A Little Recap Catching September's Tail End, Happy Birthday to the Motherland~

The one-month practical training wrapped up on the 27th. I figure summer is about to end too—there's autumn in the air everywhere.

This month in Guangzhou was still mainly about studying. What you can learn at the training class is quite limited, but I did tinker with quite a few things on my own, and it felt pretty good.

On the Technical Learning Side

You can't say the training class was useless—at least it was a frontend crash course. On that foundation I read some books myself and learned layout, animation, and a bit of JS. JS is actually pretty handy; I take back my earlier prejudice~ (just hadn't seen much of it)

I also used JS to make a few fun things, like auto-spamming danmaku on Douyu and Bilibili, cracking NetEase Cloud Music downloads, and so on. I'll paste the JS for Douyu danmaku spamming, for learning purposes only (I've already been banned~)

setInterval(() => {
    document.querySelector('.ChatSend-txt').value = document.querySelector('#js-barrage-list').lastChild.getElementsByClassName('Barrage-content')[0].innerText;
    document.querySelector('.ChatSend-button').click();
}, 500);

As for JS, I also dabbled a bit in node.js and electron. nodejs is nice; electron lets you write cross-platform software, which was right up my alley, but debugging felt pretty annoying, and my JS skills are too noob, so when other things came up I didn't go deeper.

Then I took leave for the Linux ops class and didn't learn it. After that the Java class was an intro to SpringBoot, which is pretty convenient for quickly developing website backends. But Spring's inherent flaws are still there—the ORM is awkward, the language is rigid, development is time-consuming, those issues remain. In China's environment, saying anything bad about Java really gets you flamed, but I still want to say C# is awesome, long live Python, Go silently owns all (flees

Setting aside the limitations of the language and framework themselves, the Java teacher in the last two weeks still taught pretty well—covering JavaEE development, basic design patterns, using vue.js on the frontend for two-way data binding, and even a bit of deploying with Docker. Just in terms of what was taught in class, it was already more useful than a whole semester of the school's JSP course = =. I'm not trying to put down the school's teaching; the school really does lag far behind actual demand in applied tech. That's a force majeure kind of thing, and you can't blame the teachers, but the school is still solid on the fundamentals.

The image below is what we studied in the last two weeks.

Yeah, looks decent enough, haha~

Besides what I learned at the training class, I tinkered with a lot of new stuff myself, like Go. Gotta say, deploying it is way too convenient—it solves the pain points of backend development. It's just that the language is still a bit weak in features; I don't really get its design philosophy, but as long as it's useful, that's fine. (The BeeGo framework is pretty nice. More and more homegrown Chinese frameworks showing up in IT, nice)

Then there's .Net Core. This platform's momentum is fierce. There's a pile of projects on GitHub, covering everything from desktop, web, mobile, and game development to machine learning, blockchain, cloud computing, you name it. Go on any community and there's still a bunch of javers talking it down, but I always feel this platform's momentum can't be stopped—someday it'll take out a lot of currently popular tech~

I'd used .Net Core for desktop development before, and recently I tinkered with web and game development. One word: awesome. But with unity, the network's been terrible lately; those packages often fail to import. Looks like this matebook of mine isn't suited for game development—I can only write frontend, alas.

I found a blog system written in .Net Core on GitHub and was blown away. The design can go toe-to-toe with WordPress. Here's a screenshot—I even kind of want to just use this system for my blog, and turn the pages I designed earlier into an Angular theme~

Blog homepage:

Dashboard:

I actually found a Django blog system too, also pretty good, but I just feel python's performance can never match C#? So this one's better, and you can switch themes too, hahaha.

On the tech side, lastly I'll post my redesigned blog homepage~

It uses Metro design. When the tiles haven't loaded yet it looks like this. Each tile flips, with different flip timings, and the content after flipping updates in real time:

I can't post a screenshot with the tile images loaded, because the network is so bad right now I really can't load them. I'll dash off another post when the blog goes live~

Thoughts on Learning

Nearing graduation, every day I watch classmates around me cramming interview questions and discussing interview experiences and takeaways, and I realize how lucky I am that I can still treat programming purely as a hobby~

No matter how fun something is, once it becomes a work assignment, once it turns into the pressure of making a living, it all goes flavorless…… But facing reality, we have no choice.

Every night I usually stay in the classroom coding or reading until a bit past eleven before going back to the dorm. There are also lots of classmates in the classroom doing various things. For a moment it felt a bit like senior-year evening self-study in high school, haha… though this evening study is way too chill…

Above I only talked about what I learned, without mentioning the actual experience of the training class, which might mislead some classmates into signing up. But there's a senior from school in the same dorm who actually paid real money to attend. He complains almost every day that those tens of thousands of yuan went down the drain. Anyway, summing up all the complaints: don't sign up for training classes, and especially don't come to the one we're at now. There's some personal emotion in it, but based on my actual experience most of it is fair. From the attitude toward students to the actual service, training classes really aren't worth the money and time.

Let me be a bit more specific. As the saying goes, "it takes ten years to grow a tree, a hundred years to cultivate a person." Even at this age, coming to a training class, the relationship between students and teachers is more of a transaction than a traditional teacher-student one. But as a teacher at a training class (whether the ones who lecture or the "homeroom teachers" who follow the class—if people call you teacher, you're a teacher; actually our lecturers are okay), you should at least have some professional ethics, right? On this point, our school's teachers, compared to these so-called "homeroom teachers" at the training class, can, without exaggeration, leave them dozens of streets behind.

Anyway, the attitude toward students is pretty bad (maybe because we didn't pay, so it's not a "real" training class~ too real). They generally don't bother responding to WeChat messages, and they don't care if you take sick leave…… Human warmth is definitely not a thing. Feeling unwell and arriving late is counted as an absence. Before the Mid-Autumn holiday they said class would end at four (later they notified we still had to stay until six); leaving a bit after five for something was also counted as an absence…… A friend came all the way to Guangzhou to see me, I asked for half an hour off to pick them up, and they said: "Let him wait"……

These things aren't a big deal for people who want to come to a training class to learn tech, but they really chill you to the bone. How can a place with no human care talk about producing good students?

Life

Thank you~

First, a shout-out to my cutest girlfriend, for the little surprise of lovingly ordered takeout from time to time, and the huge huge surprise of secretly buying a ticket to come see me in Guangzhou on Mid-Autumn Festival! I'm really so touched~

After I caught a cold, my parents mailed me tea leaves and a teapot. Chaoshan people, wherever we go, can't drop the tea-drinking tradition hh… The key is this teapot even has my favorite "A Moonlit Night on the Spring River" printed on it. When I happened to notice, I was happy for a whole afternoon + evening~

The PDA-spewing sbwc who came to the dorm to see me when I was sick~

Boss Han who came from Shenzhen to hang out and tricked me into a meal at Dim Do De~

Thanks to all the lovely people~

A few nights ago I heard a tiny bit of gossip, team gossip. I have to sigh that some girls nowadays are just too casual…… Maybe I'm old and can't keep up with young people's pace…… I can only say, in today's world where so many people's private lives are a mess, not a single person waving the Western banner and shouting x-freedom is innocent…… (personal opinion only, don't flame if you disagree; birds of a feather flock together, rights and obligations go together—why should someone who indulges themselves get a chaste person to take them on? Disagreeing with me just means we're not meant to be…)

iPadOS updated in the early hours of the 28th. I eagerly waited until past one to update, got up first thing in the morning to experience the new system's "productivity," and found…… still iQiyi…… But a lot of the details are decently optimized; just feels like there are a few too many bugs? Some apps freeze often. Also, I've been using the iPad a lot more recently, and imported a bunch of new books, for… collecting?

Speaking of reading, because I'd scored too many PDFs from classmates before (about 300G+), manually organizing that many books was really too much, so I wrote a python script to auto-organize them, matching filenames directly, removing duplicates and incomplete downloads, simple and crude. After organizing, a bit over 100G left. I looked through them—the quality of the books is pretty good, all relatively new books~

These are ones I collected before, not yet organized with the tool~

Recently I also followed a few new DotNet-related WeChat official accounts and discovered a bunch of slick tricks. I feel like in the future I can totally use C# instead of python to write some simple scripts, like crawlers, file organizing, simple data analysis, etc. Performance leaves python ten streets behind……

Entertainment

The most common entertainment here is watching videos while eating. From watching YouTube and Bilibili film commentary at first, to later watching shows while eating (mainly because I got Tencent Video VIP), haha…

The last two weeks were relatively free. Lots of classmates started playing around in their spare time, and I was no exception—watched some movies and shows. For movies I watched Stephen Chow's Fight Back to School, super funny, goddess Zhang Min is so pretty. Stephen Chow's movies are still consistently humorous and funny~

Then I watched Chasing the Dragon starring Donnie Yen and Andy Lau. Actually last year when my roommate was watching it I really wanted to see it, just never had time~ There's a lot of Chaoshan dialect dialogue. It tells the story of a generation of Hong Kong drug lords—no, it should be said it used two hours to tell the story of an era~

One day I saw a question on Zhihu about sky-high betrothal gifts, and one answer posted a clip from a TV drama. For a 500k betrothal gift, the male lead ran off with the second female lead, and then I got suckered by that 500k into finishing the whole show…… The plot is okay-ish to watch. The wedding part is a bit realistic, but the ending is really too Mary Sue—everyone got whitewashed, truly a "glorious grand wedding"~ That's right, the show's name is Glorious Grand Wedding.

Then I already don't plan to watch TV dramas anymore. These shows nowadays all follow the same formulas; watching one or two occasionally is just me being an idiot. But what to watch while eating…… I happened to find lots of Chinese animation on Tencent, tried watching with a "why not" attitude, picked a sci-fi one I like, emmm, kinda good… Looks like Chinese animation is about to rise…

I'm on the second one now. The first is Apocalypse Awakening: Invasion, about fighting zombies at the end of the world while navigating among tribes, the government, and AI-controlled zones. The second is Tencent's official Fatal Response, about AI going out of control. Pretty fun, the modeling is quite conscientious. Haven't finished it yet; I watch a bit when I have time, taking it slow.

Also…… I discovered a casual game jointly launched by Tencent and People's Daily: Homeland Dream, and then I got hooked, and incidentally dragged all the classmates around me in too. Now they play better than I do…… But launching it around National Day is still pretty meaningful. It's not just a simple game; you could say it's a good way to learn the history of New China's modernization and get to know the motherland's scenery, hahaha……

I'll paste a simple review from Zhihu:

Homeland Dream Game Experience—Strategic Ramblings for Young and Old Alike - Article by 喵喵一世 - Zhihu https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/84595410

Have to Get This Off My Chest

At this point I have to diss some people and some things; I have to get it off my chest……

First, diss our department's new counselor (the original counselor was super nice, unfortunately transferred away this semester). This newly replaced counselor, how to put it—as a person, nothing to say; when nothing's going on he chats and laughs with students, and often likes and comments on students' Moments. But when you need him for something he never replies to WeChat, never picks up the phone. At the start of the semester I sent him n messages for a whole week straight, not a single reply. At first I thought he didn't know how to use WeChat, went and asked other teachers, and learned this is just how he is. Honestly, I'm impressed (shrug)……

Also, diss a certain section chief in some school admin office. Never at his post during work hours. When I called him I got interrogated about how I got his number (me？？？). Isn't serving students during work hours your duty? Besides, when students go to these leaders, which student isn't meek and submissive, letting them put on their full official airs? Can't afford to offend, can't afford to offend…… Yet for matters related to changing majors, I still have to deal with these official big shots…… Exhausting.

On the misdeeds of a very few counselors and leaders at our school, a senior in the training class dorm and I are pretty much in agreement (though I think he has a bit of an antisocial streak…)

Alright…… that's about it. Always dissing others makes it seem like I have a lot of negative energy. Actually people who know me well would think I'm an upright, patriotic three-good youth (laughs). It's just that some people's faces are really hard to stand, so I can't help ranting a bit~

The "throwing into the green belt to force a stop" incident that happened in Shantou a while ago is still vivid. After seeing it on Weibo's trending searches I felt, as a Shantou native, really angry and ashamed… Thankfully the police later promptly admitted the mistake and punished the traffic cop who caused it.

I don't dare say much more; I can only say, in being a person and doing things, be a bit more careful and cautious~

This month a lot of people are rushing to buy houses, and my family has been talking about it too. But I've seen all kinds of analysis everywhere about the real estate bubble bursting, and I feel holding cash and waiting is more practical right now…… Don't know if I'm missing the era's window of opportunity. Anyway housing prices are sky-high; people who have a place to live don't want to buy, people who don't have a place naturally can't afford to and can only rent, let the speculators speculate…… (To be honest, without a house it's really hard to gain a foothold in a city)

Last

Rambled on about a lot……

Overall, a pretty good month. The atmosphere of classmates around me exchanging tech and joking around in class was quite comfortable. The end of the training class means another step closer to graduation, another step closer to the life I'm looking forward to……

The final course project was quite rushed, and everyone was busy with interviews. You could tell it was all done rather casually—gone is that feeling from school days of everyone showing off their skills on course projects.

Everyone is working hard.

I need to keep pushing in my own direction too~ Going to say goodbye to code for a while~

Finally a confession to the motherland: I love you, China. Happy 70th birthday

September, goodbye.