Author | Yan Hui Editor | Tu Min
Listing | CSDN (ID: CSDNnews)
Words are a silent force and an intangible and immeasurable wealth. As China's professional IT community, CSDN has millions of bloggers, and the content creation of these creators brings huge value to the entire technology ecosystem. At the same time, as a creator himself, his growth experience and practice have also established a good brand for himself.
In the second issue of the video dialogue column "Talk: Programmers Create Wealth Series" created by CSDN, we invited bloggers from the CSDN community and several influential experts in the technology circle to share their creative experience, including How to better create value, and how can developers seize the opportunity of creating wealth?
Guests of this issue:
Yan Hui (moderator), CSDN Strategic Cooperation Director
Xu Xiangwu (CSDN nickname: Tianyuan Langzi), senior data processing expert
Zhou Hehe, senior security architecture expert
An Xiaohui, career planner
Why did you start creating?
Yan Hui: Today is the second session in the series of programmers creating wealth - Creating Wealth ( the first session: Going overseas to create wealth ).
Jiang Tao, the founder of CSDN, recommended a book written by Hou Junjie, a technical writer in Taiwan - "Understanding MFC in a Simple and Easy Way". It is a very best-selling technical book and has sold tens of millions of yuan (the original price of the book and the number of copies) product of ). It’s amazing how impactful technical writing can be. At that time, I also had a dialogue with Mr. Hou Junjie, Lei Jun, and Jiang Tao, which was published in "Programmer" magazine.
It can be said that every generation of technology is accompanied by a new generation of technology evangelists and communicators. Please share with all the guests, what was the opportunity for your first creation and what was the reason for you to start creating?
Xu Xiangwu: Dear programmers and CSDN netizens, my nickname in CSDN is Tianyuan Langzi. It’s very interesting. I am a programmer in my 50s and I am often invited to discuss issues with many young people. Maybe my age and thinking may not keep up with the situation, but I am also happy to feel the pulse of the times.
Today’s topic is called “creating wealth”. As a creator, am I rich? I can only say that I am on the way.
Although I am a programmer in my 50s, my coding experience in CSDN is only 8 years. I've also wondered myself, what did you do before, why don't you have a CSDN account? Later, I remembered that I had registered in the early days. Later, because I was busy with work, I didn’t write anything. I just kept reading other people’s articles. Later, as I got older, my work became a little easier. At the same time, my daughter wanted to learn programming, and I wanted to help her learn it together. This was also the original intention of the creation.
I still remember the topic of the first article I wrote was MSN Three Musketeers. The so-called MSN refers to the most famous football stars: Messi, Neymar and Suarez on the one hand, and the three most famous modules in the Python field on the other hand: Matplotlib + Scipy + Numpy. I have been writing this article intermittently for half a year and have invested a lot of energy in it. It mainly shares how to use these modules for mathematical modeling. Half a year later, Python training became popular overnight, and many people found me, hoping to cooperate with me or invite me to give lectures.
Because I don’t want to cooperate with an organization, I just want to write online by myself and start the formal creation of blogs. I am the kind of person who is particularly strenuous in writing. When writing an article, I will revise and consider it repeatedly, so it often takes several days to produce an article. In the first two years, I wrote a maximum of 50 articles each year, and later I could only write 20 articles each year.
When the epidemic started in 2019, CSDN happened to launch the Blog Star selection event. I signed up at that time. It was also that year that there were so many programmers who wanted to learn Python. Many netizens would read my articles and finally vote for me. I was very honored to get first place in the Blog Star event that year. Later, it also became a paid column. The price was very cheap, 1.9 yuan per copy, and nearly 10,000 copies were sold.
An Xiaohui: I have also read "A Simple Guide to MFC" by Hou Junjie. That book is really a classic.
In 2008, I was doing Windows GUI programming development, and I would also write a blog to record the process of solving problems. Later, I stopped because I was very busy doing development and worked overtime every day.
In 2013, I started working in R&D management, thinking I could try something more interesting. At that time, I had been making Internet TV boxes, using an embedded Linux system, and the upper framework was Qt. At that time, I wanted to share some of my experience accumulated on Qt, which might also be helpful to others. So blogging resumed, which continued for many years.
Zhou Hehe: I graduated in 2013 and started working. I registered a CSDN account in 2018 and started blogging in 2020. You started writing after working for 7 years. Why? Everyone actually knows that because programmers are very busy, they don’t have much free time to learn and share.
Work is less hectic after 2020, plus I like taking notes. Today is an era of knowledge explosion. Programmers have a lot to learn. In the process of learning, maybe a knowledge point is the result of three or five days of research. However, after studying it thoroughly, it may be forgotten in a year and a half. , so taking notes is very important.
I used voice notes before, but then I came into contact with CSDN and found that CSDN's Markdown editor is very easy to use and makes writing very smooth, so I am not willing to use other cloud notes, Word, TXT, etc.
I work in very low-level security technology, and it is difficult to find information online, including English information. I mainly relied on myself to learn step by step. After I recorded and published all my accumulated experiences in notes, I found that some people liked and collected them, which also provided me with new motivation.
Starting from June 2020, I spent half a year outputting nearly 200 articles. If I search on Baidu, Google and other search engines using related terms, I can account for more than half of the first 20 articles on the result page. Some are CSDN blogs, and some are articles crawled by other websites. Of course, because the industry I work in is relatively narrow, several keywords are also relatively narrow.
From this, I also accumulated a small reputation in CSDN, and continued to output three to four hundred articles in 2021. So far, there are more than 700 articles in total. Personally, I had no pursuit or purpose when I first started writing articles. As the number of fans increased, I wrote more seriously, hoping to be recognized by netizens.
Writing a blog, in addition to improving my technical strength, also brings me some other values. For example, when meeting some customers, when discussing certain technologies, I may search for my blog, and then look at the author of the blog. It also has a similar name to my WeChat account, which makes it gradually easier to communicate with others.
The driving force behind continuous creation
Yan Hui: Creating is actually a very hard process, especially if you have to continue creating. What is the driving force behind your continued creation? What stories happened?
Xu Xiangwu: For me, the real motivation for writing comes from the joy brought by sharing. There will be some income during the writing process, but if this income affects my sharing, I would rather not. What I like more is the sense of accomplishment that sharing brings. Being recognized and liked is the greatest joy of writing.
Some college students and graduate students who write papers sometimes come to ask questions after searching for my articles. I have several articles on sector image data conversion, which I have to update every other year, because students keep asking this question, and I need to keep updating the content.
There are also programmers who work on radars in the defense industry, and they will discuss issues with me. I have also written code for them, all for free.
Helping others makes me happier than making money myself. The biggest motivation for creation is the happiness of sharing.
An Xiaohui: I originally worked on Qt, and the GUI on the Internet TV box uses these technologies. In 2013, I mainly wrote about this aspect of blogging. In fact, Qt is a relatively niche framework, and there was not much information online at that time. After the article is published, I often read the comments. Some people like it, and some people leave messages saying that this article just solves the problem they encountered. This is also a kind of motivation.
Writing is essentially a form of communication. Like me, many programmers are relatively introverted. They may be able to write long articles on blogs, but in reality they are not very talkative. For these programmers, writing itself is communication and a form of social interaction.
There is an author ranking list on the CSDN platform. When you see the ranking gradually moving upward, from thousands of miles away to within 10,000, then to thousands, and finally to within 100, it is also a sense of accomplishment.
Sometimes when I'm looking for a job, someone comes to me with my book and asks. Writing can get feedback, and this relationship can move from articles to reality and offline. These will drive us to keep writing because it is positive feedback. With positive feedback, there will be a sense of meaning and value.
Zhou Hehe: I talk about it from two perspectives, one is a vanity perspective, and the other is a pragmatic perspective.
In the first dimension, many fans sent me private messages and praised the article for its excellent writing. Later, I also wrote a paid column, and the feedback was also very good. Later, I also discovered that the course I wrote was actually paid attention to by overseas programmers, and the language was not in Chinese. The other person said that the translation software he used included programmers from the United States and South Korea. This gave me a great sense of accomplishment, and even made me feel... You can go bragging.
The second driving force comes from the pressure from readers, because I am engaged in the security of the underlying architecture, the industry is narrow, the technology is relatively professional, and the knowledge points are difficult. Although the audience is limited, the number of readers has increased in the past two years, and the number of likes, collections, and comments has increased day by day, which has also created pressure on me. Many people ask deep questions, and these reasons also motivate me to keep learning to make up for the shortcomings.
I think that continuous creation means continuous learning and continuous growth.
Yan Hui: Many of the driving forces for sharing are the interactive recognition of readers. When we talk about creating wealth today, on the one hand, it is wealth in money, and on the other hand, it also comes from spiritual wealth, the recognition brought to us by readers.
Zhou Hehe: In addition to spiritual wealth, I think writing is learning, and technology is growing during the learning process, which is also a great wealth.
Xu Xiangwu: I very much agree with Mr. Zhou’s point of view. Although sometimes writing cannot directly create wealth, it can indirectly create wealth. By improving your own ability, you can create more opportunities at work, make better achievements, get more projects, and earn more money.
I'm in my 50s and basically closed minded. But I kept writing before the closure, which can delay the closure of thinking and allow me to accept more new things.
Everyone in our team is very busy and has no time to write. I only have a little time to write, but my personal writing can drive the productivity of the entire team. In recent years, not only I personally feel that I have gained something, but also the entire team has gained something. In the fields of space weather and satellite data processing, we were the first to use Python, and we were very competitive at the time. If you are competitive, you can get more projects in your own business field, which is also a direct manifestation of creating wealth through writing.
An Xiaohui: Creation can promote the improvement of ability, expand the boundary of ability, and do a better job. At the same time, it can also directly create wealth. For example, the books of Mr. Hou Junjie are popular and best-selling. For those who have accumulated technology, writing books can also make money.
The comic algorithm written by programmer Xiao Hui has sold 100,000 copies of the two books, and the royalties may be hundreds of thousands. So writing itself can also bring in income.
Different incomes have different meanings. The income from receiving projects and the income from writing articles belong to two different feelings in our hearts.
In 2013, after I started blogging, a publisher contacted me to write two books on Qt. One is "Core Programming with Qt on Android" and the other is "Core Programming with Qt". The two books seem to have sold about 10,000 copies and earned tens of thousands of yuan in royalties. The income you get through this is different from getting a salary of tens of thousands of yuan every month. You will feel that the tens of thousands of yuan you earn from writing a book makes you particularly happy.
I will have a dedicated account for the income I bring in from things I love doing. Writing a book is an account, and doing courses is also an account. I am now doing career planning consulting, and this income is different from the income from writing books. You will find that each type of income comes with a different meaning. When you have multiple sources of income, it makes multiple senses.
Secondly, the marginal cost of created content is 0. The actual working time is sold to the boss and cannot be sold to others. However, the created content will have the characteristics of being sold in batches over time. It only requires a certain amount of labor and can be copied infinitely with the help of Internet media. The marginal cost is 0.
Creation can directly create wealth, and there is no ceiling. Its characteristics are one-to-many and batch replication. For programmers, a dumbbell management model can be adopted. One end of the dumbbell is a stable job with a stable salary. The other end can be creation, so I like to write blogs and books. This is the same as everyone's asset allocation. First, you need to allocate some stable assets, and then buy various insurances, monetary funds, bonds, funds, and then you can also buy certificates of deposit, trusts, etc. Make a dumbbell allocation of your own time. One end is low-risk and stable work, and the other end is creative work. Media, courses, audio, etc. are all products with a marginal cost of 0.
Opportunities may surprise you. As long as a programmer is willing to write things, taking the path of creation is a very good way. Making money through creation is very honorable, but talking about money is not shameful. All creations can create wealth, and this meaning is also given by yourself.
Creation vs. coding, how do programmers switch between different roles?
Yan Hui: Creators have given us a lot of inspiration. First of all, don’t avoid talking about wealth or making money. The second is to create businesses that can help us generate more revenue. For example, a friend once wrote a book on software development management. Although the book did not sell for much money, because he was the author of the book, he gradually became a senior lecturer. Many major companies also invited him to give lectures and teach more. The benefits from consulting were substantial enough to support his full-time transition. In other words, through creation, you can form a brand and IP, and then obtain more monetization models. So, what are the similarities and differences between creating and writing code?
Xu Xiangwu: I divide online articles into three categories.
The first category is to stop talking and go straight to the code. Stacking code is a very programmer style. Many programmers think that talking is useless, as long as there are comments in the code. This is typical programmer thinking.
The second approach is like mine. I will spend a long time talking about the preface, and the talk will be colorful. Once I get to the topic later, I will rarely have a long talk. And I will find a way to write an eye-catching title.
The third category is the best. It has a very consistent sense of rhythm. It is explained in detail from the beginning to the end and every step is explained very clearly. There are also codes and detailed instructions.
Articles are basically divided into these three categories. I rarely write about the third category, but I will never write about the first category. Most of the articles I write fall into the second category.
During the writing process, I also try to think of more creative titles. Before, I wrote an article "Python for Beginners". The title is simple and clear, and it also allows readers to understand the applicable groups. In the end, this article received relatively large visits; I also wrote "Python's Top Ten Pretentious Grammars", which The name is obviously more exciting; I also wrote an article titled "An evening song of the MFC era, and a swan song of idealism", which contains some very strong personal opinions, which is quite literary. I think there is no harm in choosing a good title, as long as it is not irrelevant to the topic. After all, it is a personal creation, and there is still a certain amount of freedom.
An Xiaohui: I am different from others. I write articles first and then code. Writing an article is actually a creation from scratch. First conceive the characters, stories, and plots, and then write them out after straightening out. It will be fun to create. Later I discovered that software development is also a creative job. From this perspective, doing software development is similar to writing articles, they are both a process of creating and having fun.
After doing software development for several years in the past, I found that both software and articles should pay attention to logic and splitting. The software needs to design business logic and design interactions between modules. The modules can be dismantled from top to bottom, and different modules can interact. With logic training, it will be easy to write articles with a clear and logical structure.
Another feature of the code is that it is highly practical. Every line of code has a role, and the products developed should also solve user problems. After a long period of training, I also have this tendency when writing articles. Every article must be practical and helpful to readers.
Therefore, code and documentation must be original, logical, and practical. From these three points, an excellent programmer can easily become an excellent technical article writer.
Zhou Hehe : Writing a blog is actually writing code. Many times when programming, the brain thinks about the structure, and the code is just an implementation. There are texts, pictures, and a small amount of code in the blog. The text and pictures are enough to describe the principle scheme clearly. A good programmer thinks he is reading text, but in fact all he reads is code, and the required code has already been constructed in his mind.
However, I think writing a book is very different from blogging. Blogging is free play, and it doesn't matter if you throw all 20 knowledge points into a blog. However, writing a book requires first having a big theme, then first-level headings, second-level headings, setting up all the frameworks, and then filling it in. This is a difficult task. When writing a blog, you can have the content first and then the title, but when writing a book, you must first have the title and then fill in the content. Therefore, blogging has a very high space for free play, but writing a book has a threshold.
Yan Hui: You have written so many articles. What kind of people are the readers? What are their levels and needs?
Xu Xiangwu: My readership can be divided into at least three categories:
The first category belongs to novices, who especially hope to find entry-level readings and articles that can teach them step by step. This is what they like best.
The second category is readers who are particularly directional, such as those who study machine learning, deep learning, and data processing. These readers will deliberately search for information in this area. If the blog has content in this area, they will leave a message or send a private message to contact them. .
The third category of readers is interesting. They are particularly concerned about employment issues. What they consider is not how to learn the technology, but whether this technology can find a job. This is actually quite difficult to answer, because the span between learning skills and finally finding a job is too long.
There is overlap between the first category and the third category. The first category can account for 30%; the second category used to be relatively small, but in the past two years everyone has grown up, and it can account for 40 to 50%. The naivety can be seen from the depth of questions. There are almost no problems; the remaining 30% may be about employment and quick entry.
As a blogger, it is actually difficult to take care of these three needs at the same time. Basically, I will focus on one reader group and take into account the others.
An Xiaohui: My readers are divided into stages. This year, the books I wrote are mainly geared towards successful career changes and career review, and the articles are more related to the workplace and career development. So I attract readers who want to do a better job, find a more ideal job, and want their career development to be smoother.
It turns out that when writing a technical blog, there are two issues that readers are most concerned about. One is whether the problem can be solved and whether the solutions and codes in the technical articles can be used. They don't pay much attention to how the articles are described. These readers search for a certain type of articles with a purpose. So when I write technical blogs, they basically focus on how to solve problems. All the codes in the articles have been run in the field.
There is another category that wants to solve certain obstacles. Because many people have left comments or private messages at the end of the article saying that there is a problem in the operation of the code and how to solve it.
Zhou Hehe: I have written more than 700 articles, but I don’t have many fans. There are two types of readers of mine. The first type is those who are looking for questions and answers. Let me see if the title of your article can solve this problem for me. The other type is because the columns are very good and you need to study them systematically and buy them all.
Yan Hui: Thanks to the three creators for communicating with you, and thank you for using the CSDN platform to provide a lot of valuable content. For creators, writing a technical blog is the first step and is relatively easy. Through blogging, you can gradually build a fan base and extend more services.
Everyone also talked about some of the reasons and driving forces for creating, as well as the value gained. I believe that in the process of creation, it not only adds monetary value to individuals, but also creates a lot of value and wealth to society. This is our greater concept of creating wealth.
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" If programmers want to achieve financial freedom, how should they go overseas?" "
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