Hi, Long Time No See

Hi friend, long time no see. I’m THORN.

Two weeks ago I finally redeemed my domain name, which had once been taken over by a squatter. Taking advantage of the National Day holiday, I’ve brought my old articles, big and small, back together, and they now form the first version of this new blog. Looking at them now, these posts may seem a bit immature, but they bear witness to where I came from.

As a full-stack engineer from the pre-AI era, I started in college with hand-coded H5 pages, jQuery, and ASP (no .NET — pretty ancient, right, hahaha), and went on to work on all kinds of projects with Spring Boot (Java), UWP (C#), and Android. After graduating in 2018 I picked up React, Vue, and mpvue development, and half a year later shifted toward Node.js for mostly back-end work. In 2020 I started getting into cloud-native technologies like helm, k8s, and ansible. In a very short time, I worked through everything I had wanted to learn.

I once had boundless passion for technology, and I took real satisfaction in my growth as an engineer — this blog was a byproduct of that journey. Now, being full-stack is simply the default in the AI era. Even before LLMs blew up, I kept struggling with this question: apart from technology, what else could I do? Now, in the AI era, the question goes one step further — compared with AI, what advantage do I have?

AI being too perfect is perhaps its greatest flaw. Human flaws and imperfections may be exactly what make people unique and precious.

I am someone who deeply lacks a sense of security; whenever I find something that makes me feel safe, I cling to it and refuse to let go. Holding on too tightly sometimes causes trouble for the people around me. Some things happened recently that made me re-examine where my sense of security comes from, and how I can make better use of this flaw. I shouldn’t cling so hard to the past, nor should I cut ties with the present too easily — instead, I should stand in the present and look for more possibilities.

To put it plainly: while keeping the quality of my current work, I want to open up more possibilities for myself. Without a new source of security, going fully off work is still a bit too hard for me. So lately, outside of work, I’ve also started optimizing my workflow, letting AI save me more energy so that I have more time for the things I want to do.

I want to write stories — stories about Chaoshan. Over the next two years, five years, or even longer, I hope to do everything I can to gradually move closer to that goal.

The best is yet to come.

Let’s encourage each other.