in the archives I see that the blogs I wrote November last year were about the Enterprise Architecture (EA) course I did at the Open University in The Netherlands. In this course we needed to read a lot of literature as it was an academic course part of the Master programme.

As I remember, some papers were far more interesting than others and the course overall could have been more interesting if they added more practical assignments. But, bottom line is that I’m glad I did the course and I’m pretty convinced EA is not for me. It’s not technical enough and involved far to much politics in my opinion. And I don’t like politics on the work-floor, yet they will always be there. So you need to find your way to deal with them. I think this EA course gave me some more insights into why and how certain “weird” policies might come about.

I also got reminded, I really like studying… But I’m far more busy now than I was 3 years ago when I finished my Master’s. It’s really difficult trying to juggle to many things at once, especially when the priority of each is about equal. But yeah… If you want to learn more about the EA course I encourage you to read these blogs 😉

Lots and lots of reviews

Then in January of 2022 I started writing all of these review blogs for numerous books. I started with Clean Code by Robert C. Martin aka Uncle Bob. Why would I do this? Well I also started this podcast for beginning UnityDevs called AllThingsUnity. I wanted to dig deep into some of the material that helped me out personally back in the day. So I wanted to do a couple of podcast episodes about Clean Code in a Unity3D context. Which was a lot of fun.

But I also quickly got reminded how confronting the advise in Clean Code can be, and some people don’t like that. I’ve talked about this before; I don’t mind, I rather have someone say it straight to my face than twisting and turning around it, telling it to me in such a way trying not to offend me. C’mon man! Just tell me…

But that made me also dive into another awesome book I read called A Philosophy of Software Design by Prof. John Ousterhout from Stanford University. I’ve read many blogs about this book as well and I think lots of people find it as transformative as Clean Code. But the nice part is that these books provide some opposing advise on certain topics, which is really interesting to discuss.

So in these blogs I write in-depth about the contents of the books, I provide my own opinions and try to apply the practices in a Unity3D context. I also point out the conflicting advise made in the books. This is what makes for some interesting content like; Uncle Bob’s and Prof. Ousterhout’s advise concerning comments or function length.

Then more recently I started yet another review series when I throw one of my favorite software books, The Pragmatic Programmer, into the mix as well. And immediately in chapter 1 we find some very interesting things about, again… comments. In The Pragmatic Programmer the authors, Andrew Hunt and David Thomas, consider comments that reside on the same level of abstraction as the code duplicates. Thus these comments violate the world famous (like in the software world) DRY; Don’t Repeat Yourself principle. And I agree. How many times have you read these nonsense comments that say “Constructor” above a class’ constructor… We are programmers, we know what constructors are… telling me this with a comment is almost offensive.

So; Take a look at these blogs or if you like listen to my beautiful voice talking about them in my podcast.

All Things Unity

Speaking about podcasts; I started this podcast called All Things Unity back in January of 2022. I’ve been a bit inactive lately but let’s just say babies ruin productivity… I really want to be more active with my podcast but I also like to spend time with my family and friends, work out, renovate my house and write code for hobby projects. So yeah, life is busy.

Nonetheless; The podcast has been much fun. I really enjoy doing the podcast but it just takes me a long time to produce anything. Up till now it has been a solo show because I’m doing all these reviews. But in the future I want to turn over to a format more focused on interviews. I think this will allow me to produce episodes more often since I don’t have to spend as much time on pre-production as I do now.

For the solo episodes I really need to write a script or at least some key areas to talk about. It’s kind of difficult to keep on speaking into nothingness without drawing a blank. Combine that with the fact that I dislike and suck at editing the audio and you have a recipe for a bad episode (, trust me, I tried). So I write a script for each episode and then produce it, which takes me about 2 weeks considering my schedule. But as I said I really like doing it and I’m not planning on stopping. So there will be more episodes in the future.

Off-Topic

So I wrote only 1 off-topic blog, which was about a conference I went to not so long ago called the Dutch Clojure Days (DCD) 2022. It was a lot of fun! I wrote like a summary of it, which you can find on the blog if you search for Clojure. It has nothing to do with Unity, but it’s interesting still. If you want to turn your brain inside-out go and learn some Clojure. It will also improve your C# code for sure! It will give you this different view of the problem you are trying to solve. Just don’t come back to me whining that you never want to write C#, and want to keep writing Clojure. Because it’s a common “problem” that once you learn to write any LISP, you never want to go back the language(s) you wrote before!

I also wrote some code for a personal project in the past month(s). I don’t want to dive too deep into it here since I want to dedicate a blog to the project. It’s (again) a project I started out of frustration! I got frustrated again because I had to copy paste a lot of code connecting our back-end and front-end. I needed to implement all these DTO files for communication purposes and thus copy pasted a lot of it.

So in my personal time I set out to built a Unity3D compatible code generator for OpenAPI  3.x.x. This project called “SjwagMeister” is currently able to generate all Schema’s (DTO’s) and a strongly typed API client compatible with Unity3D. But yeah, I’ll dive deeper into it in a future blog!

For now, see you later!

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