Musings on Gender Issues and Tech Conferences

One of my personal “causes” is trying to promote the technology world as a gender-inclusive space.  If you read about such matters on the internet these days, there are some stories that talk about how we’re getting more women in technology.  I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but one of my concerns is that even if we are getting more women working in the tech industry, I’m not convinced we

Porting the Unity Editor to Linux: Stuff I Wish We’d Done Then

At Unite Europe this year, we at Unity released our public roadmap.  And while it’s super cool to be able to share all of the amazing stuff we’re doing at Unity, one thing that is close to my heart is the Linux Editor. The story behind Linux port of the Unity Editor is a lot like the story behind Linux runtime support, which was released in Unity 4.0.  It’s basically a “Labor of

Mercurial at Unity

DISCLAIMER: This blog post is now several years old and it should not be used as a source of current advice.  The landscape of version control, and DVCS in particular, has changed a lot in recent years. Not too long ago, @CorporateShark asked for a blog post about Unity’s experience using Mercurial for version control.  This is that blog post. NOTE: Throughout this post, I use several terms that assume knowledge of DVCS in

How Unity’s Build Team Developed a Custom Continuous Integration Solution

Most people reading this know that I lead the Build & Release Engineering team at Unity Technologies.  On Unity’s company blog, I’ve posted about our in-house build automation / CI solution, Katana.  I wanted to write more about this project, and go over a few key elements as to why I believe it has turned into a successful project for Unity. First of all, if you haven’t read the blog post I wrote

Build Engineering: What It Is and Why You Need It

I recently traveled to Phoenix, Arizona to give a talk about Build Engineering.  The talk was titled, “Build & Infrastructure Engineering: What It Is and Why You Need It”.  It covers the history of the Build & Release Engineering area at Unity (from 2014 to the current state in 2014), and then follows with an overview and introduction to the “5 Pillars of Build Engineering” and what they mean in

What Makes a Good Build Engineer?

In a previous post, I wrote about what build engineers actually do.  A related question is, “What makes a good build engineer?” Obviously this is subjective, but I can share my opinions based on my particular skillsets that are useful in my job as a build engineer, and the qualities I look for in prospective candidates when looking to expand my team. When trying to answer this question, an important thing

What do Build Engineers Actually *Do* all Day Long?

The responses to this stack overflow question I stumbled upon made me realize that many people may not actually understand what build engineers actually do.  Being a build engineer myself, I’d like to share my view. The definition of build engineering of course changes from organization to organization.  From my perspective, a build engineer’s role is simple: our job is to keep the wheels turning.  And as software solutions grow in size