To the 10 Yo's Me

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I am now 28 years old. The 10 years old is like yesterday when I think about it. It was 2004. Around September, I came to Guangzhou, a big city in China from a village in Guangdong. I was born in 1995 January. So actually the title should be 9 years old. But somehow it is more convenient to say to the 10 yo. That year is special to me because I first met the computer in my father’s working place. It was a tunnel monitor building. Inside it, some computers were showing videos about the traffic inside the tunnels captured by CCTV cameras.

At that time, I couldn’t imagine what it will be like when I grow up when and became a father just like my father. I probably never think about this problem when I was that young. 18 years passed by, and now, it is 2023. And it will be history soon.

I of course have so many things that I want to share with the 10 yo’s me. It is hard to make it with one article. Among this, I especially want to tell him about how to become an information genius.

During those years after I first met the computer, I of course like other young primary school students, liked to play games. And from 13 yo, in 2008, I started to participate in the National Olympiad in Informatics in Provinces. And after several years, in 2011, I made it to the second round to compete with around 360 top students in Guangdong Province, which has around 100 million population. I got no luck and even the third prize didn’t give to me. The third prize can probably reach out to the students with the top 200 scores. So I was ranked about the place around 300.

And then I went to university and then dropped out, went to work in a startup, and then created my startup. And now I was working as a full stack engineer for a global big bank through the contractor way.

In the last year passed by, I have had tens of moments where I am feeling like I am an information genius. When I want to confirm it with some of my colleagues, they said yeah, a bit, sometimes I have innovative ways to do things. When I answered some questions for our newly joined Chinese engineers, somehow, they complain a bit about how hard it is to work in a global company for the first time working this way. The language problem, the lot of access review, the tons of information, the no mentor and few can help the problem, the busy boss problem. I actively help them. And at such a time, I know I already went very far.

Actually, in my first time working at a Singaporean big bank in 2022, I was doing badly. And my boss was nice to help me change a group. In the second group, I started to shin. My new boss praised me as I was excellent among four or five Chinese engineers in the group.

And now it is June 2023, and in the last half a year, I began to shin not only among Chinese teammates but among Hong Kong teammates. My boss said that he is happy to see that I am eager to learn. Though I still need to learn a lot from my boss and my genius teammates, let me say so to celebrate the small success.

I have hobbies to update my resume and the skills inside it. Let me show the skills I have using experience:

And as you can see here my focus is quite scattered. However, if we think carefully, they are all about some kind of information. Now I am mainly working as Java Engineer though my title is full stack engineer in the company.

So how can I prove I am such an information genius? Besides, in my daily job, I am learning cloud computing, and in my leisure time, I am learning Neural Networks, as the article I Finally Understand How Neural Network Works shows. When I am relaxing or driving, I watch Japanese TikTok and Podcast as my article Why and How I Learn Japanese explains. Zhiwei is running at full speed to reach the destination where he will be praised by the world that he is truly an information genius.

I have failure feeling in my last 10 years. So now I feel that I start to become a little more successful. I was super happy at some moments recently. Sometimes, I couldn’t believe that why I am now so sharp, why I can learn whatever I want to learn, why I can think out any ways to achieve what I want.

After I closed my startup and stayed at home to learn, and sometimes work as a freelancer to make a living around the first half of 3 years of COVID time, I joined the two startup companies in Shenzhen and Guangzhou. I was fired by them. When I was fired by the first one after joining for two months, I complained that the boss was bad. After I was fired by the second one within only one week, I thought I was wrong, my previous boss was nice.

I thought it was because I ran my startup for 3 years and stayed home as a freelancer for 1.5 years, that made me not prepared well for working for a company at that time. The gap between being a proud startup founder and a docile engineer is huge. I beat the walls hard and my head is bleeding. Though this happened, I am still a friend to my two former bosses who fired me. We still have some communication in the last year.

The global companies helped me a lot. I have been working for two global banks till now. The people there give me a lot of confidence and tolerance. Though I am only requested by the company to go to the office for at least two days, I rented a parking lot for 1000 CNY under the office and drove to the office every working day. Because I like listening to Japanese TikTok on the way. My left hand will hold a small remote control and my right hand is on steers. I just listened to the short TikTok videos with my eyes looking in front. And sometimes, I used my left hand to click the button of the remote control to scroll down the short videos on my iPhone.

That’s one of the moments when I am super happy. I laughed loud alone tens of times a day. I was recollecting the interesting words or ideas my colleagues speak out. I was thinking about how to brag about my genius ability next time on my social media. I was thinking about how to shock people with my achievements next time. I was thinking about how my colleagues said the harsh truth with the most politeness. To be honest, sorry for being too honest, and it may sound a little harsh, are becoming the common phrase among my colleagues.

It is really interesting once for one genius, you can behave like a genius to be your true self. And you are comfortable with being so without offending anyone. Because you have similar genius colleagues in the company and genius friends in social media. And I encourage everyone to become a genius.

I am a genius and you are a genius, everyone is a genius. My 2yo daughter is surely a genius. I surely learned a lot by observing my daughter and playing with her. My daughter’s Chinese level is better than my Japanese level. She taught me a lot. She plays a lot and am curious about everything. I am really envious of her. She has the boldness to climb to the tourist spot to touch and left our adult standing with the specialized path. She broke a lot of rules and has the boldness to do a lot of things our adults don’t have the boldness to do or never think about it after growing up. She played with toys happily. We, adults, must have some purpose to do something. For me, it needs to learn something by doing something. That’s too purpose driven.

Thanks to the company to let me be a genius kid again and naturally. Also thanks to the genius Yin Wang, who always learn his whole life and share everything, the programming language expert, once was Staff Software Engineer at Intel and Senior Software Engineer at Microsft. In recent years, he was learning Japanese, music, painting, and beyond. He is absolutely right about one can learn easily by always thinking and suspecting.

After two months of listening to Japanese sound in some leisure time, now, my brains are very comfortable with it. I began to like to sing together with the songs my phone are playing in my driving. It seems that I will be comfortable speaking Japanese shortly though I never have the patience to sit down to recognize its literal symbols and don’t know what they mean.

I learn this from my daughter. The Chinese sounds sure help her when she was younger and couldn’t speak. She was 2 yo and she was able to express herself simply, like mama, papa, I hold the ball, I didn’t learn English today, etc. And because I helped her watch English animations for some time, she is comfortable with English sounds sure. Of course, every kid is comfortable with any language. When one grows up to certain age, the second language becomes uncomfortable.

It is all about the environment. For Hong Kong’s kids, a lot of them are fluent in Cantonese, Mandarin, and English. They are just everywhere. For learning, it surely is all about the environment. Though nowadays, the Internet is quite a convent to make the environment if you like. I changed my mobile phone system language to Japanese for some weeks. I just know a few of them. My mobile phone became hard to use and I often guess to operate my phone with mistakes. But after a few days, I find the book about neural networks is actually easy compared with all day long living together with Japanese.

That’s my genius way of learning things. I listen to the listening materials time by time when I drive to hang around in the city. No matter what thing. To the Japanese, it works. To the cutting-edge machine learning papers, it works. Youtube has a lot of machine learning paper explanation videos. After I am comfortable with them, then I am ok to sit down to read papers or books carefully.

I already do a lot of understanding when listening before reading them. I read them to make my brain do the rest of the total effort that need to completely digest learning materials.

I analyzed hundreds of long log files in the last half a year. I will carefully copy them out of the cloud computing platform, and use replace function to let new lines separate continuous log lines. And if they are all in JSON format, I will change my file extension to JSON and use Visual Studio Code’s plugin to format it to beautify. And then go to search for some keywords to find the needed information. Then I suspect every line of source code carefully. Sometimes I think about why some logs are not printed out. Sometimes when I meet the error stack trace which involves the underlying framework code I never touched before, I will directly go to look at it and learn it.

I become fearless about any code, any document, and any log. No matter who writes, no matter what code it involves. And because I was doing Android and iOS development from 2013 to 2015, I can analyze them and read them easily. One time in recent months, I went to directly the iOS code to find that it is not the first API call that made the problem, it is the continuous second API call that made the problem. At these moments, I am feeling like I am an information genius.

You know, in big company projects, there may be hundreds of microservices. And this is to the backend, for the front end, that’s also a big project. And there are a lot of documents and tickets. I am capable to jump between them and get the information I need. Though I still need time for me to learn, after so many years of learning and programming, I am fearless about learning. And it is all about learning.

So now, when getting a ticket, I started to learn every code and document around it. I am sometimes surprised by myself why it is so easy for me now. After learning neural networks for months in my leisure time, I become a little fearless about any math formula. They are actually easy compared to the Japanese, which I know nothing about its written symbols. And for the Japanese, I have ways to learn, why Math I couldn’t learn.

When I was in high school, I was envious of the guys who win the gold medal in National Olympiad in Informatics in China. I was always curious about how they do it and how I can do it. I now know the answer. It is that in high school, I am still not working hard and focusing well. And I lack the environment to perform better. In high school, there was only me who practiced and participated in such competitions.

And I somehow knew why I failed pretty hard before, my company couldn’t continue and had to shut down, I asked for some reward money from my friends and users and sent one-to-one direct messages to everyone to ask for help and then got deleted by more than one thousand, I was fired by two times, I have communicated more than 4000 HRs and recruiters actively or passively and then ignored or rejected by most of them. My daughter came into the world and her father was badly poor. If we count my failure small or big, we can make a book.

It is my laziness of mind. Now, I finally cured most of my laziness in thinking and learning. And I learned probably every hour to chase cutting-edge technology and polished my brain to process information better and more eagerly. One famous founder in China said that most people are willing to do anything to avoid real thinking. It was true and I was one of them before.

In retrospect, most of my failures can be avoided. Those failures turned the most optimistic person into the most pessimistic person. But they gave me the strength to face the difficulties and challenges.

The good people in my life saved me. I was moved by their kindness and tolerance. When I reach here, my tears are forming.

It is a really good era. You see that the value of information is starting to surpass the value of the land. And a lot of people in the world are helping to generate truly useful information, I hope this one also can help you all, especially those who are 10 years old and find themselves like learning.

I couldn’t imagine your generation, my daughter’s generation can achieve what when all of you grow up.

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