The "Remains of the Day" chronicle, marathon journals, history and mathematics reading notes, travel dispatches, and reflections on life.
Another sweltering Saturday, the smog still blanketing Beijing. As my wife and mother-in-law roam the toy stores at Solana, I sit with my daughter by the ice rink, watching two boys drill—and slip into a long meditation on what makes a great programmer.
My grandfather marched into Xinjiang; my father studied late and moved the family south. Their stories shaped me. Now a father myself, I ask what stories I will have to tell—and find meaning in books, travel, and wisdom.
Reading starts as entertainment and knowledge; add experience, understanding, and insight, and it becomes wisdom. 'Must-read' is a coercive, utilitarian phrase—Jobs's calligraphy class reminds us that dots connect only looking backward.
After an eleven-hour flight, this programmer lands safely in San Francisco — and stumbles into an unexpected good deed that earns him praise from airport staff and a stranger's lasting gratitude.
Four days driving alone through California — Tahoe, Yosemite, Universal Studio, Highway 1 — with a GPS for company and thoughts drifting from cscope grammars to the fisherman parable. A meditation on solitude and why we strive: to earn the right to choose.
From a recorded Serie A match watched beside my father to a lifetime of devotion to Juventus and the Azzurri, these are World Cup memories — of fandom, fatherhood, and the cruel arithmetic of growing four years older every time the tournament returns.
With the World Cup more than halfway through, staying up every night to watch will push your body to its limit. On match-free nights, sleep well, move more, and get fit—especially if you neglect exercise and carry the “three highs.”
The internet's new economy has been reshaping how we work for two decades, and programmers stand first in line. The future may belong to small, self-organizing teams that behave like writers — owning projects end to end, earning both immediate and long-term rewards, and living with the work rather than simply clocking in.
On July 18, Beijing Marathon pre-registration opened with two paths before me: half or full. I chose the full — and learned that finishing alive would demand far more than courage: a plan, and systematic training.
At the end of July I published an essay titled “The Marathon Suddenly Became a Serious Matter.” I never imagined that within a month this “serious” matter would become real—and that I would run my first full marathon.
After six months of training, race day dawned with PM2.5 near 400 — and I ran anyway. On holding pace, hitting the wall, a knee that betrayed me, and why a goal you chase for yourself is worth every sneer.
A visa stuck in 'administrative processing,' a relocation that stalls out every time it builds momentum, and three bosses gone in six months — this is the story of pushing a boulder uphill and watching it roll back down. Blackly funny, stubbornly hopeful.
A trip is like a dream — unreal, and yet shot through with truth. Nine days driving the California coast with my family through Carmel, Highway 1, Solvang, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles and San Diego — and discovering, by the end, that this isn't really a travelogue at all.
After more than half a year in the U.S., and a return trip to Southern California, I was eager for a new journey. With four extra days off around Independence Day, we assembled a nine-day drive north to Seattle.
After every lottery slipped away, I stumbled into the Portland Marathon — a citywide festival of music, brutal hills, Vaseline lollipops, and one remarkable woman striding on trekking poles. A story of cramps and the quiet lesson that wanting to give everything isn't always enough.
If I had never started this public account, I would never have met haofei. A chance sublet turned into friendship, and eventually an introduction to a startup that sponsored my O-1 visa—proof that scattered efforts can connect in hindsight.
At the end of 2014 I wrote down a summary of that year and my hopes for 2015. Now it's time again to review 2015 and look ahead to 2016 — a year of marathons, books, library trips, and a hundred hours of tech talks watched at 1.5x speed.
Reading your own diary is like talking with your past self. This 2015 retrospective curates essays from my WeChat account on choosing jobs, programmer productivity, engineering culture, languages, concurrency, APIs, AWS, products, and life in America.
Anna shouts into my work call, begs me to play, demands true love on demand, offers an impromptu haircut, and hijacks my own scolding lines about fruit. A day in the life of a father thoroughly outmaneuvered by his three-year-old.
Every morning begins with a fifteen-minute gauntlet to catch the 6:13 train — same car, same seat, same sleeping seatmates. Notes on commutes, startup neighbors, and the quiet arithmetic of endurance.
A sunny Saturday morning becomes a scammer's trap when a terrifying pop-up and a suspicious "Apple support" call nearly trick the author into handing over control of his computer. A firsthand account of phishing, social engineering, and the habit that saved the day.
On August 22, 2016, my UA889 flight landed at SFO, and a routine Advance Parole stamp sent me into the customs “little black room,” where I spent ninety minutes watching anxious travelers, bureaucratic indifference, and small human dramas unfold.
After returning from China, I let my running slide and hit the marathon wall at 17 km. This essay asks why that painful limit is so instructive—and why careers, relationships, and startups have walls of their own.
On the eve of Thanksgiving 2012 our first son was born in Beijing; four years later, on the eve of National Day 2016, our second arrived in Santa Clara County. A father compares childbirth in Beijing and Silicon Valley—hardware, software, and mindset.
December is tubitv's busiest month: advertisers burn their budgets, users binge on TV, and our streaming service prays it stays up. A year-end medley of my 2016 writing on naming, refactoring, APIs, and the programmer's life.
After college, my father and I wrote often. I read Fu Lei's Family Letters but never envied Fu Cong, for I too had a capable father who guided me as mentor and friend. Now the baton has passed to me, and despite two degrees and years of experience, I am still learning how to be a good father.
Last night I had three terrible dreams in a row. Worse than the dreams themselves: I remembered all three in perfect detail, and after waking could recount every one of them to my wife. After dinner, Xiaobao asked to play in the yard for ten minutes — then the yard went silent...
From my first WeChat article in 2014, I somehow wrote 386 pieces in just over three years—on technology, management, startups, and assorted musings. This is what small persistence can unleash: day by day, scattered fragments quietly gather into something wonderful.
Three years of steady writing never once prompted me to improve my craft systematically. Believing in learning by practicing and by teaching, I kept laying down soil week after week—until I finally went looking for the theory that would let me tamp it down.
The biggest event of 2018 finally landed: at dawn on a Thursday, Tubi TV moved all its services and data from one AWS region to another — a project we called Move to Oregon. A one-way door: either it worked, or six months of engineering vanished and the company's future dimmed.
When Su Shi was asked whether Lingnan was unlivable, his answer came back: where the heart is at peace, there is home. My parents gave me the restless gene, and I have passed it on without stint to my daughters — Xinjiang, Gansu, Guangdong; Beijing, the Valley, Seattle.
After a year and a half abroad, I returned to Beijing on a business trip—only to be struck by the heat, the traffic, the O2O revolution, the fervor of its entrepreneurs, and the quiet terror of inflation and school-district housing.
Four years and two hundred and five days into America — five cities, two states, and a plan that mostly held. Then a trip home, a young friend's sudden death, and a meditation on how Confucius, Laozi, and Zhuangzi taught us to face illness and mortality.
Readers of the Zizhi Tongjian smile at its opening formula—the book's own cant, a password among initiates. So I built a filmstrip edition: fragments, living annotations, maps, and audio, all made by code.
As summer drew to a close, my wife asked what I wanted her to bring back from China. A friend had been raving about *Unflattening* — a doctoral dissertation told entirely in comics. Two readings later, I realized it had done something rare: not taught me anything new, but reawakened what I already knew.
My affair with the Portland Marathon began by accident, and it turned out to be a citywide music festival wearing a marathon's bib. Here is the story of my third official marathon: the training, the fall, the crowds, and a long-sought answer about happiness.
A colleague once asked how I manage to write such rich, substantive essays. The answer comes down to two things: writing with a purpose, and keeping a place — a pensieve — where knowledge, thoughts, and inspiration can be captured before they slip away.
A reader asked for more of the videos I've watched, so for 1024 Day I've gone all in and rounded up the talks that hit me straight in the soul — high-definition, uncensored, and utterly mind-expanding. These are the lectures that shaped how I think about tools, systems, simplicity, and craft.
Halloween, 31 OCT, is also 25 DEC—so it’s Programmer’s Christmas. A dry joke about number bases leads into polynomials, odd carry systems, and why math’s “useless” ideas can still delight.
For most of my children's upbringing I was the absentee father, giving my time to work and writing. Then a near-rupture at home forced me to commit to a nightly lesson plan — and to learn that math taught as an art, not a formula manual, can captivate a seven-year-old.
Our little one came home from a piano competition defeated and sulked for days. To cheer her up, my wife picked out an inspirational film, Akeelah and the Bee, and we watched it together. I drew strength from it too — above all, the reminder of how much a harmonious family matters to a child.
A ten-year retrospective across startups, Silicon Valley, family, marathons, and writing—a meditation on how small choices compound into a life, and why time rewards those who understand and steward it.
In the blink of an eye, a twelfth of 2020 is gone — has your New Year plan kept pace? After a month of outrage over attacks on doctors and anxiety over Wuhan's outbreak, I send New Year wishes along with a guide to a long holiday without regret: books, Rust, and time with the kids.
A 1,100-page history of mathematics written over ten years by a Swedish surgeon — a map of the mathematical world running from the birth of number to the differential equation, explaining why every concept had to be invented.
