The content is transferred from: http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4b0e23c90100b2qf.html
Recently, I discussed with my UCWEB colleagues how to make our UCWEB to the extreme. I said, "There are so many platforms on mobile phones. If you want to do well, you need enough and good enough programmers. How do you define a good programmer? First, you must love to write programs, and second, you must be a perfectionist. Only then Only people can do things to the extreme.”
Talking and talking, I miss the days when I used to write programs. From 1987 to 1996, it was a sunny day. A few years ago, I accidentally found a few posts on the BBS in Jinshan West Point in 1996 from the Internet, and now I read it with emotion. Thank you Tony Low, the webmaster of the year, who collected my articles and kept them to this day.
Reposting this article to commemorate my ten-year programmer career that has gone away!
My program life path
Written in Jinshan West Point BBS in May 1996
[Inscription] If the program lives, this road is too long:
I didn't naturally like to program, and I didn't think about the life of a programmer when I was in high school. I learned computer by accident. When my childhood friend went to college, I chose the computer department. In order to have more common language with this friend, I also chose the computer department and began to step into the path of programming life.
When I learned a little, I found that I especially like to write programs. I was in the Computer Science Department of Wuhan University in 1987, and I only had professional courses in the second semester of my freshman year. When I was qualified to get on the computer, I found the world of computers to be wonderful, and plunged into it. At that time, I used a Motorola 68000 (equivalent to Intel 8088), 540K of memory, running UNIX operating system, and eight people used it together. I studied PC in my sophomore year. After another semester, I began to appear in the teacher's laboratory to help with my work. At that time, I wrote the RI (RAMinit, a small tool for clearing memory) that many people use now. It seems that I was still the first batch to write. Shareware people). After another semester, I started to get in touch with off-campus companies. In the summer vacation of my sophomore year, that is, in August 1989, I formed the Yellow Rose software group with a friend and wrote my first commodity software, BITLOK 0.99. Later, I started a company and wrote some other software.
After graduating from university, I was assigned to a research institute, and I didn't quite adapt to the atmosphere there, so I joined Kingsoft in early 1992 and started my career as a professional programmer. Later, I became the director of Kingsoft's R&D department, but I have always been a first-line programmer.
Programming experience:
Programmers live in the kingdom of their own imagination
When I first came into contact with computers, I discovered the beauty of computers. Computers are far less complicated than people. If your programs are well written, you can have a good relationship with the computer, and you can direct the computer to do what you want. You are in full control at this time. Every time you sit in front of your computer, you are cruising around your kingdom, and these days are nothing short of heavenly. The world in the computer is huge, and programmers live in the kingdom of their own imagination. You can imagine everything in a computer down to every byte, every bit.
I love programming and I'm sure I'll do it for the rest of my life
Many people think that programmers can work until the age of thirty-five at most to change the environment. And think that writing programs is a matter of young people. When they reach a certain age, it is estimated that no one will be a programmer anymore.
When I first got a little bit of skill, I felt like everyone else that programming was hard, and I wanted to do something else after the age of 30. I discovered my ignorance when I got a little older. When a person graduates from college, he will be twenty-one or two years old. When he is a bit skilled, he may be twenty-five, and then he will live a lot of things. Maybe thirty-five years old when everything is settled. If so, we don't have to choose the path of a program's life. It has not been a long time since computers entered China, but the real large-scale use began with PCs in 1985. Therefore, people who actually write computer programs in China have been writing computer programs for more than ten years at the longest (I don’t know if there are still such people). . Due to the relatively short time of computer application in China, the main force of domestic development is young people under the age of 35. But that doesn't mean that programmers are as prone to aging as Pink Lady. The main engineers in the United States are mainly people in their thirties and forties.
At the beginning, we felt that there was nothing we couldn't do (I can still hear such rhetoric now), and what was even worse was that we seemed to be very smart, especially suitable for developing software, and much stronger than foreigners. When we actually got in touch with those outstanding developers, we found that they were amazing, with more than ten years of development experience. Although there are many young people who have done a lot of good things, the vast majority of products come from the hands of these programmers with rich development experience. When I first graduated, programming wasn't just a hobby, it became a lifetime job. I don't know what to write all day, I feel very bored, I can't find the feeling, and I feel very discouraged. Later, I realized that only with full dedication can the program feel.
The work of writing programs is very brain-intensive and very tiring, but I like it, and I am sure that I will do it for the rest of my life, although I have no intention of only doing this thing in my life. It's both easy and difficult to spend a lifetime programming. If you do nothing, write some programs for the intersection, such a day is too messy. But if you want to devote yourself to writing programs, it is not an easy task to write for ten years. Now many of my friends have washed their hands, and sometimes I also think "what computer are you using, isn't the world outside Windows also very big?". When facing the computer, I immediately realized that writing programs is still my best thing and my favorite thing.
Advanced programmers are not the goal
Some people learn programming technology, it is the goal of the pursuit of senior programmers, or even lifelong goals. Later, after participating in the real commercial software development, I became confused and at a loss.
As long as a person has tenacity and spirituality, and has the opportunity to touch and learn computer programming techniques, he will become a good programmer. At the beginning of writing programs, people who have learned more at this time can write well. Later, everyone has reached a level, and who can write well depends only on whether the person is careful, resilient, and spiritual. Master a little more or a little less, and you will soon be able to make up for it. Becoming a senior programmer is not difficult.
Senior programmers were also my goal when I was in school, and I wanted my skills to be recognized by others. Later, I found that no matter how advanced the programmer is, the key is whether you can come up with ideas and products, whether your labor can be recognized by the society, and can create wealth for the society. Becoming a senior programmer is definitely not a goal to pursue.
Programming isn't just a technology, it's an art
Some people think that programming is a skilled trade, and some people say that programming is an artistic creation. The two views are more contentious.
Let's look at it from another type of work. Masons should be skilled workers and belong to workers, and it seems that they have nothing to do with art. But it is these masons who have left us many cultural relics and monuments, such as the Leshan Giant Buddha, the Mogao Grottoes and so on. It should be said that these masons left us with endless cultural properties. The modern software industry has a considerable scale, and the completion of a lot of software requires large corps to fight. After an ordinary programmer accepts the task of writing a certain module, he often just writes the code and has little room to play. In large projects, many programmers can only understand very local details related to the modules they have compiled, and they are also limited by the development environment. It is really difficult to realize that they are engaged in "art" creation, and more often It is the feeling that you are doing heavy physical work. Sometimes I worry about whether the project I have worked so hard to participate in is meaningful, whether it is competitive with similar products, and whether it will become obsolete due to the development of hardware and the replacement of operating systems after it is developed...
I think programming work is more similar to masonry, with technical work and more manual work. After all, writing good software is not an easy task.
Both of these ideas are one-sided, and programming should say that it has both properties. Programming is not only a technique, but also an art. Programming is a technical activity, and it is possible to carry out on a large scale, and there will be software engineering and software factories. It is precisely because programming is an art that there are so many good products that make everyone fascinated.
Reply "1" in the official account to bring you into the fan group