2024 Summary - Continuous Iteration
Categories: Life
Another Year
Time flies so fast. In a blink of an eye, it’s the fifth day of the Lunar New Year. I’m used to taking advantage of the less busy days during the Spring Festival to record what happened in the past year. I think the keyword for this year should be “continuous iteration.”
I’m increasingly realizing that everyone’s most important work is actually themselves. Your life experiences, personality, values, and skills constitute this work itself, and the work needs to be continuously iterated. I plan to use this summary to back up 2024 and start the new version of 2025.
Life’s Iteration
After having a daughter, you don’t know how happy I am every day ❤️.
The greatest happiness this year is having a sweet daughter. I hope she will be a bright and happy person.
Born on October 2nd, she is now 4 months old. She doesn’t cry much, is very well-behaved and loves to laugh. Accompanying her as she grows up day by day has made my life much more colorful. During this time, I also learned to soothe her, change diapers, prepare and feed her milk, and even bathe her independently. Although I am sometimes tired and sleepy, every time she smiles at me, I am full of energy.
In terms of parenting, I will try my best to provide her with a safe, healthy, and non-competitive living environment, give her unconditional love, let her have a sense of self-identity, her own values and beliefs, and encourage her to learn various knowledge and maintain a curious mind.
I should be most grateful to my wife this year. From the hardship of ten months of pregnancy to the unconditional dedication in the process of raising a child, she is very careful and patient.
Life’s Iteration
The secret to keeping life fresh is to do more things you haven’t done before 🤹 .
Have you noticed that in the years after the epidemic, life has been getting faster and faster? Maybe it’s not because of the epidemic.
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 the age of 5 is 1/5 of a lifetime, and there are fresh and curious things everywhere. But at the age of 30, a year is equivalent to 1/30 of a lifetime, and there are repetitions of experiences everywhere, so we feel that each year is faster than the last.
How to break this curse of the relative length of time becoming shorter? The way I thought of is to experience more different things, try more things I like, try new technologies, food, electronic products, reading, scenery, 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. In addition, I went to restaurants with colleagues every week to eat delicious food, and my weight reached 144 jin. I was very worried that I would become a greasy middle-aged man with a big belly in the future. In addition, seeing that Tong Dawei in “The Story of Rose” is 45 years old, he still looks so young. I think the secret is not to be fat and to have a healthy lifestyle.
So I bought the two very popular books at the time, “The Glucose Revolution” and “Outlive.” By controlling my diet, eating order, quitting bad carbohydrates, drinking apple cider vinegar, and cycling to and from get off work, it was a kind of persistence that was not uncomfortable. At that time, I lost 8 jin, which gave me a lot of confidence. Then I continued to persist. By the end of the year, I had lost nearly 20 jin, and I have maintained a very comfortable weight of 124 jin until now. It’s even magical that many of the pants I bought in the first two years are too big to wear, and I have replaced them with a new batch.
Device Hobby
In 2024, I bought more electronic devices. I like to tinker 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 that I enjoy very much. Listening to good music in a quiet environment is a great happiness in life.
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 very good. I bought an Apple Watch Ultra2, and I really like the texture. I replaced my phone with a 15 Pro Max and found this big white guy to be very easy to use. At the end of the year, considering the separation of home and work computers, and the very favorable national subsidy, a 16G + 1T 14-inch Mac Air only cost less than 7,000, and I really like the feel of it.
Reflecting on this year’s consumption of electronic devices, it’s a bit too much. I need to restrain myself next year and control myself.
Enjoying Food
Eating delicious food is a great happiness in life. Making delicious food also has the feeling of an engineer writing code to create a work. After buying a coffee machine, the frequency of making coffee has increased a lot. After buying a pressure cooker, the frequency of stewing spicy meat has also increased a lot. After discovering the benefits of soda water, I can mix a lot of delicious drinks.
In the past two years, I even volunteered to cook a table of dishes for my family for New Year’s Eve dinner. Haha, if cooking doesn’t require preparing ingredients or washing dishes, and only requires stir-frying, then this thing will be more interesting.
Professional Iteration
Using the professional ability of an engineer to work, make money, and output is often a very interesting thing 🎬.
This year is the 9th year of my work. I have gradually understood the value and meaning of work. Simply put, work is organized work to obtain income and meet consumption. Since it is organized, it is not completely free, and many people will even feel that it is painful.
How can I make my work less painful and even feel happy? That is to use your profession to solve problems and provide services, which happens to be what you love, which is to do what you like and make money by the way.
The happiest job is not assigned to you by others, but invented by yourself. According to the needs of the consumer market, combined with what you are good at, you provide solutions/services/emotional value. This kind of work is the happiest.
A moderately happy job should be one where you can make your own decisions. Although the general direction is not under your control, you have a certain sense of control over what you do. It is not the kind of alienated labor. In this process, you can cultivate the abilities you need to move towards the happiest job.
I have always believed that I am quite lucky to be doing what I want to do. In the past few years, I have also been thinking about how to make my team members work happier and write the code they like.
Unrestricted Work
The biggest change I made in my work this year was to let the team be unrestricted, not limited to the front-end, and upgrade from product engineers to AI engineers 🤖.
The team size has continued to expand compared to last year. From the original industry front-end team, a new innovation front-end team has been added to be responsible for the implementation of AI capabilities. The number of people has also expanded to 40 full-time employees + a group of partners. In addition to business support, most of my energy is focused on the implementation of AI scenarios, using professional engineering methods to solve difficult problems in the business and enhance the depth of the technical team. The sense of accomplishment in this process is very interesting.
In the scenarios where large models can be implemented in business, it is very much like a blue ocean market. There are too many things that can be done. If you want to do them all, you will spread yourself too thin and the effect will not be good, and you will be more likely to work overtime. It is a bit like considering investment. We will try our best to align with the three points of “good effect, large volume, and profitable.”
- The scenario has a major pain point. We don’t consider demo scenarios that are not painful or itchy. It should be the current main business of the business. It just so happens that there is a module that is very difficult to solve with current traditional technology, the indicators cannot go up, and it is a headache how to do it. But you find that with the help of the large model’s capabilities, it can be solved efficiently and with high quality.
- The demand has scale. It is often necessary to process hundreds of thousands or millions of data. It is better to have a continuous stream of increments after the stock is processed. It is difficult to complete it in a short time with traditional methods, but with the help of large models + engineering productization, it can be easily solved by running automatically 24 hours a day.
- The investment is cost-effective. You need to do a simple calculation. After this scenario is run through, can the marginal cost be greatly reduced? At the same time, will the effect and cost be much better than before? When using a large model, don’t calculate it according to the price of a consumer product, but compare it with the price of hiring someone to do the work.
AI is very advantageous for front-end teams with ideas. They can use their product engineering capabilities to quickly transform business pain points into a verifiable product capability. In particular, it is necessary to pull in business colleagues to frequently debug to the best effect based on business rule SOPs to produce more appropriate context information. After the effect meets the standard, use engineering to achieve automatic batch call processing and go online. Finally, considering the efficiency of result review/operation iteration, after it is done, the business can play by itself.
Over the past year, we have made a large number of million-level 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 business efficiency.
In terms of Node, the corresponding team continued to iterate and upgrade, undertaking the business gateway to provide service capabilities for Java colleagues to use, and building a complete set of workbench mechanisms based on workflows to meet the efficient business docking and iteration of industry, production, and research. In terms of productization capabilities, we have gradually undertaken the product capabilities of the BU for data viewing, including the analysis of traffic and operating data and the drill-down and resolution of problems. In terms of assistant work, we are responsible for improving the efficiency of corresponding tools for customer service, BD, and industry operations, and often go offline to see how users use the tools, collect some scenario-based efficiency improvement pain points and come back to optimize them, and have done a lot of productized capabilities to improve the ease of use of assistants’ work.
Started Investing
The biggest decision I made in investing this year was to stay away from Chinese concept stocks and become a Tesla shareholder 🚗.
I’m ashamed 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 that I’m a beginner and still need to make a lot of supplements in terms of ability, especially in terms of mentality.
A few simple principles: don’t touch Chinese concept stocks, don’t use leverage, be optimistic about leading companies, invest in the S&P 500 on a regular basis, and be optimistic about the development of AI/Bitcoin/new technologies. For more information, please see Talking about Future Technology Trends. The income for the year is quite considerable. In another way, BABA’s stock has returned to 300.
Output Needs to Be Strengthened
Many times, it’s not about how much input you have, but how much output you have, and about long-term persistence. After a period of time, you will see many surprises ⛳️.
GitHub Open Source, on the data, Followers 5630, ranked 76th in China, the number of stars for pure technical code repositories has accumulated to 53K, including Pake 34.6K + MiaoYan 5.8K + XRender 7.2K + WeexUi 4.8K + others 1.3K.
It just so happened that last year was the tenth year of playing with open source. Some friends have asked before how there are so many things on Github. In fact, it is more because of long-term submissions. I do a little bit every week, and after a few years, it gradually has a certain effect. It is not a task, but a hobby. However, I need to reflect here. The number of iterated versions in 2024 is lower than in previous years, and I need to work harder in 2025.
Twitter, I’m still used to calling the current X Twitter. I like the blue bird. I still follow 300 interesting people when I first started playing. The number of followers has grown from 70K last year to 94.1K this year. I don’t follow hot spots. I mostly share some interesting open source works, updates on my own products, and write casually about life. This community is very friendly, and the quality of the followers is also high. I am very grateful. It gives me an outlet for my usual output, so I don’t feel suffocated.
Trendy Weekly, the first issue originated in November 2020. At that time, a team member said that the technical atmosphere was not strong, so I set a flag to write a trendy technology weekly. I didn’t expect it to be the 4th year now. One article a week has reached 208 issues. Now there are 17,263 followers on Follow. I usually notify readers via RSS. Many friends read it casually when they go to work on Monday. It feels a bit like my technical circle of friends. It also made me go out more and take some beautiful photos.
Personal Blog, there are not many technical things this year. Most of them are my reading notes, electronic device tinkering, investment learning experience, and life experience articles. It’s a blog without too much burden, but I also made an English version. My blog didn’t do well this year either. I only wrote 6 articles. I wrote a little more sharing-type articles on the internal network. I need to write more 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 to waste my life 💁.
In fact, there were 3 regrets last year. The first regret was that I didn’t get a ticket to Li Zhi’s concert in Osaka, Japan at the beginning of the year. Looking back now, I should have been more decisive and bought the Tokyo show directly. Although it was very troublesome to go from Hangzhou, I could have left no regrets. Unfortunately, there is no if.
The second regret is that I didn’t travel abroad in 2024. It can’t be called a regret, because there was a great happiness, the birth of my daughter. When she is older in 2025, I can take her out to see a different world.
The third regret is that I need to create a new work. 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 the friends who see this a happy life, happy work, and profitable investment in 2025. I also hope that I can always insist on doing what I like and live a meaningful life.