I wrote this a while ago before the age of LLM Coding. It is a good reminder for myself to what is important:

There is this feeling I used to have when working on Unity projects. When the project becomes just big enough that you can’t keep a mental image of the complete project so you start compartmentalizing the project to keep track. I would organize the assets, simplify the scene hierarchy, try to make prefabs wherever possible, maybe refactor some code. But somehow it always stayed a mess. An interconnected jumble of scenes consisting of instances of prefabs that contain scripts with different component values intertwined with Unity’s engine and editor. Feeling would wash over me, something like anxiety, disgust, dread or disappointment. It kept increasing in strength every time I open that damned editor. Not too long after, I would stop working on the project. This happened dozens of time over some number of years. So many times I started on a project with the intention of finishing just to quit some months later. I felt like the Jimmy neutron villain that can’t finish anything. I felt so useless.

When working on college projects, I did not have this issue. I was always wary of tech debt and tried to organize around this idea of never feeling stuck in my own codebase. My Unity experience definitly made me focus on this more than average. Granted I was not, and still am not that good at building up a project in way that will not become ‘messy’ wherever that means, but I became good enough to build larger more complex software with different tech stacks without feeling the dread I felt with Unity.

One day I did what many novice game programmers do, and started building my own hobby game engine. It was a lot of fun. Later this expanded into a framework / engine / game. Funny thing is over the 4+ years I have been working on this project, I have never felt that feeling I had with Unity. I never feel stuck. Never felt that the project is decaying day by day just by existing inside a morphing cup that is Unity. I never felt an exponential slowdown in productivity here. There are fleeting times where I feel the exact opposite. Moments where for just seconds I feel a cocktail of positive feelings. It feels like I am floating, no anxiety, no pressure on my shoulders. A sense of nostalgia to a time without any stress. I feel I have an immense world in front of me, that I can carve till I am content. No random unminable blocks in front of me, just a shape that I can morph freely.

I never want to go back, I want to cherish this place and wall it off from the disgusting mold growing in most software. Honestly if I did not have this, I would likely fail to find happiness in my life and be reduced to being an depressed NPC spending my days in a office, working on random sprint task where only 5 minutes are actually needed but I can’t find the courage to actually open sections of the codebase out of sheer mental anguish. To open it would have to keep myself from cleaning the disgusting mess made by others. Others have no joy in programming and have plugged their nose or have been living in their worthless trash for too long to notice the stank emitting from every corner of their codebase. They are forever subjected to be knee deep in shit, locked in a jail cell constructed out of their own labour, unable to look up to see the rare creatures flying above their mess.