DawnBringer3D Tips & Tricks, Personal News, Game Development

Ownership To Boost Development

In many companies you aren’t encouraged to take the ownership of your code it. You should.

This is how I see the meaning of taking the ownership of your code :

• Taking responsibility – if it is in your code, you will fix it!
• Need to create high quality software – being proud of it.

Always expect that somebody else is going to read your code, and when that happens you want that somebody to be able to read it, understand it and use it. Always aim for the best quality, there is no reason to write bad code. Sadly, I can see some problems in my current job and this is one of them, managers..

When applied it is a very powerful way to motivate yourself and other programmers to create high quality code and to improve existing code, themselves and others! Trust me I have seen this, and the cap between not using it and using it is really big.

Writing high quality code all the time, e.g. trying to do it right once, is very important. Most managers won’t agree only because it takes more time to write high quality software. But in the end it would have been a lot better choice to spent more time on doing high quality software as low quality code tend to have design problems, more bugs, etc. This is why I loved to work at Nvidia, we were allowed to write high quality code and encouraged to take the ownership of our code.