Aite Tribe Stories (2): The Road to Transformation Caused by Chance

【51CTO.com original article】 Use craftsmanship to create extraordinary A man is not confused at the age of 40. Lao Cao, now in his 40s, is a very rational and sober half-baked full-stack craftsman who has been in the world of code for more than 20 years. As for himself, he prefers to use his personal experience to influence the programmers around him and share every bit of his career as a programmer for most of his life.

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Cao Hongwei, Head of R&D

The first time I saw his photo, an image of a man who never gives up appeared in my mind. Lao Cao has wandered around several Fortune 500 companies, joined several entrepreneurial teams, published several pamphlets on outdated technologies, scribbled several texts, and signed several domestic and foreign patents. He is currently the head of R&D and VP of Technology at Hechuang Technology.

New to the workplace, not afraid of challenges

Lao Cao studied wireless communication in college. After learning "Electromagnetic Field Theory", he became very interested in resonant cavity filters (a copper tube). He liked hardware and looked down on people who wrote code (maybe many students of other majors were the same). Now I think it was very naive. My first job was in 1995. I worked on the PTSN interface of cordless phones right after graduation. After the project was completed, the company did not want to keep idle people, so I was assigned to do testing. I worked for two years. At that time, I was testing programs on Windows. Testing required meticulousness and patience, but it was really boring to click the mouse on the screen! So I wanted to free myself from the tedious mouse clicks and started thinking about automation. Fortunately, I finally found MSTest, a tool from Microsoft. Through MSTest, manual click events can be recorded as VB scripts, and then the steps can be automatically executed by modifying them. It immediately improved work efficiency and completed several days of work in half a day. So the problem came. The client was tested quickly, but the server was not finished, which affected the client test. What should I do?

I had no choice but to try to make an emulator, which is equivalent to using VC to implement the current mock function. I thought it was pretty good, so I participated in a pre-research project to automatically convert faxes received by a fax machine into emails. It mainly involved the operation of the hardware dialogic card, which was to directly read and write to the driver. This aroused my interest, and I eventually used multi-threading to operate an 8-port dialogic card to achieve the intercommunication between emails and faxes. I remember that was in early 1998.

Unforgettable 1998, Hardware Transformation to Java Development

1998 was an extraordinary year for Lao Cao. The company sent him to Canada for work for half a year, where he met a real master - a Yugoslav, Nened Kovacevic, and began to learn to use Java 1.2. Why Java? Because the C++/C masters around him looked down on Java at that time, and there was a contempt chain. It seemed that he was the only Java rookie in the whole project, a rookie who started from scratch.

The master is different. He only spends more than 10 minutes a day on guidance, usually asking a few questions and giving a direction. Since I don’t have a laptop, I can only work in the office, so most of my time is spent in the office. One of the most common questions asked by the master should be why for such codes? Why is this code like this? Why, to achieve such a function! In addition to this, what else can I do? The master didn’t say anything, but threw a book "Design Patterns" in English, which I read for two weeks. When the Web can run, I found that it can’t be compiled with C++ programs. What should I do? The master threw another book "Advanced Unix Programming" which is thicker than the other. So, I started to teach myself shell, makefile and various system calls, and I could compile. The next step is the communication between the Java program and the C++ functional module, inter-process communication, and network communication. This is actually a distributed system based on the corba architecture.

What to do? The old routine, a book "TCP IP Illustrated", seems to be multi-volume, he was given the first volume. Fortunately, he had some basic knowledge of socket programming, and finally completed the Web-based management and operation platform relatively smoothly.

The past six months or so have been the time when he has grown the fastest. In this way, Lao Cao officially joined the ranks of programmers and began his career as a programmer. It has been more than 20 years. Today, Lao Cao is willing to share every bit of his experience with the developers around him, hoping that like-minded people can fight side by side with him and move forward courageously towards the road of programmers.

If you are also willing to share your story, please join the 51CTO developer QQ exchange group 370892523 and contact the group owner. We look forward to your wonderful story!

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