Recently there’s a sticker “passing tea to the big shot” being used a lot,
and the way I understand the meaning of “big shot”
is the same meaning as “teacher” in “when three walk together, there must be one I can learn from.”
Recently because I’ve been bragging a lot in public places,
some uninformed people might think I’m also a big shot.
My heart’s a bit nervous,
so I plan to introduce to everyone the big shots in my eyes.
DISCLAIMER:
This article has no objective facts, all subjective views.
If there are inappropriate places, then my views are inappropriate.These big shots I basically know them, but they don’t know me,
no conflict of interest.
Jeff Atwood, founder of Stack Overflow
In the period when I just started catching up on personal blogs,
I unilaterally got to know many big shots,
learned an enormous amount from blog articles,
Jeff Atwood (below Jeff)’s codinghorror.com was one of them.
His About Me page is written especially earnestly,
at least I really like this style:
within a single page,
first introduce yourself,
then talk about some trivial experiences,
finally mainly talk about your worldview (world/life/values).
As SO founder,
Jeff is probably also well-known in the industry,
I don’t know much about this side.
But there are a few things he said that I remember firmly:
One is the origin of the website’s name,
which is from Code Complete (Code Complete)’s subheading:
Coding Horror, translated into Chinese it roughly means “shit code.”
So I also completed my reading of the Chinese version of Code Complete,
though it’s a somewhat dated book,
the programmer bad habits it discusses
also nailed me many times.
After finishing the Chinese version,
I hungrily learned the English original as well.
Another is writing blogs.
Jeff has multiple times mentioned that in his mind,
writing is a great way to learn for oneself.
But he himself writes blogs mainly because he wants a place to jot down fun things.
Chen Hao, haoel, webmaster of CoolShell
Chen Hao’s (below Uncle Haozi) self-description is:
Hello everyone, I’m Chen Hao,
I’m not a master, I’m not a leader,
I’m just following my interests and hobbies to learn some technologies.
But in my eyes,
he’s one of the few people I know who has been doing programming tech for over ten years,
even though now he may be playing the role of CTO,
he’s still writing code fighting on the tech front line.
Many of his articles spread wider than his name,
(another way of saying it is they’ve been forwarded by major programming marketing accounts)
For example Programmer Level-Up Strategy,
for example “Being an environmentally-friendly programmer, starting from not using Baidu”,
Uncle Haozi also uses very authentic language to localize some interesting articles,
for example How to Write Unmaintainable Code
These articles always have a really nice smell of programming,
I love it.
Being able to learn here and there some cool ideas from frontline engineers
counts as making a little progress every day too.
Cao Zheng, caoz
A while back chatting with Boss Zhang on the subway,
I asked him besides Xiqiao Huoju,
what other great public accounts are there, recommend some.
He first dug out MacTalk, TinyFool, Dida Dida etc.
public-account small-circle of commercial mutual back-patting (laudatory here) and recommended them to me,
then we yearned for a bit for the atmosphere where big shots all know each other.
I also recommended to him keso, who seems to know Lei Jun and Zhang Xiaolong well.
Finally he introduced his long-treasured Cao Zheng (below caoz)’s public account to me (public account: caoz’s dream-talk),
Boss Zhang introduced he was 4399’s tech bigwig,
everyone calls him Boss Cao this and that.
At the time I simply tagged caoz with the same label as Fenng.
But later many of his public account posts changed my view:
I found this person caoz, is interesting.
For example he and keso would both post articles to stir things up,
but they’re not quite the same.
keso likes to confront big trends,
like xxx changes the world,
xxx isn’t a good direction,
big-picture, full of momentum.
caoz likes to confront specific things,
like cutting leeks + countless examples,
and would also reveal dislike for specific people.
caoz this way is more apt to attract haters,followers also not easy to grow
but he doesn’t care,
just says whatever he wants to say,
and even deliberately says some “follower-washing” truths,
quite uninhibited.
Setting aside some principles I don’t agree with,
many principles caoz talks about hit the point sentence by sentence,
backed by real things,
indeed can learn a lot.
// Here are all subjective feelings, lacking references, because I can’t find how to generate permanent links to WeChat articles…
Wang Yin, author of Fully Working with Linux
Wang Yin (below God Yin), blog is Of Course I’m Just Talking BS (https://www.yinwang.org/)
The early-years article Fully Working with Linux gathered many fanboys,
later quite a few articles, like Microsoft’s Secret Separation Agreement, gathered many haters.
In my mind, God Yin is one of Zhihu’s three most topical programmers
(another one is Zeng Bo (now permanently quit Zhihu))
Setting aside others, God Yin’s own experiences make him as a person full of topicality.
First is daring to express piercing personal thoughts (and unchanged for many years),
this alone isn’t God Yin’s standout point,
God Yin will also dialectically think about problems,
daring to express his thinking on both sides of things in public.
For example he was first known to the public because of the article Fully Working with Linux,
but years later he again posted On Linux, Windows and Mac.
For example he first joined Microsoft,
then again went on solo strike (such things really do happen a lot)
In most people’s eyes, God Yin doesn’t have his own works, and is fickle.
But actually God Yin’s articles,
if you remove the part about his opinions on others,
his understanding, thinking , application of technology actually surpasses most people (like me).
For example his thinking on Kotlin - Checked Exception,
the part talking about the relationship between program design and programmer ability
is very inspiring.
And a lot of times, God Yin’s views are truly thunderous, for example:
Every time you hate something, you lose the chance to learn from it.
So much so that in my company on workdays,
whenever someone discovers God Yin has posted another article,
they’d shout: “God Yin posted another article! So damn diligent! Link sent in the group!”
Then everyone learns together.
Actually I really wanted to draw an analogy between God Yin and Sister Feng,
but on thought, too few people who know Sister Feng but understand Sister Feng.
This easily causes misunderstanding, this paragraph should be cut.
Ice1000, ice1000, high schooler who loves programming languages
I first saw Ice1000 (below ice1000)’s activity in Zhihu’s crossdressing topic,
after looking around I found this seems to be a fellow programmer ally,
looked some more, found this is a high schooler big shot.
Unlike the big shots above,
ice1000’s influence may mainly stay on Zhihu,
but ice1000’s future is unlimited.
Though all people are equal, some people are more equal,
many principles, knowing them early vs. late, makes a difference.
ice1000 was able, in high school,
to determine his own interests and plan to fight for them his whole life,
compared to me, who only after finishing four years of college
determined that I really am someone who loves code definitely stronger.
(Not to mention his GitHub activity also crushes mine)
Hope ice1000 can find his own path,
recognize it, and walk it smoothly through.
Dizi, author of You Saw Nothing and Little Green and Little Blue series
Dizi Ocarina (below Dizi)
is an artist in the same circle as Sunzha, Boss Yu and other artists.
Looking at her You Saw Nothing,
I always feel it has a similar quality to Mysterious Girlfriend X / Franken Fran
(though the art style is very different)
Also Little Green and Little Blue series,
many places similar to the xkcd comic series in quality,
or you could say similar in quality to Xiqiao’s Mysterious Programmer comic series.
Even though there’s the meme “Dizi, strong, doesn’t color”,
actually you can see Dizi is just someone who loves drawing comics very much,
and very luckily, her career is also drawing comics.
This trait combined with the trait of “wild imagination” produces a 1+1»2 trait.
The earliest Little Green and Little Blue was where Dizi expressed some small thoughts,clearly Dizi was out of razor blades
many memes inside, like xkcd,
are absurd but interesting:
For example the meme “while doing a backflip on a tightrope, holding a 5x5 Rubik’s cube in each hand while simultaneously reciting the national civil code backwards”,
follows the same principle as “when three walk together, there must be one I can learn from”.
Finally, due to length, many big shots aren’t written in.
(I have a stack of big shots I admire, but there isn’t space here to write them all)
There are also some big shots whose own pose-level is very high,
but because they spend less time outputting views/values/dry goods/tech content,
they’re easily overlooked by the people (like me),
here I apologize.
In any case,
let me end by quoting one of Dizi’s reflections:
