2024 Summary - Continuous Iteration

Categories: Life 2025-01-30

Another Year

Time flies. In the blink of an eye, it’s the fifth day of the Lunar New Year. I’m used to taking advantage of the quieter days during the Spring Festival to reflect on the past year. If I had to choose a keyword for 2024, it would be “continuous iteration.”

I’m increasingly realizing that everyone’s most important project is actually themselves. Your life experiences, personality, values, and skills constitute this project, and it needs continuous refinement. This summary marks the end of 2024 and the beginning of version 2025.

Life’s Evolution

Since having a daughter, you don’t know how happy I am every day ❤️.

The greatest joy this year has been welcoming my sweet daughter. I hope she grows up to be a bright and happy person.

Born on October 2nd, she is now 4 months old. She doesn’t cry much, is well-behaved, and loves to smile. Watching her grow day by day has made my life so much richer. During this time, I learned to soothe her, change diapers, prepare and feed her milk, and even bathe her independently. Although I’m sometimes tired and sleepy, every time she smiles at me, I’m filled with energy.

When it comes to parenting, I will do my best to provide her with a safe, healthy, and non-competitive environment, give her unconditional love, help her develop a strong sense of self, her own values and beliefs, and encourage her to learn and maintain a curious mind.

I am most grateful to my wife this year. From the hardship of ten months of pregnancy to her unconditional dedication in raising our child, she has been incredibly careful and patient.

Keeping Life Fresh

The secret to keeping life fresh is to do more things you haven’t done before 🤹.

Have you noticed that in the years since the pandemic, life seems to be moving faster and faster? Maybe it’s not because of the pandemic.

I think it’s because as we get older, we experience more things, and the relative length of a year gradually shortens. For example, a year at age 5 is 1/5 of your lifetime, and everything feels fresh and exciting. But at age 30, a year is only 1/30 of your lifetime, with repetitive experiences everywhere, so each year feels shorter than the last.

How to break this curse of time feeling shorter? My solution is to experience more different things, try more of what I enjoy, explore new technologies, food, gadgets, books, places, and relationships. Stay curious, explore and tinker more, and be a player in this game of life, not a repetitive NPC.

Successful Weight Loss

At the beginning of last year, after the New Year, I ate a lot. Plus, I went to restaurants with colleagues every week, and my weight reached 144 jin (72 kg). I was worried about becoming an out-of-shape middle-aged man with a belly in the future. Also, seeing that Tong Dawei in “The Story of Rose” is 45 years old and still looks so young, I realized the secret is staying slim and maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

So I bought two popular books at the time, “The Glucose Revolution” and “Outlive.” By controlling my diet, adjusting eating order, cutting bad carbs, drinking apple cider vinegar, and cycling to and from work, I found a sustainable approach that wasn’t too difficult. At that time, I lost 8 jin (4 kg), which gave me confidence. Then I kept at it. By the end of the year, I had lost nearly 20 jin (10 kg), and I’ve maintained a comfortable weight of 124 jin (62 kg) ever since. It’s almost magical—many pants I bought in the past two years are now too big, and I’ve replaced them with a new set.

Gadget Hobby

In 2024, I bought more electronic devices. I enjoy tinkering with sound quality, speakers, and headphones. I got Sony monitor headphones, Bose 45 noise-canceling headphones, and a Marshall speaker from a friend. These are all things I enjoy immensely. Listening to good music in a quiet environment is one of life’s great pleasures.

On a whim, I got a 27-inch narrow-bezel Dell monitor. To meet my reading needs, I sold my Kindle and replaced it with a Palma Ocean4, which feels great. I bought an Apple Watch Ultra2, and I really like the build quality. I upgraded my phone to a 15 Pro Max and found this big white device very easy to use. At the end of the year, considering the need to separate work and personal computers, and with favorable government subsidies, a 16GB + 1TB 14-inch MacBook Air cost less than 7,000 RMB. I really like how it feels.

Looking back at this year’s electronics purchases, it was a bit too much. I need to exercise more restraint next year.

Enjoying Food

Eating delicious food is one of life’s great pleasures. Making delicious food also has the satisfaction of an engineer writing code to create something. After buying a coffee machine, I made coffee much more frequently. After buying a pressure cooker, I stewed spicy meat much more often. After discovering the benefits of sparkling water, I could mix many delicious drinks.

In the past two years, I’ve even volunteered to cook a full dinner for my family on New Year’s Eve. Honestly, if cooking didn’t require preparing ingredients or washing dishes, and only involved the actual cooking, it would be even more enjoyable.

Professional Growth

Using engineering skills to work, earn money, and create output is often a very rewarding experience 🎬.

This year marks my 9th year working. I’ve gradually come to understand the value and meaning of work. Simply put, work is organized labor to earn income and support consumption. Since it’s organized, it’s not completely free, and many people even find it painful.

How can work be less painful, even enjoyable? Use your professional skills to solve problems and provide services in areas you’re passionate about—doing what you love while making money.

The happiest work isn’t assigned by others, but created by yourself. According to market needs, combined with what you’re good at, you provide solutions, services, or emotional value. This is the happiest kind of work.

Moderately happy work should be where you have some autonomy. Although the overall direction may not be under your control, you have a say in how you execute. It’s not alienating labor. In this process, you can develop the skills needed to move toward the happiest kind of work.

I’ve always considered myself lucky to be doing what I want to do. In recent years, I’ve also been thinking about how to help my team members enjoy their work more and write the code they love.

Unrestricted Work

The biggest change I made at work this year was letting the team be unrestricted, not limited to frontend, and upgrading from product engineers to AI engineers 🤖.

The team has grown compared to last year. From the original industry frontend team, we’ve added a new innovation frontend team responsible for implementing AI capabilities. The team has expanded to 40 full-time employees plus a group of contractors. Beyond supporting business needs, most of my energy has focused on AI scenario implementation, using professional engineering methods to solve difficult business problems and enhance the technical team’s depth. The sense of accomplishment in this process has been very rewarding.

In business scenarios where large models can be applied, it feels like a blue ocean market. There are so many things that can be done. If you try to do everything, you’ll spread yourself too thin, the results won’t be good, and you’ll likely work overtime. It’s a bit like considering investments. We try to align with three criteria: “good effect, large scale, and profitable.”

1. The scenario addresses a major pain point. We don’t consider demo scenarios that are trivial. It should be core business where a module is very difficult to solve with current traditional technology, metrics can’t improve, and it’s a headache to deal with. But you find that with large model capabilities, it can be solved efficiently and with high quality.
2. The demand has scale. It often needs to process hundreds of thousands or millions of data points. It’s better to have a continuous stream of new data after processing the backlog. It’s difficult to complete in a short time with traditional methods, but with large models plus engineering productization, it can be easily solved by running automatically 24/7.
3. The investment is cost-effective. You need to do a simple calculation. After this scenario is running smoothly, can the marginal cost be greatly reduced? At the same time, will the results and costs be much better than before? When using large models, don’t calculate based on consumer product prices, but compare with the cost of hiring someone to do the work.

AI is very advantageous for frontend teams with ideas. They can use their product engineering capabilities to quickly transform business pain points into verifiable product capabilities. It’s especially important to collaborate with business colleagues to frequently debug to achieve the best results based on business SOPs to produce more appropriate context information. After results meet standards, use engineering to achieve automatic batch processing and go live. Finally, considering the efficiency of result review and operational iteration, once it’s done, the business can operate it themselves.

Over the past year, we’ve made large-scale implementations in large model information processing, consumer shopping guides, operational efficiency, digital employees, and multimedia AIGC, which has helped the business solve many problems and greatly improved efficiency.

On the Node side, the team continued to iterate and upgrade, taking over the business gateway to provide service capabilities for Java colleagues, and building a complete set of workbench mechanisms based on workflows to meet efficient business integration and iteration for industry, production, and research. In terms of productization capabilities, we gradually took over the BU’s product capabilities for data viewing, including analysis of traffic and operational data and drill-down problem resolution. In terms of assistant work, we’re responsible for improving efficiency tools for customer service, BD, and industry operations, often going offline to observe how users use the tools, collecting scenario-based efficiency pain points and optimizing them, and building many productized capabilities to improve the ease of use of assistants’ work.

Started Investing

The biggest investment decision I made this year was to move away from Chinese concept stocks and become a Tesla shareholder 🚗.

I’m somewhat embarrassed to say that I only started learning to invest in 2024. By reading professional books, asking AI, reading financial reports, and analyzing US policies, I learned some investment methods. I can only say I’m a beginner and still need to improve significantly, especially in terms of mindset.

A few simple principles: avoid Chinese concept stocks, don’t use leverage, be optimistic about leading companies, invest regularly in the S&P 500, and be optimistic about the development of AI/Bitcoin/new technologies. For more information, see Talking about Future Technology Trends. Returns for the year were quite substantial. In another way, BABA’s stock has returned to 300.

Output Needs Improvement

Often, it’s not about how much input you have, but how much output, and about long-term persistence. After some time, you’ll see many pleasant surprises ⛳️.

GitHub Open Source, by the numbers: 5,630 followers, ranked 76th in China, with accumulated stars for pure technical code repositories reaching 53K, including Pake 34.6K + MiaoYan 5.8K + XRender 7.2K + WeexUi 4.8K + others 1.3K.

It happened to be the tenth year of my open source journey. Some friends have asked how there are so many things on GitHub. In fact, it’s mostly due to consistent contributions over time. I do a little bit every week, and after a few years, it gradually has an impact. It’s not a task, but a hobby. However, I need to reflect here. The number of version iterations in 2024 was lower than in previous years, and I need to work harder in 2025.

Twitter, I still prefer calling X “Twitter.” I like the blue bird. I still follow about 300 interesting people from when I first started. Followers grew from 70K last year to 94.1K this year. I don’t chase trends. I mostly share interesting open source projects, updates on my own products, and casual thoughts about life. This community is very friendly, and follower quality is high. I’m very grateful. It gives me an outlet for my regular output, so I don’t feel suffocated.

Trendy Weekly, the first issue started in November 2020. At that time, a team member said the technical atmosphere wasn’t strong enough, so I set a goal to write a trendy technology weekly. I didn’t expect it to reach the 4th year now. One article per week has reached 208 issues. Now there are 17,263 followers on Follow. I usually notify readers via RSS. Many friends read it casually on Monday mornings on their way to work. It feels a bit like my technical circle of friends. It also encourages me to go out more and take nice photos.

Personal Blog, there weren’t many technical posts this year. Most were reading notes, gadget explorations, investment learning experiences, and life reflections. It’s a blog without too much burden, but I also made an English version. My blog didn’t perform well this year either—I only wrote 6 articles. I wrote a bit more sharing-type articles on the internal network. I need to write and summarize more in this area next year.

Stay Rational, Believe in the Future

In the new year, I only hope to live a meaningful life, without regrets, and not waste my life 💁.

In fact, there were 3 regrets last year. The first was not getting a ticket to Li Zhi’s concert in Osaka, Japan at the beginning of the year. Looking back, I should have been more decisive and bought tickets for the Tokyo show directly. Although it would have been troublesome traveling from Hangzhou, I could have left no regrets. Unfortunately, there’s no “if.”

The second regret is that I didn’t travel abroad in 2024. It can’t really be called a regret, because there was great happiness—the birth of my daughter. When she’s older in 2025, I can take her out to see a different world.

The third regret is that I need to create a new product. The product concept is almost there, but due to limited time, I didn’t finish it in 2024. I have to finish it in 2025 to meet my own needs.

Finally finished writing. I wish all friends who read this a happy life, enjoyable work, and profitable investments in 2025. I also hope that I can always persist in doing what I love and live a meaningful life.