Change

Software can change a lot over its lifetime because technology is moving faster, and I believe that software is living longer when operated as services. Change, driven by evolution and revolution in competitive technologies, huge changes in platforms, business models and shifts in customer expectations require us to be agile.

I don’t mean that we have to adopt Scrum, but that we need to fundamentally consider software development with an agile viewpoint that accepts change as inevitable — you will be disrupted every 5 years or so, and you’d better be able to adapt. Maybe it’s new hardware, the cloud, some new database solution, VR, mobile, micro-transactions, free to play, digital distribution, services, new middleware…

Standardized Python installs

Virtualenv for Python is wonderful, and you should use it.

Our path to using it however, was rather rocky: working primarily on Windows, we were for quite some time victims of the Python community’s focus on Pip (and insistence on compiling everything during install).

Working on Windows, with a large number of non-technical users, the idea of trying to get your tools to compile on an artists’ machine should really scare you (never-mind the lack of testing / support and particular versions of visual studio that had to exist).