A few days ago, Beijing announced a confirmed case – a 34-year-old man living in Shunyi. The announcement was accompanied by a full track of recent activity:

  • 50km round-trip between home and company on weekdays, day after day

  • On weekends, I only go out to buy goods at supermarkets and take my children to participate in early education activities. At other times, I stay at home

  • Do you stay home for fun? No, he spends all his spare time revising for the postgraduate entrance examination. The word on the street is Tsinghua University

Finally, I was arranged by the company to go on a business trip in Ningbo three days before the entrance examination. Before the business trip, I required a nucleic acid test due to the preliminary entrance examination of postgraduate, and finally confirmed the diagnosis.

Current latest situation: has given up postgraduate entrance examination, the condition is stable. Wish the elder brother who is trying to live a speedy recovery.

Is this a struggle BI? No, this is just drifting in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, in order to better life, with their own day after day efforts to struggle with the life of ordinary workers.

There is no ease in the grown-up world

As a muddle, a magician, a mechanical engineer turned half-head. At the beginning of the year, I was at home due to the epidemic, and I had a question from my soul:

Of all the big guys, why can’t it be me?

Obviously very hard in life, why I still vegetables chicken?

If you don’t think your IQ is worse than average, there’s only one answer left:

I’m not working in the right direction

After adjusting my course and running hard for a whole year, here’s my answer:

  • Wrote an open-source e-book called React Technology Revelations, 2.1K Star

  • Formed a React learning community of over 2000 people

  • Cooperate with SegmentFault to record the course from top to bottom learn React source code, and become SegmentFault excellent lecturer

  • Being a Contributor of ANu.js and React is the fastest year for my technical level to improve

  • With a side business outside my main business, although it has just started, it can also cover my food, clothing, housing and transportation in Beijing

All of this was done in my spare time outside of 8 hours. Here is my mental journey.

Work from home during the outbreak

Exploring the frontiers of knowledge

First, let’s talk about the core idea:

Exploring the frontiers of knowledge

As a technical work, the front end has a knowledge boundary, which can be divided into:

  • A breadth boundary on the horizontal

  • A longitudinal depth boundary

Horizontally, some kinds of work are naturally close to the front end, such as products and servers. Improving the ability of these adjacent jobs can improve the overall control of the business.

Vertically, the front end domain represented by traditional HTML, JS and CSS can be seen as a big circle. On the circle, there are many circles in other fields intersecting with the big circle. These small circles are the boundary of the depth of knowledge in the front end.

Some small circles intersect more with the front large circle, such as:

  • Front-end engineering, daily work will contact

  • Framework development, daily work will use the front-end framework

There are also small circles that involve more knowledge in other fields and intersect less with the front end, such as:

  • Data visualization

  • Across the development

But people’s energy is limited, horizontal, vertical, where should the effort?

The front end of the effort direction

In terms of career development, there are two fronts:

  • Technical manager

  • Front-end architect

The technical manager requires technical management ability, and the front-end architect requires higher engineering ability. Both require product and server capabilities.

Therefore, horizontally, the front end people should develop the ability of adjacent work. Algorithms, operations and maintenance, which are not adjacent to the front end, pay the same amount of effort, but the benefits are not great.

Vertically, it is suggested to choose a knowledge boundary as the direction to break through according to personal preference. Make a front end of the triangle.

For example, if you believe in data visualization and put a lot of effort into it, you’ll be more likely to become a product owner in visualization with a horizontal effort. But in the future it will be harder to switch tracks.

Similarly: a front end that has been a rich text editor for a few years can be the best in its field, but the domain knowledge it accumulates won’t be as useful in other businesses.

Therefore, I recommend developing domain knowledge that is closer to everyday development, i.e. front-end engineering or framework development.

Considering the daily use of React technology stack and the possibility of using it for a long time in the future, I decide to take the development of React framework as my direction of efforts.

Screwing the React

Let’s be honest: there were at least five times this year that I wanted to give up on this endeavor.

There are so many methods in the React source code, who else besides the React core team can really understand what these methods do? This is some of the best code bases in the world that have been maintained on the front end for seven years.

Some students complained with me that they could not understand the React source code after watching it for two days. Why am I so familiar with the calling process of each method in the source code?

I watched it for half a year in my spare time!

To React this level of source code, it is not to see the code can understand the meaning, you have to understand the design concept.

Therefore, after reading all the React Conf speeches in previous years, as well as the share of the React core team members on GayHub, Twitter, and YouTube, we finally produced an e-book that “first talk about the idea, then talk about the operation process, then talk about the local source code” — Reveal the React Technology.

I harvest

In the process of writing this book, some friends joined me on wechat to discuss React with me, and gradually a community of 2000 people was formed. There are many well-known library authors, participants, technical experts, excellent UP masters in the field of knowledge, and public account masters in the group.

Later, because of this ebook, the business people of SegmentFault came to me and cooperated with me to produce the video course of learning React source code from top to bottom. The course received a good reputation and made me an excellent lecturer of SegmentFault.

When React has no more secrets in front of me, the daily business can be said to be cleared.

Interestingly, some of our businesses use a React-like framework called Anu.js.

After being confused by a framework bug last year, we’ve started to maintain the framework this year and move some experimental features from React, such as time slices.

At the beginning of August, I started to make an official account. My article features are: focus on React technology stack, and give answers to React questions from the source level.

In terms of income, there is also after-sleep income — monthly income from advertising and courses, between 6,000 and 1W.

2021, I’m gonna be big

This year’s experience has proved my point — as long as the direction is right, the effort counts.

In 2021, try to be on the road to becoming a big shot.

Denver annual essay | 2020 technical way with me The campaign is under way…