Dickinson, Chris: - Chris Dickinson grew up in a quiet little corner of England with a strong passion formathematics, science and, in particular, video games. He loved playing them, dissectingtheir gameplay, and trying to figure out how they worked. Watching his dad hack the hexcode of a PC game to get around the early days of copy protection completely blew hismind! His passion for science won the battle at the time; however, after completing amaster's degree in physics with electronics, he flew out to California to work in the field ofscientific research in the heart of Silicon Valley. Shortly afterward, he had to admit tohimself that research work was an unsuitable career path for his temperament. After firingresumes in all directions, he landed a job that finally set him on the correct course in thefield of software engineering (this is not uncommon for physics grads, I hear).His time working as an automated tools developer for IPBX phone systems fit histemperament much better. Now he was figuring out complex chains of devices, helping itsdevelopers fix and improve them, and building tools of his own. Chris learned a lot abouthow to work with big, complex, real-time, event-based, user-input driven state machines(sounds familiar?). Being mostly self-taught at this point, Chris's passion for video gameswas flaring up again, pushing him to really figure out how video games were built. Once hefelt confident enough, he returned to school for a bachelor's degree in game and simulationprogramming. By the time he was done, he was already hacking together his own (albeitrudimentary) game engines in C++ and regularly making use of those skills during his dayjob. However, if you want to build games, you should just build games, and not gameengines. So, Chris picked his favorite publically available game engine at the time--anexcellent little tool called Unity 3D--and started hammering out some games.After a brief stint of indie game development, Chris regretfully decided that the demands ofthat particular career path weren't for him, but the amount of knowledge he hadaccumulated in just a few short years was impressive by most standards, and he loved tomake use of it in ways that enabled other developers with their creations. Since then, Chrishas authored a tutorial book on game physics (Learning Game Physics with Bullet Physics andOpenGL, Packt Publishing) and two editions of a Unity performance optimization book(which you are currently reading). He has married the love of his life, Jamie, and workswith some of the coolest modern technology as a software development engineer in Test(SDET) at Jaunt Inc. in San Mateo, CA, a Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality startup thatfocuses on delivering VR and AR experiences, such as 360 videos (and more!).Outside of work, Chris continues to fight an addiction to board games (particularlyBattlestar
