17 posts
The seventeenth article in Thirty Years in IT and Me. In 2012, I left Baidu and joined Weibo as it was sprinting toward its IPO. Baidu's organizational atmosphere was starting to change, while Weibo stood at the intersection of mobile internet, social media, and big data platforms.
The sixteenth article in Thirty Years in IT and Me. In 2011, Baidu was still in the bright years of the Chinese internet. Big companies then were not only companies; they were large engineering schools where traffic, systems, search, ads, data, and internal technical discussion pushed programmers into bigger real-world engineering scenes.
The fifteenth article in Thirty Years in IT and Me. In 2010, I moved from a system-software company into Baidu. Baidu still had a strong engineering atmosphere then, and its internal Hi groups were full of technical discussion.
The fourteenth article in Thirty Years in IT and Me. Around 2009, GitHub began turning open-source collaboration from mailing lists, patches, and project homepages into a more visible and social daily workflow. In the same year, Weibo appeared, and information streams started reshaping the Chinese internet.
The thirteenth article in Thirty Years in IT and Me. In 2008, the App Store and the first Android phone pushed mobile phones from hardware products into software platforms. For someone still working in Linux and server systems, the real shift was not a smaller screen, but the migration of software distribution, user entry points, and developer ecosystems.
The twelfth article in Thirty Years in IT and Me. In 2007, the iPhone shifted the computing entry point, Android began taking shape, and VMware's IPO reminded the industry that both frontend entry points and backend infrastructure were changing. Around that year, I moved toward C++, GTK, and Linux cluster-management software.
The eleventh article in Thirty Years in IT and Me. In 2006, S3, EC2, Hadoop, Twitter, jQuery, and open-sourced Java pushed the internet into a new infrastructure stage. Servers were no longer only assets in machine rooms. They began to become capabilities that software could call, scale, and reorganize.
The tenth article in Thirty Years in IT and Me. In 2005, Web 2.0, YouTube, Google Maps, AJAX, Git, and open-source commercialization pushed software into the always-online era. Around those years, I also spent some time in Mountain View and saw the connection between the open-source world and Silicon Valley up close.
The ninth essay in Thirty Years in IT and Me. In 2004, Gmail, Firefox, Ubuntu, Facebook, Google's IPO, and MapReduce pushed the internet into a more complex stage. Inside a Linux company, Perl, PHP, Java, Shell, and early Python felt less like beliefs and more like tools within reach.
The eighth essay in Thirty Years in IT and Me. In 2003, SCO sued IBM, RHEL and Fedora took separate paths, and enterprise Linux kept moving forward. Free software and open source were no longer only ideals; they also had to face licenses, commercial support, and legal risk.
The seventh essay in Thirty Years in IT and Me. In 2002, Linux clearly moved from discs, forums, and idealism toward enterprise distributions, desktop experience, domestic software, and commercial support. My own experience was only one small angle inside that wave.
The sixth essay in Thirty Years in IT and Me. Around 2001, Linux was hot in China: distributions, technical magazines, communities, servers, and the imagination around domestic software intertwined. That line had actually been planted back in 1995, when I installed Slackware on a 386.
The fifth essay in Thirty Years in IT and Me. In 2000, I came to Beijing. CSDN could not offer the salary I expected, so I joined a foreign company instead. The internet bubble, portal fever, office stability, compensation rumors, and the network that remained together formed the air of that year.
The fourth essay in Thirty Years in IT and Me. In 1999, I built bank front-end systems on SCO UNIX and truly wrote socket code into a production link. Software stopped being only forms and reports; it began to carry transactions, connections, timeouts, logs, and responsibility.
The third essay in Thirty Years in IT and Me. In 1998, I began doing MIS development. The butterfly in the browser was light; enterprise forms were heavy. Delphi, databases, reports, and office workflows made software truly enter organizational daily life.
The second essay in Thirty Years in IT and Me. In 1997, I wrote a small JavaScript program that made a butterfly fly across a web page. It was tiny, but it flew through the browser war, the rise of DHTML, and the beginning of ECMAScript standardization.
The first essay in Thirty Years in IT and Me. From a 386, PDP-11, Slackware Linux, and ray tracing coursework to assembly-level development, the browser war, and the Web before standards settled down.