What Does a Decade of Coding Feel Like? A Veteran Engineer’s Journey

Early Childhood – BASIC on a Red‑White Game Console

My first programming experience was on a Laser‑310 red‑white game console equipped with a keyboard. Using BASIC, I wrote small programs and saved them to a cassette recorder because the device had no disk drive. I created a phone‑book program, a random‑note generator, and ASCII animations.

School Years – Laser‑310 and DBASE3/FoxBASE+

In elementary school I used the console’s BASIC; in middle school I accessed my father’s PC/AT and 286 machines, programming with DBASE3 and later FoxBASE+. I maintained my father’s address‑book program and fixed a printing bug at his workplace.

University – C, C++, HTML, XML, VRML

In 1997 my dorm mates and I pooled money to buy a 166 MHz Pentium MMX PC with 16 MB RAM and a 2.1 GB hard drive. We shared the machine, each getting one day per week. I wrote a Visual Basic scheduler and used Turbo C for C programming.

During my sophomore year I discovered GNU/Linux, GCC, and VI, tools I still use today. I built a BBS user‑tracking robot in C that logged online status to my Motorola pager.

Early Career – Web Development and Startup Experience

After graduation I joined a startup aiming to build a Chinese version of Hotmail. The stack used FreeBSD, FastCGI + Apache in C for the front‑end, C RPC servers for the back‑end, and a file‑system for storage. We faced challenges with C’s memory safety and the need for high reliability.

Later I worked on a web‑mail service that supported 300 k users on four servers, handling TCP/IP, SMTP, and POP3 directly.

Mid‑2000s – Java, ASP, JSP, and Open‑Source Adoption

From 2001 onward I used Java, JSP, and later Spring, jQuery, and other open‑source projects. I built various websites (friend‑group sites, e‑commerce, component‑driven portals) and contributed to open‑source tools.

Later Years – Big Data, Scala, and Cloud

In 2014 I switched from Spark to Scala, and later focused on Azure cloud services using C#. I also wrote test‑automation tools, model‑based testing frameworks, and internal DevOps platforms.

Personal Reflections

After two decades of coding I realize that the language or framework matters less than delivering functional solutions. Programming brings creativity, immediate feedback, and personal satisfaction, but it also demands continuous learning and humility.

My career taught me that:

Technical skill is built through relentless practice, not innate talent.

Family and friendships become the most rewarding aspects of life.

Fundamental computer science knowledge (hardware, OS, algorithms, distributed systems) is essential for long‑term growth.

These insights are the essence of what it feels like to write code for ten (or twenty) years.