Graduation#
In the first half of this year, I finally graduated from the school I had attended for seven years. This was a relief for me.
How do I evaluate the significance of my graduate school experience?
On one hand, I underwent the most significant changes during my graduate phase. I found what I truly enjoy doing and formed my own worldview. I learned front-end development, participated in open source, worked remotely, searched for jobs, and left behind traces worth recording in almost every time period. If you're interested in these, you can read these two articles.
https://hyoban.xlog.app/work-one-year
https://hyoban.xlog.app/24-years
On the other hand, for someone like me who is not good at or fond of research, these were also the days when I encountered the most frustrating issues. The matters related to school and mentors were hard to spark my interest, and the overall environment was difficult to relate to freedom. In the end, three years resulted in a patchwork thesis and a pass that eased my entry into society. Fortunately, I met some wonderful classmates who brought me a lot of comfort.
Work#
After graduation, I worked at Meituan for two months.
How was the work experience at Meituan?
To be honest, the overall work experience at Meituan was quite good. I could basically leave work around seven or eight every day, and the tasks were not too complicated. My colleagues and leaders in the team were also very nice. If I didn't have a more ideal and free job, working here temporarily would be fine. However, this was ultimately a job where my role felt more like a cog in the machine, and living in Beijing while renting was not what I wanted.
Why was I able to decisively choose to leave the internet?
From many people's perspective, quitting a "stable" job at an internet company early after graduation doesn't seem like a prudent choice, but I could make this decision without any hesitation. Because my long-held ideal has always been to obtain a remote open-source job, doing what I love and living freely. As a saying I like goes, Don’t do what you should do, do what you want. (This was said by Russ Hanneman in the TV show Silicon Valley; although he is unreliable, this statement is still very true.)
Starting in September, I joined RSS3 and successfully transitioned to a full-time position three months later.
How did I find such an ideal and free job?
It's actually quite simple; I just kept doing what I loved.
- My contributions to projects related to xLog and RSSHub, which I really like and have been using, led me to meet DIYgod.
- I saw the new Follow project opened by DIYgod this year, which matched my vision of an RSS reader, so I got involved in the project early.
- My participation in the Follow project led to an invitation to officially join as a full-time developer.
The starting point for doing these things was that I really enjoyed them, without considering what they could bring me. If I hadn't obtained a full-time job at Follow, I would still participate in my spare time; these are things I would willingly do even without payment. From my experience, this way, you are more likely to feel happiness and fulfillment, achieving an outcome you like. It's like playing a game without deliberately grinding for tasks or following guides to achieve perfection.
How is the work at RSS3?
After joining RSS3, my feeling is that I have come to a place where I can stay for at least 10 years. I currently can't find any drawbacks; this is the most suitable job for me.
- In the Follow project, no one assigns you tasks; you find things to do driven by your interests, and the products are open source.
- The team atmosphere is very friendly, and I feel I can become good friends with any member of the team.
- Completely remote work with no fixed hours allows for a good balance between work and life.
- The salary and benefits are uncompromising; I don't have to worry about the struggles of living. (This is the least important.)
Open Source#
This year, I started a monthly sponsorship plan for open source, with a budget of $20 per month.
Who did I sponsor? How much did I spend in total?
You can see who or what projects I have sponsored on my GitHub, open collective, and 爱发电 homepage. Most of them are projects I use or authors of blogs I read.
The specific sponsorship amounts are as follows, totaling approximately $253.35, averaging about $21.11 per month.
- GitHub $168.06
- open collective 47.58 sgd
- 爱发电 270 cny
How do I sponsor? Why do I sponsor the community monthly?
At first, I chose to sponsor certain people on a monthly basis for the long term, along with Anthony Fu's sponsorship forwarding plan. However, I later found that this limited the open-source authors I could support, so I chose to manually sponsor a one-time amount of $5 each time.
I use many open-source authors' projects daily, but the work of many of them may be overlooked, and they do not receive corresponding rewards. I believe that continuing this way is detrimental to the development of the open-source community, so I want to do my part for it.
This year, I also received sponsorship from some people, and I am very grateful to cuikaipeng, Hakadao, and emiyaaaaa for their support; I will consider this money as part of my sponsorship budget for next year.
This year, I successfully got a small project of mine used by others and made a small contribution in Follow.
Are there any projects I want to share?
- tailwindcss-classname-highlight highlights the class names in your code files that will correctly generate to CSS; this year it supported tailwind v4 beta. I also extracted the part that interacts with the tailwind API and released tailwind-api-utils.
- eslint-config-hyoban is an ESLint preset that I think is quite good, mainly containing plugins and rules related to React and TypeScript. If you are using it and have rules or plugins you want to configure, feel free to open an issue for me to add them.
You can find more projects on my GitHub homepage.
What open-source projects am I currently focusing on?
Since my full-time open-source work is to work on Follow, most of my time is spent on development related to Follow. Sometimes I also submit PRs to upstream projects based on the needs and issues I encounter during development. For example, I recently worked on some auth-related features and fixed a small bug in better-auth; overall, it is a very useful auth-related library with rich integrations.
Life#
After leaving Beijing, I started a life of traveling in different cities. This year I went to Qingdao, Zhengzhou, Nanjing, Chengdu, Changsha, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and Shanghai.
How do I travel and balance work and life?
The overall rhythm this year was to change cities every one or two weeks, mostly choosing places where I already had classmates or friends. I stayed fixed in one city from Monday to Friday, finding a stable place to work. Since I had classmates in the area, I could often crash at their place. On weekends, I would fly or take a train to the next city, possibly wandering around randomly or meeting friends for a meal.
This sounds more like constantly changing places to work. I am not someone who enjoys checking in at various tourist spots, and if my week is filled with work and play, I won't have enough energy. So, the traveling life in the second half of the year was divided into two parts; in October, I stayed home to avoid the National Day holiday and rest, and after finishing my trip to Guangzhou, I returned home to relax.
Next year, I plan to extend my stay in different places to at least a month, reducing my travel fatigue and giving me more time to experience each city.
Is there anything worth mentioning?
Thanks to my work at Follow, I recorded an episode of web worker with team members. Since it is a program I have always enjoyed listening to, I felt excited to have the opportunity to appear on it.
Although I haven't become a very proactive or outgoing person yet, this year I also met some friends I had previously interacted with online in person, gradually overcoming the issue of not being able to thrive in unfamiliar environments. I am very grateful to the friends who were willing to interact and have fun with me (situ, cosine, 雪谋, Hakadao, qiuqiu). New friends are also welcome to connect with me; I am very open to meeting new people, and we can grab a meal or hang out together.
This year, I gradually started buying some digital equipment I hadn't purchased before.
What notable items did I buy? What do I plan to buy next?
- nuphy air 60 v2 I used a low-profile keyboard for the first time, and with its size and weight, it became a great companion for my Mac while traveling.
- AirPods 4th generation I used wireless noise-canceling headphones for the first time; I found they play a crucial role in many scenarios during my travels.
- PS5 My first gaming console; I only started playing Red Dead Redemption 2 in 2024, and I welcome everyone to recommend games to me.
I also want to buy a NAS, but the recommendations are varied, and I'm a bit unsure about which model to choose. Next year, I plan to get a new computer; my current M1 Pro is a bit insufficient, mainly because it only has 16GB of memory.
Emotions#
This year was also another year of being single; I welcome everyone to introduce me to potential partners. However, I feel it will be quite difficult for me to find someone because I am short (under 1.7 meters) and not very good-looking.
I used to hope that I wouldn't gradually become distant from friends due to a lack of daily interactions, but I am now gradually accepting this fact.
Summary#
Alright, this is my year-end summary for 2024. For me, 2024 was a year of realizing dreams and the starting point of a new journey. I hope that in the future, I can continue to be a free and interesting person, keep doing what I love, and plan well for my future days.
As you can see, there are no pictures in this summary because I still haven't developed the habit of taking photos worth storing. I hope to cultivate the habit of recording life next year, making next year's summary more colorful.