About a year ago, I decided it was time for a career shift. I managed a fabulous team of mobile developers who were a joy to work with, but I missed creating things. I talked to my boss at Mutual Mobile about the problem; he encouraged me to chart out a way back to an engineer role within the company.

I thought carefully about my options. I could go back to iOS engineering, which my previous boss had done. He was delighted with the change and had no regrets whatever about stepping down from management to an engineering job. But I enjoy learning and figuring out new things and, while iOS is a fantastically enjoyable platform to develop for, iOS 10 seemed pretty mature. I moved from web development to mobile because the web stopped feeling like the wild west. Now I had the same sense about mobile.

So I looked at alternatives. Mutual Mobile had a months-old Virtual Reality practice at that point that was gaining steam. While I hadn’t yet spent any serious time with Unity, which the team uses for its work, my son and some of my fellow engineers both had and were clearly enjoying the experience.

I floated my plan to retool myself into a VR engineer to my boss and the VR team, all of whom were gracious enough to give it an enthusiastic thumbs-up. So in early 2017, I began a self-administered crash course in Unity and VR. I found Unity’s online training materials to be excellent, and by the time we executed my official transition to the VR team, I was able to jump in and contribute to the team without a problem.

(I was still green compared to the other two excellent engineers working on our projects, but made up for it by continuing to do management of our engineering and project management teams.)

I’ve now gotten to contribute to a Cardboard project and do all the engineering for an Oculus Rift project. (The former should be available in the mobile app stores soon, and the latter will be installed in the Bass Pro HQ in Springfield in a few weeks.) The team’s also doing work with several other really interesting clients; I’m excited about the work ahead.

Now that I’m past the initial hurdles in Unity, I’m learning things I think might benefit other developers and/or VR enthusiasts. Accordingly, I’m going to post things here to document my learning. My areas of particular interest include: Good Software Architecture in Unity, Cool Stuff our Team is Doing, Using Physical Props in VR, and Accessibility in VR.

If you’re interested in any of these areas or just in creating VR, please get in touch or just follow along. I’m excited about this next phase of my career, and will be happy to have company!