Look it up before you make it up
We mentioned this in Chapter 10, Creating a Multiplayer Experience in VR, and want to reiterate it here: one of the core mistakes new developers make is failing to do research before they dive into a problem, and they wind up rewriting code that's already been written.
Do your homework. When you're trying to solve a problem, before you start hacking away at it, see whether anybody else has tacked anything similar and left footprints behind. Is there already a tool in the engine that does this or does most of it? Are there examples in the templates or the sample projects that show how it can be solved? Has someone written a tutorial somewhere? Sometimes, the answer is going to be no, but far more often, you're going to find something that either points you directly toward a solution or gets you closer than you would have gotten without it.
We once saw a small team of engineers waste weeks of development budget on a problem that had already been solved with a single function in a freely-licensed plugin. That's time that didn't go into making the game better, and you don't need to fall into this trap. Research is part of your development process and should always happen before you start typing or dragging nodes.
This leads us right into our next topic of discussion where can you look when you need to find information?
