Originally posted on wechat official account

By the end of this month, I’ll be 29 years old, 30 years old.

Unconsciously, do front-end do for nearly seven years, counting the time to learn programming, nearly ten years.

review

Looking back at this decade,

In the first three years of school,

I spent the next four years working my way up the corporate ladder,

The last three years were hard work.

I’m thankful for the days and nights I spent coding in college, forcing myself to read some basic books that were useful later in my career.

A word of advice to school readers: Read at least one classic book a year, each one of which may help you for the next year.

Besides, my girlfriend was already a wife.

In the company to work for a few years, I have seen the completeness of large companies, but also know the humble of small companies to experience the mood of screwing screws in large companies, but also a small company alone addiction.

If I am asked whether it is better to go to a big company or a small company, I would probably say both, so that I can see different scenery.

I learned the big corporate aura early on. If the first company is AT this level of the company, basically small companies do not have to interview can enter, AT least the resume is directly. If I had chosen a small company for my first job, the road would have been much harder.

But the freedom of a small company actually suits me. I don’t like working in a restrictive environment, and I left Alibaba because I didn’t want to be on the front end.

Because I feel trapped by the “front end” title. I have a lot of ideas that can’t be made possible by “front-end” technology.

For example, I’ve been doing a lot of things outside the front end of my startup: lecturing, writing articles and advertorials, arguing in the community, making products, doing back-end development, doing operations, and so on.

The scariest thing about starting a business is that it inevitably drains you dry.

In terms of lectures, I had to read dozens of books at school, otherwise I really could not have given such a long lecture. The video files of the courses I have taught in the past three years have exceeded 2TB, about 600 hours (it takes 25 days to watch them without eating or drinking). However, I rarely repeat myself. Even if it’s similar stuff, I try to say it differently.

Let’s talk a little bit about the startup years.

When we started, we had no background and no money. How could we accumulate users?

Ruoyu and I decided to use the most solid way: to write a column on Zhihu.

We wrote a question of the Day every day, and in a few months we amassed close to 20,000 followers.

This slow and steady approach to publicity has brought in very good students.

But as with all startup stories, there’s always something wrong.

Our course content has been stolen by part-timers to run their own training classes! I won’t go into details, but we made it through. Because of this incident, we decided to make the whole teaching system more professional, even if someone stole our content, we can not steal our teaching system.

So I spent a couple of months with a new engineer, rewriting the whole teaching software, and it’s been running ever since.

Since then, there have been a few more incidents — our video has been targeted by pirates.

Most content providers have no idea what to do about this situation. They can call the police, but they have to wait a long time to solve the case. During the period of existence of pirated video, the impact on the sales of legitimate video is very large.

Thanks to the fact that our system was self-written, we quickly figured out who was responsible. The specific method is inconvenient to disclose.

Starting a business was tough, but we made it.

harvest

In the past year, I answered nearly 100,000 words in Zhihu and wrote nearly 100,000 words in articles. There are 2,423 submissions on GitHub.

I’ve put on a few pounds since I’ve been working from home for the past year. But I’ve made more friends. Like doing some audio shows with amazon engineers (search for “garbled radio” in the Himalayas).

Last year, I spent a few months building wheels out of Vue and taking courses, getting my hands on all the bits and pieces of Vue. This year we are going to teach React wheels again.

After all, there are three stages of learning: seeing, doing and speaking.

Speaking is the best way to learn.

As for the current income, to be vague, it is probably higher than a P7 engineer in Alibaba, close to part of P8. However, I am in Wuhan and I work remotely, so the comparison is not high.

In addition, I plan to DIY a desktop computer recently, because I haven’t played large-scale games for many years. RTX2060 will be released in a few days, I’m going to wait…

feeling

Learning is endless, and I feel there are not enough hours in the day.

But my technical direction is pretty clear: keep going.

The more I researched, the more I realized how simple the current technologies were, the more I could explain them.

So I read more books and write more code.

In terms of life, I plan to have a baby this year…


AD: My React wheels course started live after Spring Festival, if you are interested, please check it out.