Lirian Su's Blog

Random Thoughts · How Things Are These Days

Thu, 11 Jan 2024 00:16:25 +0800

Recently after James glanced at my blog,
he commented: “A certain blogger hasn’t updated in a long time.”
Looking at the only 3 articles updated in 2023,
I can only directly face and embrace my excuseless laziness.

(I)

Last year I didn’t read many books. WeChat Reading says my fastest read was “The Dao of Strangely Strange Immortals.”
The emotional impact this book gave me was no less than reading “Mercenaries’ World” during my chuunibyou period.
Mercenaries belongs to a young hothead encountering a fully built western fantasy world.
“Dao of Strangely Strange Immortals” belongs to the top-tier crazy literature of this chaotic era.

The past month I’ve been bombarded with various year-end recaps.
It seems any decent app on the phone
allocates part of its product-engineering team at year-end to do a year-in-review project.
Many habits develop into customs in strange tacit agreement.

I personally don’t like calling new cultural customs “innovation.”
For example, last year there was Wen Huijun who went viral on WeChat Moments for a day,
his interesting point was inserting discordant parts into daily life,
essentially the same as “brain-dead games” where the fun comes from those who can’t wake up.
But I’m nobody too. I also posted Wen-shen-style states and had fun.

(II)

People always fall into one contradiction or another.
A while back I made a big deal writing 《Why I Hate Smoking》.
A few years later, today’s me suddenly discovers I don’t dislike smokers.
On the positive side, tobacco at the social level contributes income, jobs, provides consumption and entertainment,

On the negative side, smokers have shorter average lifespan, reducing pension pressure,

As for smoking itself, this behavior isn’t hallucinogenic, has little impact, can be self-restrained.
As long as the people I care about don’t smoke, smokers actually look quite friendly.

Writing to this point, I startle, and can’t help but think of a classic conversation with my dad before.
I asked my dad: “What do you think about homosexuality?”
My dad: “Oh, very normal existence in modern society, they’re also normal people blabla”
Me: “What if I were gay?”
My dad: “Ah you can’t be gay.”

The “interests-relevant principle” is a rule that mature social humans must learn,
but it’s also part of what I secretly mourn — “adults are no longer as cute as kids.”

(III)

Before I grumbled to Mia, lamenting that recently I often feel quite slimy, not cute at all.
Mia comforted me, saying: “Being a bit slimy at your age is very normal. Men in middle age are all like this.”
Me: …………
The experience of moaning-and-sighing being turned back on you and leaving you speechless is hard to respond to.

Luckily I later lost a few jin and encountered the song “Earth Thunder Lord,” and was able to quickly turn the mindset around.
There’s a saying that someone who knows their own stupidity isn’t stupid. So someone who knows their own sliminess probably isn’t slimy.
The brave enjoy life, the ignorant are always happy.

All my life I have not cultivated good fruits, I only love to kill and burn. Suddenly the golden rope opens, and the jade lock breaks here. Hey! The tide on the Qiantang River comes, today I finally know I am me.
—— Gatha, before Lu Zhishen’s nirvana

Sometimes I feel being a guy is pretty simple.
Not being a successful man means not much social pressure.
As long as you don’t get fat (exercise more), are humble (brag less), self-disciplined (love learning), clean and restrained — you can stay like a youth forever.
And becoming a youth itself is the happiest thing.

(IV)

2024 is my favorite year in recent years.
The number 2024 itself is wonderful.
It’s a multiple of 2, 4, 7, 8, and if you calculate wrong it can also be a multiple of 3, 6.
It’s the year of the Dragon, also an Olympic year. Compared to the doomsday year 2012 it’s double doomsday, compared to memorable 2008 it brings triple memories.
And this year everyone’s birth year plus age equals exactly 2024.
In short, 2024 is a year I really like.

Like adjusting TV volume — 25 is a suitable volume, 24 is also a suitable volume, but 23 definitely isn’t, you have to lower it to 21 or 20.
Everyone has a slight case of OCD.

For programmers, OCD is like cleanliness for doctors,
a slightly distressing but career-developmentally beneficial issue.
Besides the correct use of full/half-width, line breaks in text files, correct use of “的”/“地”/“得” marked in “My Bit of OCD,”
in recent years the issues I care about most include “correct pronunciation of 优惠券 (coupon) and 阈值 (threshold),” “don’t misspell words in APIs,” and “say ji ~~jiu~~ bu shuo ba civilizes all of us.” (slang/wordplay)

A life without ups and downs is a relatively dull life, not fun.

(V)

Recently most of my time has been given to work.
These past few months working at Opus are some of the most exciting times in recent years for me:
teammates are three-headed-six-armed, growth-side breaking through thorns, strategy-side cautiously optimistic, development-side everything-to-do.
I have a lot to say. I’ll wait for the honeymoon to end, think it through, and write separately.

About work, the deepest thing I’ve felt is what an upperclassman always said: individual struggle and historical process.
In a career spanning decades, many who lay flat early are no longer connected to the word “struggle.”
Many people happily waste their talent. In my view it’s just a bit regrettable.
And in remaining careers, “historical process” or “cycles” is a threshold you can’t cross over.
However outstanding the individual, however brilliant the decade, however good the generation of young people — all may get consumed in some phase of the Kondratiev cycle.
But this little bit of dialectical difficulty is too easy for Chinese people:
just like climbing a mountain — during the plains phase, rest and enjoy the scenery, but when going up, hold firm to the goal and climb hard. Then you can enjoy the view from the peak.
What’s called “store force against the wind, ride the surge with the wind.”

I hope I can convert my bit of talent into a vigorous flame, throw it into Opus’s big fire.

(VI)

A really fun feeling at work recently comes from speaking English.
Yes, speak English.
Even though it’s a startup team, our colleagues come from various countries and regions.
Everyone speaks the same English in different accents.

Hot tip: when two friends communicate in English, the one with better English is actually the one straining more.
Because their English is more standard, the friend on the other side understands more easily,
but the friend’s brain doesn’t track tenses or word-forms — more relies on hearing for understanding.
Secret thanks to my colleagues — my smooth English communication is entirely thanks to their powerful listening.

Besides language ability, English is more direct in semantics than Chinese,
this feels especially clear to me.
For example when giving a technical opinion, in Chinese by default I’d euphemistically express “that might be better.”
But in English I’d more bluntly say “No, I don’t recommend to do this.”
More direct semantics brings clearer viewpoints,
this really is closer to the “adult culture” in Netflix culture.

(VII)

Outside of work time, I’ve also been quite into exercise recently.
But given that for exercise, results matter more than process, I’ll wait till there are results before sharing :)

The debate of process vs result is always a fascinating topic,
whether it’s the ending of Mia & Sebastian, the justice debate of Joker & Batman, or even the lockdown & opening-up debate,
all are worth seriously experiencing and appraising.

The most precious possession a person has is time. Time is also wasted equally on each person.
From this point, people are destined to be long-term-ists.

Of course, that’s another article. Hope my future articles are more nutritious and more cute than this one :)

(end)

One Year of Cycling

Mon, 16 Oct 2023 20:09:04 +0800

Over the past year,
I’ve cycled 1000+ km.
Cycling is lonely,
but loneliness is also beautiful.

The Trigger

Back in middle school, I’d often cycle to the neighboring town on weekends to hang out with my girlfriend.
The 5km in memory was a journey of dust flying, wildflowers thriving, time flying.

Later in college I also bought a bike at the small grove bike shop.
I carried my roommate Yuxiang more times than my girlfriend.
But in those years there were many bikes and bad locks,
during my four years of college I lost four bikes in a row.
Later when I went back to school and lamented to the underclassmen “bikes were easy to lose on campus,”
from their puzzled eyes,
I saw the gap of eras.
This is shared bikes — the new era’s economy thoroughly impacting the old era’s culture.
Of course, losing bikes isn’t a good piece of old-era culture, not worth missing at all.

After graduating from college, I settled in as a sunshine homebody,
maintaining a high-calorie lifestyle through high metabolism, never seriously exercising again.
—— Until the happy lockdown life of ‘22 lifted me to 80kg.

Maybe found a suitable reason for my exercise persona transformation?
Thinking this, I went to Decathlon for a stroll,
and ordered a road bike online: Decathlon RC100.

Logistics

Cycling is like running, it’s a sport (this sentence is useless).
Cycling differs from running, it needs more logistics work.

The most important thing for cycling is — you need a bike.
There are two common types: road bikes and mountain bikes.
Road bikes generally have drop bars and thin tires, suitable for paved-road cycling,
perfectly fitting urban commuting, morning rides, night rides, and coffee rides.
Mountain bikes generally have flat bars and thick tires, with good shock absorption, suitable for cycling in complex conditions,
very suitable for mountain trails, grasslands, and loaded cycling.
1000+ yuan can buy you a bike with gears that’s pretty good in every aspect.
But if calculated by three-minute enthusiasm, every minute costs several hundred yuan, that’s not cheap.
So in the month before I decided to buy a bike, I rode shared bikes for 30 days:
I had to prove to myself the decision was sustainable.

Besides the bike, the most important equipment is a helmet.
A helmet is somewhat like life insurance:
you don’t hope it’ll come into play,
but when buying you always want to calculate the “ROI.”
In this year’s cycling journey,
besides suppressing my exploding hair,
my helmet played no actual role.
This satisfies me greatly.

The remaining logistics prep roughly falls into three categories: protection, data, consumables.

Protective gear includes gloves, quick-dry clothing, cycling shorts, knee pads, long socks.
These scattered peripherals I acquired one by one along my cycling journey.
Because in actual cycling, I actually experienced hand pain, lots of sweat, ball pain, falls, slippery feet.
Everyone’s actual cycling experience is different.
You either learn to endure, or improve logistics.

Data prep includes scales, fitness bands, cycle computers, heart rate monitors, cadence sensors, etc.
The most exciting was the scale: “I’ve started cycling, you should at least take a few jin off me, right?”
The scale honestly told me: “Your weight hasn’t changed.”
(Cycling really can’t reduce weight, eating less can)
Data is the most honest partner.
Without data, I could only feel I was a noob.
With data, I could quantitatively see how noob I was.

Consumables include but aren’t limited to inner tubes, bananas, sports drinks, etc.
During cycling Suzhou, I tried to count my consumption:
roughly 8L of Kang Shifu iced tea per 100km.

Including the bike, the money spent on cycling this year is around 5000+ yuan.
The money I used to spend on mobile game wives has basically gone to myself this year.

The cycling community, like the PC-building community, also has price-comparison gear-snobs.
But cycling is like running too: the biggest bottleneck is always the rider themselves.

Routes

With the logistics not yet in place,
I impatiently started cycling.
—— Even before the bike I bought online arrived,
I first put on the helmet,
got on a shared bike,
and rode along the routes I’d researched, between work and home.

The route I rode most often back then was from People’s Square (Huangpu District) to Sixth People’s Hospital (Xuhui District),
10km one way, 30+ traffic lights (…), the whole journey about 50 minutes, about 30 minutes excluding stops.

From my personal feel,
20km a day is a very suitable cycling distance:
there’s a certain amount, but not tiring, no need to change clothes specifically, if it’s raining or you have a formal client meeting you can skip cycling.
Commute time is controllable. Only a few dozen minutes more than the subway, but the gain is the experience of going to work facing the sunshine.

The biggest challenge for the work commute is road conditions.
City commute is generally equivalent to being cut off by delivery guys, blocked by illegally parked cars, cut in by pedestrians.
The core is to remember one line: the weak have the moral high ground, but the weak die first.
In any case, hope everyone — walking, cycling, driving — pays attention to safety.

For weekend cycling routes there are many choices.
My two favorite routes are the Longteng Avenue round-trip and the Huangpu River loop.

Longteng Avenue round trip — route goes from the Long Museum to Xupu Bridge.
A round trip is about 14km, a place cycling groups like to go for morning rides.
At 5am, the Xuhui waterfront’s lake surface reflects light golden sunlight.
The morning mist hits each rider’s legs working up the slope.
The neat sound of drums made by the morning ride group turning at intersections is also part of this picture.

The Huangpu River loop is a more leisurely route.
Shanghai has placed many ferry crossings along the Huangpu.
From Sanlin Road ferry to Pudong, all the way to Dongchang Road ferry back to Puxi, is a route I like.
If departing in the early morning, the road is sparsely populated, with occasional cycling clubs riding along together.
One time leaving in the evening, suddenly a downpour — I hid in the storm under the glowing belly of Nanpu Bridge.
The raindrops along with the music in my headphones blended the whole world into the same rhythm.

Like this, non-daily experiences make the daily extra beautiful.

Experience

Over a year of cycling, besides side effects like learning bike repair and reducing fat,
my happiest finding is discovering my “destined sport”:
if there’s a Valhalla with me in it, I’m probably closer to the Rider job class.

Life lies in experience, experience produces memories, memories are happiness, and happiness is life’s beautiful future.

Cycling past Qibao, a dark shadow suddenly swept past in the bright sunshine.
I was stunned for a few seconds before realizing: an airplane’s shadow had just swept across my shoulder.
On the way pedaling back to Minhang, at a red light, a kid sitting backwards on his mom’s motorbike curiously looked at me.
Though I was tightly covered, I tried hard to smile at him, gave him a thumbs up, hoping he’d grow up tall and well.
One morning on the Huangpu River loop, again a sudden rain. A stranger cyclist friend and I hid under an awning chatting for half an hour,
rode half the way together, exchanged WeChat, he invited me to a cycling group, where I met more friends.
Coming back from Suzhou, at a roadside rest station I tiredly stopped.
The waitress-girl was very thoughtful and brought me a small stool, gesturing for me to sit and rest a while.

Overall, cycling is just this kind of ordinary sport:

Needs investment, but no need to compare.
Can’t lose weight, but easy to start.
The journey is lonely, but the world is big.

In the time ahead,
I plan to try the 200km one-day Shanghai-Hangzhou challenge.
If possible, later try Tibet cycling, around-Taiwan-island, cycling in various parts of the world.
But to be fair, it’s still early.
Let me start with commuting~

(end)

My Mom Su Lin

Thu, 17 Aug 2023 22:06:52 +0800

My mom is called Su Lin.
She also has a younger brother and a younger sister,
whose names are “Nong” and “Jing,”
all these names are strong and resonant,
probably all chosen by my grandpa.

I often chat with my mom about her childhood.
In the scattered fragments of memory,
she’s told me from pre-Republican times to my childhood.
I learned that my grandpa’s grandfather did business in Hunan long ago,
and also heard how my mom, born in 1968, lived her ordinary life with great relish.

Hunan’s weather isn’t very different from Shanghai’s.
Last year Shanghai got a stretch of snow,
my mom lamented on a voice call:
when she was my age (around 30),
she experienced taking her mother and son south by train on a snowy day,
meeting my dad who had gone ahead with the move in Guangdong,
ultimately the two of them settled in Guangdong,
and taught school there for thirty years.

“Time really does pass fast!”
Teacher Su Lin lamented.
Then she added a line for me:
“Feels like you grew up in a flash.”

By now my childhood memories have gradually faded,
but the stories parents told me when I was little are hard to forget.
One scene is engraved on my heart:
after finishing homework in elementary school, my mom would hold “The Legend of Yue Fei” and read me a passage.
This kind of “interactive storytelling” where I could listen and ask became something I eagerly looked forward to.
After that, even though I never reread that book,
the figures of Yue Fei’s mother, Niu Gao, Wuzhu, Yue Yun all etched into my mind along with mom’s words.

A while ago I recalled this old story,
and asked my mom to verify: “Why do I remember you reading me one book?”
Teacher Su Lin helplessly told me the truth:
at the time because I didn’t know many characters,
and she disdained the dumbed-down phonetic children’s readers,
she tried reading me a passage,
and didn’t expect a year became most of a year.
Later, seeing I could half-understand and read on my own,
she let me go read by myself.

Teacher Su Lin takes full responsibility for her son’s education,
which is something she’s quite proud of, with strong sense of accomplishment.
After starting work, I also experienced a similar feeling:
as a programmer, I take full responsibility for the home’s computers and network,
which also makes me quite proud, with strong sense of accomplishment.

Teacher Su Lin teaches middle school history.
When the teaching workload at school was heavy,
she also moonlighted as a Chinese, English, or geography teacher.
Later under the school’s arrangement,
she takes on the history group leader and graduating class teacher roles every year.
I only then realized,
not all teachers teach the same class for three years.
Rare good teachers, it turns out, teach a different class each year.

Besides excellent professional ability, Teacher Su Lin is also very popular with students.
Not only does she get voted Most Popular Teacher every year,
when Teacher Su Lin goes shopping at the supermarket she gets enthusiastically recognized by students who graduated more than a decade ago.
This year in the graduating class,
students heard rumors that she was retiring,
and were very shocked, going to verify with Teacher Su Lin.
But she teased the students: “I haven’t retired this year, remember to come back to school to see your teacher after graduation!”

Teacher Su Lin is also one of the earliest netizens.
Her name on forums is “Qing Xia,”
with many online friends she’s known for over ten years.
At first I curiously asked her: “What is this forum for?”
“It’s for online friends to exchange seeds.”
I was shocked: “Exchange seeds?!?”

Yes, Qing Xia is a member of a local gardening forum.
She made a vegetable-growing space at home.
This patch of ground grows cucumbers, loofahs, pumpkins,
that patch of ground grows mangoes, dragon fruits, cherry tomatoes,
and in the dozens of flowerpots at the corner,
there are jasmine, baby’s breath, croton, nasturtium and other colorful flowers…

The gardening forum occasionally holds offline flower-friend meetups.
Qing Xia, carrying flower seeds, jumped from online to offline.
Meeting spots are usually local parks,
flower friends also bring fruits and local specialties,
and there are flower friends driving in from other places to participate in this grand event.
Qing Xia coming back from the flower friend meeting not only brings fresh seeds,
but also tells her son about newly met friends and new things.

Later every time I see “Chinese people have built-in vegetable-growing genes,”
I always have some doubts and expectations.
Both feeling this saying doesn’t seem made up,
and not knowing when that part of my gene will awaken.

After my grandpa retired he also became addicted to fishing and growing vegetables.
When obsessed, every morning at 5am he had to go out to hoe the field.
Later his health wasn’t good and he stayed home enjoying tranquility.
My mom then picked some vegetables suitable for balcony growing for grandpa,
letting him cultivate a big world in a small garden.

People around all know Teacher Su Lin is a plant master.
When going hiking before,
friends would often ask her: “Teacher Su, what flower is this? What tree is this? What plant is this?”
I also often ask her this.
She answered the same questions many times,
seeing that I really don’t get it and have no memory,
she sincerely taught me: “You can download a Baidu app, the homepage has photo-recognition function, very useful.”
Now when I see flowers and grass on the roadside,
my curiosity gets a little restless.

As you can read between the lines,
Teacher Su Lin has blooming curiosity and desire to learn.
For example, she always agonizes over correct Chinese pronunciation,
when encountering uncommon characters she’ll definitely check the correct reading on the spot,
and will also correct mine and my dad’s wrong pronunciations,
even though we no longer have to take Chinese language tests.
This probably greatly influenced me too,
along with my prickliness when I hear coupon “juan” or threshold “fa” mispronounced.

My mom turned 55 this year and is retiring.
Whether counted by lunar birthday on the 4th of the 7th month,
or by ID-card birthday of August 22,
this is the last summer break she’ll have.
She also finally made up her mind
to drag my dad to Tibet for a graduation trip.

In her whole life I’ve only seen a few times Ms. Su Lin had places she really wanted to go.
In 2008, she nearly signed up for a teaching support team to Sichuan, leaving home.
But with her child around, hard to travel far.
In the dozen years since, she’s been looking forward to going to Tibet.
This time she finally got to travel smoothly without serious altitude sickness.
I’m happy for her.

Since I was born, mom has been the figure of “mom.”
But I always feel, as Teacher Su Lin, mom also has a very unrestrained side.

The person who understands my mom best is my dad,
and his evaluation of her is:
your mom is a person with inner beauty.
This line is shockingly consistent with Qu Yuan’s self-evaluation:
“I have inherent inner beauty, and add to it cultivated talent.”

In the past searching “Su Lin” online,
the first result was the first giant panda sent to America, also named Su Lin.
I hope from now on, Teacher Su Lin can also live, alongside this article,
in some corner of the internet with an unrestrained image,
just as Qing Xia once was active on some flower friend forum.
Her retirement days
will surely, like her students and the people she’s influenced,
live the ordinary life with great relish.

This is my mom,
Teacher Su Lin.

This Year Working at DataRC

Tue, 28 Feb 2023 22:09:15 +0800

While having dinner with Yuxuan,
I suddenly realized it’s been a full year since I came to DataRC.
At the one-year mark at Zaihui,
I wrote 《My Work》.
Today might be a suitable time to write down something.

Introduction

When Zhiyuan had just joined DataRC,
she often lamented to me: “I really love our DataRC, it suits my taste so well!”
I always comforted her: “The first six months are always fresh. Lasting affection is the best confession to a company.”

Sharing the fresh period myself,
last year I often had the urge to write something about work,
but pressed it down by myself.

A year in, the enthusiasm has slightly faded, but the fervor remains.
Looking back today,
I can share some insights and feelings from the perspectives of entrepreneurial mindset, changing environment, and continuous reflection.

Entrepreneurial Mindset

Starting again from the initial stage,
I can finally confidently say:
I really like working at a startup-style company.

Innovation

Since my company works in a new direction in the industry,
many functional implementations and product experiences must be done by groping along with no one to follow.
Even more, as a first-mover, others grope along with us.
Of course in the end it’s still a product function-experience competition.

In 2022 I participated in several projects
that had only a handful of competing products globally in the industry,
and even some had pioneering features.
Later when customers praised the product,
I was as happy as watching my child get into Fudan.

But there were also plenty of bitter moments.
We had many requirements docs stillborn in the womb,
technical implementations dying halfway,
product features urgently needing optimization under market validation.

Startups doing innovation
is like using limited energy and resources,
plus unlimited wisdom and courage,
to face super-limited difficulties and unknowns.

Fulfillment

After working for a few years,
my peers basically know clearly what they want.
Those who wanted to lie flat went back home,
those who wanted stability entered big companies (those who entered a few years ago),
and I am full with dreams alone.

People still have to do things, not doing things doesn’t work.
—— my grandma

Doing things at DataRC features fulfillment.
Our work mode is bimonthly OKR + weekly iteration,
no Tech Leads who don’t write code,
nor have I seen Tech Leads who don’t love writing code.

When I just started working I was influenced by the Work Hard, Play Hard. culture.
Today I am indeed immersed in this happy fulfilled state.

When friends discuss when to retire early,
I, who proclaim “I hope to keep working happily,”
am like a cute oddity,
hanging out happily with everyone.

I’ve always believed work is part of life.
Because I love it, fulfillment is happiness.

Like-minded People

There’s a saying: “Not afraid of others being smart, not afraid of others being hardworking, just afraid of others being smarter AND more hardworking than you.”
(Another real-life version is rich and handsome)

After splitting up technical research with the frontend dev on Friday,
on Monday she said “I had nothing to do over the weekend, so I mostly finished my part…”
Being able to have teammates who learn tech in their spare time
is truly very blessed.

Teammates also have relatively consistent good taste in tech,
things like keeping latest version dependencies, unit test coverage, clean commit history, and strict code style,
these best practices have also integrated into everyone’s coding daily life,
which makes me with a bit of tech OCD feel very comfortable.

This year a few teammates I liked also left,
Andrew went to the US,
Eva chased after JJ Lin,
Zhiyi is walking her Shiba Inu.
This year I also became partners with more like-minded friends,
to avoid favoritism, I won’t name them additionally :)

👆 Magically, the wish worked. Within a month one was indeed granted.

But this is also the beautiful part of life:
no one can predict who they’ll meet again at the next corner.

Changing Environment

When I just graduated,
listening to the boss talk about big-environment trends,
listening to seniors talk about industry transformation,
always had a “scratching an itch through a boot” feeling.
But now with broader vision,
I have a more personal understanding of “individual struggle and the wheels of history.”

Economic Situation

The biggest process affecting today’s world is the de facto decoupling of China and the US,
behind which are the respective economic difficulties of China and the US.

One aspect of the impact is the uncertainty theme in the VUCA era.
Including individuals having different judgments about future money-making forms,
leading to different talent destinations.
Also including capital shifting from rate-of-return to profit-rate,
leading to changes in overall financing and investment environment winds.

Another aspect of the impact is companies being more tightly bound to international politics.
Quite a few foreign companies have gradually withdrawn from China.
Domestically there’s a very strong demand for specialized/refined/peculiar/novel, IT-innovation industries, etc.
Because my company is an IT-innovation company with proprietary core patents,
this year, after explaining the product to many customers,
not only did the functionality itself receive great feedback,
but also as a solidly-product-building IT-innovation company we received great reviews.

I hadn’t dealt with many Fortune 500 level large customers before,
but last year I quickly got into the groove,
genuinely thanks to the awesome sales partners who took me around to customers.

Industry Trends

The biggest trend in the data industry is everyone is racing to lower the barrier.

Just like from DOTA to LoL to Honor of Kings,
the operational barrier is lowering,
but the player count has greatly increased,
affecting more people’s entertainment lifestyle.

Data analysis used to only be doable by people who understood SQL or Python.
Later drag-and-drop BIs like Tableau and FineReport appeared,
people who understand data formats and relationships could make reports.
And what DataRC does is semantic data analysis.
The homepage is a chat box. If you can chat, you can analyze data.

Recently ChatGPT became hot again,
this time more viral,
giving the industry trend a big push forward.
Previously we might need to educate the market on what “semantic-enhanced analysis” is.
Now we often encounter very knowledgeable customers we can engage with deeply.

Work Culture

Culture is a product of era and soil.
So it is for work.

Pushing work forward requires culture.

When I started working at DataRC,
I set a rule for myself:
“No mental fixations, no path dependency.”
Specifically, I can’t say anything like
“At my previous company everything was on k8s”
or “We used to keep backend functions forward-compatible.”
On one hand it smacks of praising the ex in front of the current girlfriend: bad intentions.
On the other hand, you can’t paint a gourd by following the model: be truth-seeking.
So when pushing tech decisions and organizing requirements,
I prefer the rhythm of pre-research, discussion, consensus, execution.
Compared to directly driving “how to do it,”
letting everyone understand “why” is more important.

Team communication requires culture.

Different people have different ways due to different backgrounds and angles.
I’ve always been uncomfortable seeing people argue.
If people have heated conflicting views in meetings,
I always want to suggest first establishing consensus,
then privately and gently (or not necessarily gently) discussing.
But this year I often discovered in meetings,
a few teammates arguing back and forth also reached a consensus,
and in the process fully expressed their own views,
and at noon they go arm-in-arm to eat rice bowls…
Indeed, different people in the team adapt to different communication styles.

You also have to adapt to changes of the era.

Each era has its own “political correctness.”
In today’s work culture,
“want salary, want development more” is more openly promotable than “taking a loss is taking advantage,”
“moderate work, appropriate lying flat” also has a more mainstream ideological position than “hard work, strive.”
So under this background, “result-oriented,” “humanity,” “strict with self” are the most basic requirements for doing things well.

Era change is accompanied by cultural change,
cultural change demands changes in organizational form.

Even though it’s written somewhat abstractly,
this is really my recent understanding of the world.
Looking at it, I really do practice my motto:
“Think idealistically, live materialistically.”

Continuous Reflection

I’m not satisfied with this subtitle.
The “的”/“地” particles look like they’re wrong in Chinese,
but what I want to talk about really is continuous reflection.

All along I’ve had a great fear:
worried about becoming a “1+N years of work experience” person:
only learning and thinking in year one of work,
and mechanically repeating in the remaining N years.

And my current work has presented me with new challenges:
“Avoid being someone who’s tactically diligent but strategically lazy.”

For example we make a product.
It seems there are tons of things to do,
countless features waiting to be done.
But without deep thinking,
you’ll fall into the trap of being busy doing things
that actually aren’t critical to the customer.

“Following the crowd,” “going with the flow,” “the three-no principle” (no initiative, no resistance, no responsibility) —
in my eyes are all bad cases of “tactically diligent, strategically lazy.”

In any case, people still need to study more.

Conclusion

Stepping on a watermelon skin, sliding to wherever I land.
Writing all this way, I’ve also forgotten what I was going to say.
Then let me end with a small interesting story.

A year ago “DataRC” was not called “DataRC.”
At the time the name was still “Arctic Data.”
By 2022, this company named “Arctic Data” had been founded for over three years,
but the founders, intoxicated with product development, actually forgot to apply for a trademark.
So they could only ride the wave and rename to “DataRC” to complete a brand upgrade.

“DataRC” combines “Arctic” from “iceberg theory” and “RC” for “Nine Chapters” (jiuzhang) of arithmetic.
But I personally think,
maybe the name also comes from the founder Allen’s particular fondness for 🐻 this animal,
plus “Nine Chapters of Chuci” — that beautiful piece of literary text.

Finally, hope everyone can be like a potato,
issuing this Chuci-style lament to oneself in the new year: “I have inherent beauty within, and add to it cultivated talent.”

(end)

Random Thoughts · Where You Sit Decides How You Think

Mon, 26 Sep 2022 20:00:36 +0800

People value continuity.
Even if their words don’t match up,
I always thought this in my heart.
But when the day comes that I notice my thinking has diverged from the old me,
I’m also a bit emotional.

(I) Hiring Standards

I often share interesting hiring stories with friends.
There’s one I used to really like telling.

At the time the company was interviewing backend engineers,
using multi-round interviews and a one-vote-veto hiring system.
I often served as the first round interviewer.
One day, after I finished talking with a returnee referred by a colleague,
I happily told my teammates: “This candidate is good, might be teammate+1!”
But an hour later, the second-round interviewer came out with a difficult face: “This candidate isn’t great, I passed.”
After sending the candidate away, everyone asked the interviewer why. He recounted this scene:

After discussing topics like computer networking, databases, servers,
the interviewer asked: “Can you tell me the most successful thing you did at your last company?”
The candidate happily took the floor:
“Of course! My last company did clothing wholesale. At the time the company’s logistics costs were high because clothes take up a lot of volume.
Later I discovered we could use vacuum packaging, reducing the clothing volume without compromising clothing quality!
In the end it saved the company over a million dollars!”

Every time I finished telling this interview story,
my listening friends would fall into silence,
then ask: “But what does this have to do with a backend engineer?”
We’d burst into laughter together: “Right, that’s just an inappropriate interview strategy.”

But somewhere along the way,
the scene of laughing along after telling the story often surfaced in my mind,
and the recollection emanating from this scene faintly pricks at me.

Later I never told this story to new friends again.
As an interviewer I also became more patient.
In the past as a pure technical interviewer, I’d first require the candidate to write good code.
But now as an interviewer, I care more about the candidate’s ability to solve things.
If they give an off-topic answer,
I’d ask one more question: “Could you share the impact of this on your career?”

When we talk about hiring standards,
hiring a teammate is really different from hiring a player.

(II) Company Systems

A topic I’ve thought about a lot this year is remote work.
After much thought, I discovered that I am completely double-standard:
“As boss, I’m unwilling to push for flexible remote work policy.
As employee, I hope the company pushes for flexible remote work policy.”

Simple logical thinking is as follows:

Only people with strong self-discipline don’t lose efficiency from remote work. If self-discipline is poor, remote work loses efficiency.
Unless specifically tested in the hiring process, employees’ self-discipline follows a normal distribution.
High self-discipline and high productivity are not strongly correlated attributes.

So this question leads to the conclusion:
To push for remote work, either rely on employee self-discipline, or accept efficiency loss.
And we clearly know, at-work two-choice answers are often all-of-the-above:
To push for remote work, you both rely on employee self-discipline, and accept some efficiency loss.

Issues like these, along with
“to prevent tissues from being taken empty, change the tissue free-take policy to one pack per person per week,”
“unlimited annual leave, but because someone really took a continuous month off, change to the legal five days per year” —
are not only human nature problems, but also profit-maximization problems and temperature-dividing problems.

Company systems may eventually all fall back to the moderate-but-correct common denominator.

(III) Striving Attitude

Sometimes compared to personal ideological shifts,
the group’s discourse shift is even more intriguing.

Public opinion about work itself is constantly shifting.
From “supporting and promoting wolf culture” to “guarding against the bloodsucking 996 capital” is only a few years apart.
But among the masses riding the waves of both sides of public opinion,
how many people have really thought about their own career, stage, perseverance, uniqueness, hardships, and achievements?
Among those people, even fewer can stick to independent thinking and walk a path without regrets.
——《What I Say, What I Know, What I Do》

After lying-flat-ism led the trend,
nowadays I’m seeing more and more different voices on the internet:
“You say lie flat, but did you, the OP, actually lie flat?”
“996 really is a blessing — at least you still have a job.”
The pessimism that leaks through these words
shows the collective ideological current influenced by the larger trend.
This is perhaps a cycle.

Another interesting thing is, now I find it hard to advise others to work hard.
When I just started working, I was happy on one hand, and on the other in my 2018 OKR wrote “the reward of work is work itself.”
By today, I’m seen as “the capable senior,” and I’ve tasted the wonderful flavor of “the reward of work is work itself,”
but I can’t say such words with a red face.

Youth urging onward — that’s vitality.
Middle age urging onward — that’s slime.

(IV) Coding

Even coding gets influenced by perspective.

Among countless website personal signatures,
my favorite is the introduction I left on GitHub:

Lirian Su:
This is a vimer, a pythonista, a gopher
and a business man on the way.
Code for life rather than code for work.
Wubba lubba dub dub.

But as my capability and scope of responsibility expanded,
product, operations, and business were also placed in front of me:
the success of a cause needs domain-specific means; tech is just one of them.
So the thinking of “all is lowly except coding” started to loosen,
gradually moving toward “engineers are people who solve problems.”

Now in the team,
if the bottleneck is tech, I do tech;
if the bottleneck is in product, I optimize product;
if the bottleneck is in compressing clothes for logistics,
I’ll look for a vacuum compression bag.

Writing to here, I can’t help but think of that guy from back then.
I hope he found a position he likes, doing what he loves,
and when talking about his successes, his eyes still shine.

(end)

The Neighbor Who Shouted Thirteen Times for Supplies

Mon, 11 Apr 2022 20:39:47 +0800

This time the pandemic put me in the eye of the storm in Shanghai.
Working from home also let me thoroughly understand the neighborhood situation.
The committee secretary lives in our building,
next door lives a family of three,
and downstairs is also a fanatical Daolang fan who plays music at max volume.
But none of this compares to that neighbor who shouted thirteen times for supplies.

The first shout came during the morning meeting.
The increasingly hot weather had me pushing open the window,
warm air carrying “Send supplies!” rushed into the room,
hitting the bewildered me.
For a moment I couldn’t tell if it was the joking of the Beijing meeting room in my headphones,
or the suppression of being locked down in Shanghai.

The second shout followed close behind.
“I want supplies!” — one phrase with precise subject-verb-object expressing the demand.
The pandemic stripped away Maslow’s false prosperity,
making everyone confront the first level of needs head-on.
Mia said the recent situation often makes her think of “The Three-Body Problem.”
Maybe it’s this kind of feeling.

The third shout was no longer as forceful.
“Supplies…” the trailing sound gradually dissipated in the wind.
April brought your shout,
but Cao Gui doesn’t lie — by the third [drum beat], it’s spent.

The fourth and fifth shouts came after a while.
“Where are the supplies? Send supplies!” — six words mixed with reluctance, indignation, defiance,
two punctuation marks combining question, rhetorical question, and inquisitive setup.
The whole neighborhood was simultaneously in the daytime noise,
and in the silence set off by the shouts.
Maybe others also like me
posted on WeChat “Lmao, someone next door is shouting for supplies,”
playing the role of a complex-moodied onlooker.

The seventh and eighth shouts came very unexpectedly.
After laughing, I thought I could return to normal online work.
But to my surprise the neighbor seemed to have pulled out a metal basin,
banging while shouting: “Send supplies! Bang bang bang! Send supplies! Bang bang bang!”
As if the metal basin used for washing vegetables had been given a temporary heavy responsibility,
it gathered its spirit and lived up to expectations, producing an ear-splitting sound.

The ninth shout was slightly gentler.
Maybe the sound of banging the basin also bothered his own ears,
the neighbor stopped his hand, but didn’t close his mouth.
“Supplies!” — the shout of these two words pierced through my eardrums straight to my soul.
I couldn’t help but think, luckily we successfully grabbed vegetables, the company helped,
so we don’t have to experience in 2022 the hardships parents talked about from childhood.

The tenth shout didn’t come for a long time.
Our neighborhood has five or six high-rise tower buildings,
each building has one or two thousand residents.
During the pandemic everyone is rare in cooking at home concentrated.
If you really run out of vegetables,
you can use the smell of the neighbor’s stir-fried carrots to flavor your rice.
I joked this way with Mia.
Maybe the cooking fumes at noon covered this shout.
This “Send supplies” was consciously missed by everyone.

The eleventh and twelfth shouts came with a trace of sarcasm.
“Are there supplies? Are you sending supplies!” Two exclamation-question sentences vented a month of emotions.
I, sitting by the window, also stood up,
wanting to use the binaural effect to find where this guy actually was.
But finding a once-spoken sentence is like recovering a basin of spilled water,
there’s memory, there’s the scene, but no possibility, no method,
just like many people’s love ends this way,
behind comedy is tragedy, behind tragedy is also comedy,
life is a Möbius strip,
there are always people who hear a word and misuse it…

In the chaotic emotions, I seemed to hear the thirteenth shout,
again “I want supplies!” — this simple, blunt, but hopeless demand.
But I also seemed not to hear this shout.
On reflection,
in this month of lockdown, besides one supply distribution,
the rest of the time I could only rely on my own hands to grab vegetables, meat, eggs, milk.

Let this guy shout.
I hope he has food and drink.
Thinking this, I stood up and closed the window.

(end)

Five Things Zaihui Taught Me

Thu, 24 Feb 2022 18:00:00 +0800

A while ago I lamented to Brother Yang
that this stretch at Zaihui has been a very precious treasure for me.
Today might be a suitable day —
let me pick out a few,
and share the brightest gems among them with everyone.

This article is suitable to accompany with Daft Punk’s “Veridis Quo” as background music,
so you can obtain a mindset similar to mine when writing.

Work, While Living

After graduation, when I encountered the two-points-one-line work-life cycle,
a question always lingered in my heart:
“Even though everyone says Work Life Balance,
what kind of Work Life Balance do I actually like?”

Later I discovered the state I like is just: working, while living.

After joining Zaihui, one day going home I excitedly lamented to Mia:
“Zaihui teammates are people like me!
They watch anime and play games, and write code on weekends too!”

Living in Tangqiao, I quickly made friends,
forming the “Line 4 Four Heroes” with Jinming, Zhongyin, and Xufeng.
Whether on the way to work or back,
we’d mock Python/Javascript for which is worse,
while also flattering each other for having learned 30% of Liao Xuefeng’s or Yuyuxi’s powers,
sometimes also chatting about how badly we wanted to buy Nintendo’s new Switch.

When projects were busy we’d also work overtime on Saturdays.
Some teammates looked forward to the overtime meals,
some looked forward to the Texas Hold’em battles betting on bubble tea after the work was done.

In such an environment, work and life have no hard-coded boundary.
Everyone is both work colleagues
and friends in life.
We also call each other partners.
Some partners’ chemistry went over the top and developed into couples.
Just around me alone there were 10+ couples (I always feel something’s wrong somewhere).

Everyone doesn’t see the company as “the boss’s company,”
but as “our company.”
People holding the same vision
also don’t hesitate when doing things.
At a bar team-building outing,
one partner enthusiastically recommended to the bar owner the ordering machine we developed.
Of course he righteously denied our suspicion about his motives.

For me,
work itself is life.
Doing what you love with the people you love,
this is the best Work Life Balance.

Plan for the Post, Be in the Post

Confucius said: not in the post, don’t plan for its affairs.
But on my path of upgrading from frontline developer to Leader,
what I felt most deeply is the “converse theorem” of this saying:
plan for the post, be in the post.

Some workplace partners face this expectation gap:
“Should you raise my salary first, then I do more things?
Or should I contribute more first, then ask for a raise?”
This dilemma is very common.
I always choose to take on more responsibility first.

To put it small, promotions and raises need reasons or excuses.
To put it big, the path of entrepreneurship is first finding a path in uncertainty,
then generating creative value.

When the ordering machine business hadn’t yet recruited a Windows developer partner,
I picked up just-learned C# and got to work.
When the community business needed user accumulation from zero to one,
I dragged the ground-promotion folks to scan codes and add people.
When team-dividing projects lacked a responsible person,
the first to raise a hand and volunteer was always me too.

Rights and obligations are always co-occurring,
no need to overly care about their order.

Maybe it’s related to different companies.
Zaihui is not stingy with rewards for partners who put in effort and produce results.
Maybe it’s also related to different people’s dispositions.
Mia will later become “a free and useless soul,”
but my mark will probably always be “having chosen SJTU is having chosen responsibility…”

Be Flexible, Stand Firm

Before working, hearing the four words “embrace change,”
I had no personal feel for it.
Only after working did I understand the weight of these four words.

At Zaihui I switched through several teams,
personally informed my best friend that he was fired,
went through the disbanding of an entire business unit,
also saw acclimatization-failed executives parachute in and swiftly retreat.

Each time I’d think of the grass that’s unaffected after a typhoon passes:
be flexible, stand firm.

Being flexible means not being proud, not being complacent.
After CTO Brother Hua was poached from Baidu to Zaihui,
he didn’t grab a hammer to find nails and Baidu-ify all the processes.
In the end he used Zaihui’s way,
combining production and sales,
to push forward the product technology most suitable for the business.

Being flexible also means not yielding, not despairing, not giving up.
When pushing for higher code standards and stricter coding rules,
at first no one knew where to start,
the shit-mountain bad habits were too heavy to push through,
but later every member of the team agreed with and achieved the high standards.

Whether stepping out of the comfort zone to greet change,
or trying to introduce a catfish to create change,
the best way to embrace change is to face it with a smile.

Endure Patience, Resist Doggedly

To do things well requires enduring patience and resisting doggedly,
just like the spring-engineer often tells us:
“The turtle won the long-distance race.”

Zaihui is in the local services industry,
which puts great emphasis on customer service quality.
The high-quality service provided to customers
comes from each service being continuously high quality.

This occasionally brings me the fatigue caused by energy depletion,
but more often, thinking about partners like Ergou recording outreach marketing all day Saturday,
I quickly get infected by each other’s fighting spirit. ~~(Can’t lose to Ergou, right?)~~

Even in the technical realm of engineering,
continuous brick-laying is needed.
Our earliest manual code-pull deployment
developed into today’s fully automated debug-deploy-alert workflow,
all the ideas were forged from one commit after another over six years.

People get excited about one-and-done gacha pulls,
but day-and-night cultivation is my joy.

Where’s the Road? Under Your Feet

Mia and I jokingly call ourselves “Mi Boys”:
my favorite is Mia, what I play is miHoYo, what I use are Xiaomi (mi) products.
Half of my knowledge of Xiaomi comes from Lei Jun,
and half of my knowledge of Lei Jun comes from “Are You OK”…

When we can lead the direction of our cause,
the question we definitely ask ourselves is: “Where’s the road?”
The answer at this moment is “Under your feet”:
no matter what others say, just let go and do it.

For example, before the grayscale release on the main site,
internal discussion always had various worries that current traffic isn’t large,
the traffic path hasn’t been governed.
But once we actually did it,
we discovered that grayscale really can effectively control the scope of impact,
but also raises new requirements for code compatibility.

It’s the same in the workplace.
Judgments about work and positions are like Little Horse Crossing the River:
only it knows whether the camel carries salt or sponge,
how deep the water is can only be known by walking across,
the real road is one you walk out with your own two feet.

More choices often aren’t happiness.
What they may bring is more worries.
Just like Ashina Isshin taught:

“Hesitation is defeat.”

— Ashina Isshin

(end)

2021, My Weibo Is Gone

Sun, 16 Jan 2022 19:52:27 +0800

One day at year’s end,
I routinely logged into Weibo,
and received a punishment notification:
@Floating Cloud Weibo is gone?

Got Censored

For me,
on one hand this was expected.
The reliability of internet services
is like the experience Baidu Space gave me.
On the other hand it was sad,
because over ten years of heartfelt words I didn’t post on WeChat Moments
all stayed in Weibo,
and it held my chains of online relationships with people I’ve never met in person.

I tried to appeal. Weibo sent me an email, the gist was:
“After our review, your Weibo is too dirty, so it’s banned. (Note: can never be unbanned)”

This left me very headachy.
I both wanted my account back,
and didn’t want to be forced to admit I’m not pure.

After friends learned my appeal was useless,
they all expressed indignation for me,
and asked me to show what I had actually posted.

I was helpless, I just had them follow Heye.
Only my anti-going-viral declaration may need to be restated:

Writing to here,
I decided to hold a small funeral for Weibo.
The contents of the funeral are my random thoughts of 2021.

Finished the Exam

The fathers’ generation has more siblings than ours,
which is probably why they can enjoy family warmth more than us.

At the start of the year I was inspired by my aunt’s husband’s (whom I call “uncle”) friend to “buy a diploma,”
so at year’s end Mia and I took the national exam together.

The interview went smoothly. The written exam went numb.

Because I haven’t been in the interviewee position for a long time,
going back to my alma mater for the interview felt especially disorienting.
There’s an extra tree here, an extra construction site there filling my pre-exam brain.

Like a conflicted Wen Yiduo,
sometimes I say without doing, do without saying,
but more often I speak first then do, doing while saying.

For me, wanting to start a business is like wanting to cross a river.
I know in the end I’ll be on the other side,
and understand there are many ways to cross.
But I also feel the journey is still long,
I can always wait a bit more.
“The advantage is on my side.”

Got to Work

Even in the software industry,
the past two years I’ve also felt the surging current from “anti-involution” to “anti-grind.”
Sometimes I feel this current is like a table of people having dinner together,
where the well-fed advise the malnourished “eat less unhealthy meat, eat more healthy vegetables.”

It’s like being carried by clouds, going along only because you’re floating.

I often feel many truths in the world are very obvious,
like the “labor is most glorious” I often heard when I was little,
or my grandpa’s mutterings of “work, then eat five bowls of rice.”

The moment of genius becomes the permanence of genius under daily persistence.

Ah, permanence.
Oh right, my favorite character in ‘21 was Raiden Shogun.

Got Stronger

At year-end, I lamented to Mia that none of my three goals were met.
Weight reached 145, books only read 10, investment returns at -8% (then to -20% after New Year…)
But I also comfort myself: “There’s nothing shameful about being weaker than you.”

We call each other’s companies “school”

Sometimes we discuss how other couples get along.
Comparing, we jokingly call ourselves “mutual competitors.”
After all, my behavior of secretly doing math problems at midnight before the entrance exam made Mia very disdainful.

Looking through 21-year self,
relativity is verified again:
past time always passes like a shuttle,
future time always drags on agonizingly.

People can’t live in the world uniquely.
Maybe in a thousand eyes there’s only one Hamlet,
maybe the mathematical expectation is five hundred plus,
or maybe a thousand.
But overall, Hamlet seems pretty similar to me,
also not lonely.

What's New in Python These Years

Thu, 21 Oct 2021 20:26:58 +0800

Recently we finally upgraded our whole stack to py39/go117.
While everyone was excited about Go’s new features,
@ackerr raised a very sharp question:
“What’s new in Python’s new versions?”

Yeah,
besides features like f-strings/dataclasses that everyone may already know,
what’s actually new in the new versions?

I used to read Dota minor version changelogs with great enjoyment.
Today I decide to chew through the update logs from py36 to py310 ~~(HOHO~~

All code snippets below can be executed in the latest Python 3.10.0 Repl.

What’s new in Python 3.6

Python 3.6 was released on 2016-12-23, officially maintained until 2021-12-23.
Some of the more impactful changes include:

# In string concatenation, support for f-strings' inline concatenation method
# Finally we can concatenate strings as conveniently as JS
name = "ackerr"
precision = 2
height = 183.2
assert f"{name} is {height:0.{precision}f}cm tall." == "ackerr is 183.20cm tall."

# In constant definitions, you can use underscores to improve readability
number = 3_735_928_559
magic = 0xDEAD_BEEF
assert number == magic

# In variable definitions, type annotations are supported
# Worth noting that Python is still not strongly typed, just written in this __annotations__ variable
import typing
numbers: typing.List[int] = [1,1,4,5,1,4]
complex_data: typing.Dict[int, typing.Set[int]] = {}
assert "complex_data" in __annotations__

# Added enum.auto function, developers no longer have to bother with auto-increment
import enum
class Colors(enum.Enum):
 R = enum.auto()
 G = enum.auto()
 B = enum.auto()

assert Colors.B.value == 3