Hi friend.
My name is Su Ziyue, born in Yueyang, Hunan Province.
The name itself is tied to my birthplace:
my parents hoped I would be as talented as the Zi (子) of “Hundred Schools of Thought” (诸子百家),
and as solid and reliable as the Yue (岳) — meaning a great mountain.
Lirian Su is my English name.
Lirian was one of the protagonists in a novel I wrote in high school,
a character built the way I wanted to be:
calm enough to make sense of things with the pen,
strong enough to hold his own against a hundred with the sword.
I was born in Hunan and grew up studying in Guangdong.
I got into programming in the 7th grade through informatics competitions,
later won a provincial first prize in NOIP in high school,
which exempted me from the gaokao and let me go straight to Shanghai Jiao Tong University to study Software Engineering.
In July 2014, after my senior year began,
I started interning at QAD China.
QAD is a multinational team,
and that’s where I learned the textbook software development workflow.
The main language at the time was Perl,
and the work was on a Git-based customized code version control tool.
Later, after I gradually grew into a lead programmer there,
I drove a major refactor of the entire project, optimizing both performance and complexity.
In October 2016,
I was invited by a Baixing HR for an interview,
because my friend Zhou Cheng had also interned at Baixing,
so we just set up a meal.
And then he dragged me into my current company with a bowl of Chongqing noodles.
The company is called Zaihui in short,
and when I just joined the tech team had only 12 people, every one of them sharp,
I felt like I was the weakest one in there :)
I wrote down my work experience on Zhihu,
back then I had no idea this article would, over the years, bring quite a few people into Zaihui.
At work I started out doing web backend stuff,
the main job covering the three parts a backend usually involves:
implementing business logic, designing and managing databases, and setting up server deployment environments.
There’s a lot you could say about each of these,
so I’ll just not say anything :)
Starting January 2018,
I became the tech lead of one business line and started charging forward with the team.
Quite a few people have directly told me:
“You’re my favorite Leader.”
These kinds of words encouraged me,
not only to make sure my hard-working colleagues got career rewards,
but also to do everything I could to keep us all at the cutting edge of technology.
During my years as Team Leader,
I held a fixed weekly meeting with my teammates every week,
where we shared tech and discussed career growth.
What genuinely makes me happy is
that the colleagues working with me have all had pretty low turnover,
which also encourages me to keep pushing in a better direction.
Starting February 2022,
I joined Arctic Data.
While mainly leading R&D in Shanghai,
I also took on product responsibilities.
In my year-plus at Arctic,
I got to experience, in deeper water, what it feels like to do startups in data, AI, and tech.
Startup is a word that’s been overused.
At its core it’s really just people and business.
For people: thinking, hard work, and trust are the key elements;
for business: cash flow, model, and innovation are what matter most.
In September 2023,
nudged by Zaihui’s founder Zhao Yang,
I started a new journey at OpusClip.
This journey has been the most enjoyable process for me in recent years.
I’ll get a chance to tell everyone about it properly sometime.
After growing from a frontline developer into a tech lead,
I’ve always continued to use myself as a senior programmer.
On engineering, I push projects to follow community best practices,
because that’s how you can best leverage all kinds of tools to be lazy boost productivity.
On languages, I mostly write Python,
and have some understanding of Go/JavaScript/Perl/Java/Lisp (in that order).
Life is short, I use Python.
I’m also mainly active on Zhihu and GitHub.
On Zhihu I mostly just lurk,
but on GitHub I get involved in quite a few projects.
My own projects are mostly split into two parts:
one part is my personal life projects, like my homepage or my environment configurations;
the other is various tool projects, like my Chinese holidays library, which is fairly popular.
My usual development environment is Windows,
I’m a heavy Vim user and Git user,
and also a victim of the JetBrains gift bundle.
Love languages and logic,
love fun things,
love reading blogs,full of questionsabundantly curious.
Particularly fond of this line from the Python Zen:Now is better than never.
I believe the meaning of life lies in the present, and if you want to do something you shouldn’t hesitate.
Compared to complex designs that cover 100% of cases,
I prefer simple designs that cover 90% of cases.
I believe the deeper truths are simple and pure
(for instance, I firmly believe in the Grand Unified Theory).
I believe all people are born equal,
and I also believe some people will live more equally.
Either way, life is what you make of it.
When I’m old and look back on my life,
I hope I can recite this line with a calm heart:
“If it serves my country I’d live or die for it,
why should fortune or misfortune make me dodge or chase?”
(— Lin Zexu)
I don’t like labels — I think the most important thing about a person is their free, independent identity.
I don’t like regret, I don’t like arguments — I think facts speak for themselves.
I don’t like politics, because I think politics is opaque and not played fairly.
I don’t actively join social events;
my spare time is mostly with my girlfriend.
Of course, she’s my wife now,
and she’s continuously updating a podcast blog called Cannot Skip Class — BookTalk (不可逃课 BookTalk).
My dream is world peace, good people being happy,
and becoming someone seriously impressive.
Nice to meet you.
(But if you finished reading my self-introduction
without introducing yourself to me back,
then I won’t get the chance to actually meet you.)
About this blog
Building a blog is easy, making the decision is the hard part.
Generated by Hugo, hosted on GitHub.
The comment system is commentit, and PV/UV uses busuanzi.
Appendix
Time I’ve been spending on writing code lately:
(yes, this guy has been writing less code lately)
The editor I’ve been using lately:
(the GUI I use for querying data is also PyCharm)