All Things Unity

Episode 6, A Philosophy Of Software Design Part 2

Hi there my fellow gamedevs and welcome to yet another episode of the All Things Unity Podcast. Today we are going to continue our discussion about A philosophy of Software Design. This is part of a series about clean code and currently we are exploring some of the alternatives to clean code by Uncle bob.
 
In the previous episode we covered the first five chapters of the book, and today we will continue with another five.
 
In the episode I mention a book called “The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs” which you can get for free here: https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/index.html
 
I hope you enjoyed this episode and join me on the next one where we will continue our discussion about A Philosophy of Software Design. I think we will need about 2 more episodes to cover the remainder of the book, and then we will look at two other alternatives to clean code.
 
And remember; With Unity, we can do great things.

Episode 5, A Philosophy Of Software Design Part 1

Hi there my fellow gamedevs and welcome to another episode of the All Things Unity Podcast. Today we are going to look at the first of three alternatives to clean code.
 
We’re going to dive into a book called A Philosophy of Software Design by John R. Ousterhout. It’s such an amazing book with a lot of really great information.
 
In this episode I mention a talk he gave, which you can check out here. The visuals of deep and shallow modules are in shown here plus you can see and hear how passionate he talks about this favorite (deep) interface. You should check it out, it’s really great to see.
 
I also mention a guy called David Parnas somewhere in this episode, but never explain who he is so if you would like some information about him you can read it here.
 
I hope you enjoyed this episode and join me on the next one where we will continue our discussion about A Philosophy of Software Design.
 
And remember; With Unity, we can do great things.

Episode 4, Clean Code Part 4

Hi there my fellow gamedevs and welcome back to the All Things Unity Podcast. In this episode our adventure for in clean code comes to and end. Sort of… at least… 
We are going to dive into the next four chapters of the book. Oh yes, again four chapters. We are going to look at chapter 10 Classes and find out what Uncle Bob has to say about those. We will discuss one of the often returning topics in this book, the Single responsibility principle. We will talk about coupling and cohesion of classes and much more. 
Then we also discuss chapter 11, Systems. This is an important chapter to understand and since nice systems design will have big positive impact on your Unity3D application. In unity we are dependent on a really specific startup sequence of loading scenes and awake or start calls. In this chapter we dive into Uncle bob’s advise how to make nice systems, and I’ll try to convert this advise into something tangible you can apply in a unity3D context.
Then we have yet another chapter to discuss and this is chapter 12, Emergence. Uuh.. What? Well with Emergence Uncle bob means that your code, your system evolves and grows. From a tiny little system a larger system emerges and you as a professional game developer need to be able to manage that in a clean way. So in this short 5 page chapter Uncle Bob will give you some advise on how to take on that challenge and slay the spaghetti monster.
And at last, we talk about the last chapter we can meaningfully cover in a podcast, and that is chapter 13, Concurrency. And Concurrency is one of these topics I do not want to bother starting or junior developers with but it is the last chapter in the book we can cover nicely in a podcast format. The rest of the book are case-studies and refactoring examples. There’s also a chapter about code smells with a lot of examples but that’s also difficult to cover in a podcast. So to make this series complete I’m gonna cover the concurrency chapter anyway.
Concurrency is really cool and it can result in some massive performance boosts in your game. But it can also be your worst nightmare and melt your brain into a sludge. Writing concurrent code requires a different mind set since you need to separate the what from the when. We are going to explore all of that in the latter part of this episode.
I also mention a couple of things again:
My blogs about SOLID: https://hamersoft.com/?s=solidThe AbstractFactoryPattern (design pattern): https://www.tutorialspoint.com/design_pattern/abstract_factory_pattern.htm Moore’s Law: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/history/virtual-vault/articles/moores-law.html 
The next episodes is going to be about alternatives about clean code and making some comparisons to clean code. As I said in the 0th episode, I’m not saying clean code is the best, the only way to go. I’ve also read and learned a lot from books like the original Pragmatic programmer, Code complete and A Philosophy of Software Design. I’ve read them all but I think the Clean code book is the easiest one to get started with since it has great advise for juniors, lot’s of code examples and even these case-study chapters.
In the episode I mention that I will spend one episode talking about alternatives but I after quickly having reviewed the contents of these books I can tell you that I will make at least three episodes that dive into these books individually. Because there’s so much good information in there I can’t really do the book, or the author justice by spending like 15 minutes on each of them. So expect at least 3 more episodes in this series :)I hope you learned something today and join me on the next episode!
And as always, remember; With Unity, we can do great things.

Episode 3, Clean Code Part 3

Hi there my fellow gamedevs and welcome back to the All Things Unity Podcast. In this episode we are going to continue our journey through clean code with the next four chapters of the book. We are going to discuss chapters 6 through 9. Object and Data structures, Error Handling, Boundaries and Unit Tests.
 
Chapter 6 is about objects and data structures, where we talk about the distinct differences between them; how objects hide implementation details and expose their data through functions and data structures do the exact opposite and expose their internals without providing an abstract interface.
 
Then we also discuss error handling in chapter 7 and how error handling can be really difficult in Unity3D since we don’t want to start throwing exceptions everywhere because it will impact performance greatly.
 
Next is chapter 8, boundaries, and it is about how to integrate with 3th-party code. How you explore it by covering it by tests and how you create facade classes around it to minimize dependencies.
 
And then, the final chapter, we discuss chapter 9 which is all about unit testing. As I said before finding a unity project that is properly unit tested is very very rare, and that’s for a reason of course. We’re all going to discuss it in this episode.
 
In this episode I said I wrote a blog about Polymorphism which you can read here: https://hamersoft.com/2021/03/10/14-solid-part-5-the-dependency-inversion-principle/
 
I also mentioned the Law of Demeter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Demeter
 
Enjoy!
 
And as always, remember; With Unity, we can do great things.

Episode 2, Clean Code Part 2

Hello my fellow gamedevs and this is the second episode of the All Things Unity Podcast! In this episode we are going to talk about the next two chapters of the book. We are going to discuss Comments and a more aesthetic subject – Formatting. Both of these topics are important in a Clean Code Context.
 
In the podcats I talk about Clean Architecture and a book called Object-Oriented Software Engineering, A Use Case Driven Approach by Ivar Jacobson. So I’ll provide you some links:
 
Clean Architecture: https://www.amazon.com/Clean-Architecture-Craftsmans-Software-Structure/dp/0134494164/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=clean+architecture&qid=1644468669&sprefix=Clean+Archite%2Caps%2C212&sr=8-1
 
OOSE: https://www.amazon.com/Object-Oriented-Software-Engineering-Approach/dp/0201544350/ref=sr_1_1?crid=R3I7ZA9JDCWR&keywords=object-oriented+software+engineering+Ivar+Jacobson&qid=1644468743&sprefix=object-oriented+software+engineering+ivar+jacobson%2Caps%2C189&sr=8-1
 
I also mentioned that I wrote a review about the OOSE book, you can read a couple of blogs about the book here: https://hamersoft.com/?s=ivar+jacobson
 
Lastly I mentioned the SOLID acronym and the fact that I wrote some blogs about SOLID before. You can read them here: https://hamersoft.com/?s=Solid
 
My Unity3D affiliate link still has not been approved yet so I still can’t put the link in here yet. But nonetheless, thanks for listening.
 
See you next time and as always remember; With Unity we can do great things – Game Over.

Episode 1, Clean Code Part 1

Hi there my fellow game devs and welcome to the first episode of the All Things Unity Podcast.
This is the first episode of a series dedicated to the clean code and focused on the first three chapters of the book. Future podcasts will focus on the remaining chapters.
 
In this podcast we are talking about the book called Clean Code by Robert C. Martin. He is one of the old school software guru’s out there and is a big voice behind agile, TDD, SOLID, Clean Architecture for example and lots more. He has written a number of books like Clean Code, The Clean coder, Clean architecture, Clean Agile, and of late Clean Software Craftsmanship. He also has a site of his own where he makes very cool video’s about many topics in software engineering which is at https://cleancoders.com. He’s also a very good public speaker with many very interesting keynotes at multiple conferences all around the world. He has a well respected reputation in the software industry and I hope this gives you an idea about who he is.
 
Oh and somewhere in the podcast where I was talking about trying to keep functions as less as four lines I said that a simple guarding if-statement at the top of your function would result in 3 lines, but it should have been 4 of course, the condition, a curly bracket, the body, and closing bracket.
 
I hope you enjoyed this information and if you have any feedback or comments, please leave contact me :)
 
The affiliate link is still not setup, so I guess I’ll tell you to wait again.
 
Thank you for listening, and as always, remember: With Unity we can do great things.
 
 

Episode 0, Introduction

Hi my fellow gamedevs, and welcome to the 0th episode of the All Things Unity Podcast. My name is Ruben and in this first episode I’m going to talk a bit about why I started this, what the podcast is about, who I am, future topics, monitization, yeah I would like to be transparent about this, and some other general housekeeping topics.
 
This is a podcast about Unity3D development. Not just developing games, but also business apps, simulations and other applications you can use unity for. Heck we might even loose ourselves in the metaverse. We are going to dive into best practices, popular design patterns and game architectures. Software development methodologies and processes. And of course game design and everything that revolves around it.
 
The aim is to be an entry level platform while still diving deep into the trenches of game development every now and then. And, of course, in the end having fun and producing valuable content for everyone involved!
 
The episodes of the debug log podcast I mentioned can be found on your favorite podcasting platform, or here for example: https://the-debug-log.simplecast.com/
 
I mentioned this talk by Uncle bob called “The Scribes Oath” from the GoTo conference 2017. You can watch the talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tng6Fox8EfI.
 
Also here is an old blog from Uncle Bob himself where he explains why he thinks the number of programmers double every 5 years: http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html. He talks about this in many more keynotes, but I think the Scribes Oath is the most recent one.
 
If you are thinking about setting yourself, or your team, up with some Unity3D licenses, please consider using my affiliate link if you want to support me. Also, buying assets in the Unity AssetStore through my link will help me out as well. I really want to be transparent about this and this is a nice passive way to gather some funds to support the podcast.
 
My request to become an official Unity3D affiliate is still pending and I’ll update the show notes when I get everything set up.
 
If you have any feedback please leave me a comment, and also if you would like to hear a podcast about a certain topic, feel free to propose it to me :)
 
The next couple of episodes will probably be about Clean Code in C# and Unity.
 
Thank you for listening, and remember; With Unity we can do great things!