Category: Software development

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Software development Stocks

Why average investors should pick S&P 500 over picking own stocks

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I have been in the US stock market since 2003. And I observe majority of average investors don’t like volatility. They chase the hot stocks, and they catch the falling knife, and then they sell during panic. And occasionally they watch Jim Cramer’s Mad Money show on CNBC “watching TV and making money”. In other words, they usually buy high and sell low – using the late Charlie Munger’s words a little blunt, please note, “if (many) people are not stupid, how can we make money”.

This is obviously not a winning strategy. And yesterday’s market action is a perfect example. The direct reason for yesterday’s stock drop was due to the below report. I do understand the selling pressure on software stocks from the AI disruption has been there for a while now. Disclosure: I do own some software stocks, and the largest position is the good old MSFT. I joked that I was Bill Gates’ slave 20 years ago. Also – I am an average investor too and I put most of my money into S&P 500 index fund – I told my wife to do that too – if something happens to me.

The mentioned report is below. I suggest read at your leisure time.

But we need to keep in mind the software (SaaS) stocks have been trading at high valuations for at least 20 years. This may be a healthy adjustment of valuation – somewhat like an obese person losing some weight so that he/she can put less stress on his/her body.

Software benefits from larger trend such as the shift to cloud computing, pandemic (working from home), for the users there are usually higher cost of switching (think Oracle DB, or Electronic Medical Records vendor such as Epic, and Cerner now a part of Oracle), and so on. But nothing lasts forever, the recent AI revolution appears (or will likely) causing disruption to the industry. As I also worked in this industry (software and IT) for last 25+ years, and I can see that seismic shift coming. Nothing or no trends last forever.

Back to stocks, below is the S&P 500 compared to some of the popular stocks or assets.

Also the stocks hit 52 week low yesterday. Many are software or tech stocks. The saas apocalypse is real.

Btw, just bumped into my own writing on stocks etc. here, and noticed I wrote it almost 6 years ago. I can see both my kids grew significantly in last 6 years, and I am getting older – hopefully wiser too.

Last but not least, regarding the asset price, JPM’s Jamie Dimon said something yesterday – Jamie Dimon says ‘watch out’ as lofty asset prices add to economic risks: ‘My anxiety is high’ (CNBC).

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Software development

Dev Stories

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I bumped into Angus Cheng accidentally the other day, on YT – I make $40K/month with this one website

And I had to admit, I love read his dev stories or technical deep dives. Here is one on X. And here is his profile on X.

I think I would share some of my dev stories from now on too – probably via YT (as I am not a big fan of X platform, mainly because I don’t like its owner 🙂

Categories
Business Investing Software development

A lot going on recently

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Moved this WordPress website (again)

SaaS and SaaS stocks apocalypse

Thinking somewhat more bullet proof idea in this space is Constellation Software Inc., which is a Canada based software conglomerate (TSE:CSU; OTCMKTS:CNSWF). And I looked at both Robinhood and Schwab, it appears the former doen’t have it, the latter one has to pay $6.95 to buy the Over the counter market stocks. I don’t think $7 fee should be a deal breaker if one is truly believer of the company and the stock, though. Also, refer to this YT video Broken Compounder or Rare Sale? Constellation Software Stock Explained by Drew Cohen. And his stock researches here.

From software to real estate, U.S. sectors under the grip of AI scare trade | Reuters – (this is a quote) AI-focused logistics firm Algorhythm Holdings (RIME.O), which previously sold karaoke machines, said its SemiCab unit boosted customers’ freight volumes by 300% to 400% “without a corresponding increase in operational headcount”.

The news triggered a rout in stocks such as Landstar System (LSTR.O), opens new tab and C.H. Robinson (CHRW.O), opens new tab. The Dow Jones Transportation Average (.DJT), opens new tab fell 4.4%.

Jefferies analysts, however, said the reaction was disconnected from fundamentals. “Proprietary freight data and physical networks remain durable moats,” they said.

The company seems problematic for me, to say the least, looking at its stock price here. And here is its linkedIn profile (Algorhythm Holdings Inc. and SemiCab).

Anxiety of AI among white collar workers and parents, high school and college kids

(Fortune) Brian Moynihan isn’t so worried about an AI jobs bloodbath, pointing to a 1960s theory that computers would end all management roles

Two sad incidents

I came across this news today: Man who fatally shot woman in Starbucks drive-thru robbed someone in different drive-thru days earlier, police say NY Post article.

And it reminds me of another incident I read about recently. ‘Was just like a war’: Rideshare driver gunned down in Ferguson was unintended target – As a former Uber driver, I felt incredible sad… I have been to Ferguson a few times in my short Uber driving tenure (10/2024 to 09/2025).

Categories
Site Info Software development Web

Moved the wordpress host again

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I moved the host of this WordPress website again. It’s on a smaller Droplet. There was some AI bot spike recently (since mid-Dec), and also the previous droplet has been there about 10 years ago. It’s time for a cleanup etc.

More details are forthcoming: as practical as possible, obviously.

Note this also marks my 20 years of blogging.

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advice and tips Life Life Tips Software development

My 2025 year end review

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New habits re: health and fitness

Swim:

Run: I didn’t run a lot. I did run a few races (for run): the Ladue Dogwood run, the ‘Due Run for Education (LEF) and Frostbite Run at Forest Park organized by the St. Louis track club (short distance).

No more alcohol 🍷

I started using Apple Watch to track sleep.

Other new adventure I decided to take on

Learn music, guitar and piano

Stocks

Need some more patience there. A good example may be $MDB at 04/04/2025: it was under $155 then. Today it closed at about $399.65.

Family and China Trip

Started teaching my older kid to drive

Realized that “Good habit is important – easier to correct in the beginning than to correct later on – similar for the music learning too”. Today 01-01-2026 she even drove from the Walgreens in St. Ann (St. Charles rock road and Ashby road) to our home – via Ashby road. I was the passenger. (Update 01-02-2026) Today’s practice route here.

Btw, I paused the Uber driving for now. It was fun ride to say the least.

YouTuber or creator instead of blogger?

Thinking I may archive this blog site and focus more on the video content creation instead. Haven’t made final decision yet but leaning towards this – it was a good 20-year journey but couple things made me to re-think about my blogging journey – very few people are reading my blogs these days, that’s probably true for other newspaper, magazine website too – people are mostly switching to video or short videos over the years due to many reasons. Video is more engaging, or much easier to absorb. Also, video especially short video is quite addictive. Other reasons are the cost of hosting this website, as well as the recent AI bots scanning my website continuously (they appear are from CHN).

Categories
Career Software development

Parents’ anxiety on AI and kids’ job prospects

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In the news:

150 job applications, rescinded offers: Computer science grads are struggling to find work | CNN Business 

Goodbye, $165,000 Tech Jobs. Student Coders Seek Work at Chipotle. – The New York Times (this one seems widely circulated)

A linkedIn post (thread, or rant 🙂

Also in the FB group –

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1506637529662997/search/?q=%20AI%20career

https://www.facebook.com/groups/GrownandFlownParents/permalink/4543960429264010

One story I heard at Rolla

Honeywell CEO (or maybe Allied Signal CEO, Allied Signal is now a subsidiary of Honeywell, AS was HQ’ed in Kansas City: he may only work for one company his whole career; while we (my generation, the gen X) may have 7 jobs throughout our career (I have 10 so far, I think – Minjie Xu | LinkedIn).

Also, this one – https://thestillwandering.substack.com/p/the-death-of-the-corporate-job?r=44469&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true “The death of the corporate job”

I recorded a short 7 to 8 minutes video for this too – my journey – pivotal points? Choose career and during career. Here is the video – My colleague and engineering career journey  

Again from Linkedin

Since 2023, I have kept on testing AI capabilities, and in 2025, AI has become scary good.

I understand why some might be afraid of AI getting better and better. It’s understandable, yet not the right attitude. There’s a lot of upside in learning how to get the best out of all these powerful tools.

As a software developer, we are students for life. We’ve always needed to reinvent ourselves and learn better ways to do our job. Embracing AI is just business as usual.

That’s exactly why I got into IT in the first place. If I wanted a boring job, I’d have chosen a totally different field 20 years ago.

Po-Shen Loh

Po-Shen Loh interview on AI 🤖 at YT – The Only Trait for Success in the AI Era—How to Build It | Carnegie Mellon University Po-Shen Loh (the key is to find solutions for new problems, not the good old leetcode exercise which is basically a memorization of many popular algorithms and data structures in the big tech or computer science arena’s code base).

My comment or disclaimer: we cannot predict the future…

Categories
Software development

My impressions on Copilot

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Code Review

At my current work place recently we switched from Atlassian’s Bitbucket (stash) to Microsoft’s GitHub for our source code version control system. Along with that, we get the GitHub Action (which is somewhat like Jenkins, the CI/CD tool) as well as Copilot Code Review and other Copilot tools.

Let me talk about Copilot Code Review first. In general I say it’s pretty good, with its quick human readable overview or summary for the code change. I think it’s probably better than I would write myself: if I ever have to write such a summary.

Now, the code review comments. There are various levels of comments in terms of severity. If you have done any code review, you will probably know quite a bit of suggestions or feedback are subjective, because coding is still not exact science, or like some of the other disciplines such as Mechanical Engineering. I will categorize the comments below:

  1. Nitpick: Copilot actually says that word. We can ignore those.
  2. Format or spacing, we can accept the suggestions, and commit directly. That’s probably the only place we can directly commit.
  3. Other suggestions: I think most are valid. And we should try to incorporate them in our coding. For example: things around better error handling, more robust code, efficiency, break out functions from common code (copy and paste code), and so on. This including feedback on the unit testing too. One thing to keep in mind, always run unit test or debug the code changes before we commit, don’t just commit the code change in the web browser. Because I learned the lesson hard way: I commit code directly, then I realized that I broke the CI (continuous integration) build.

Coding Assistant

My own exp: I have done a bit experiment on this, both via the Copilot inside IntelliJ and VS Code. I will continue use Copilot. Somewhat like code review suggestions: coding assistant (or Q&A) is not AI does the coding for us, we still need to think about the usual stuff: design, testing scenario, debugging, and so on. Again we can think copilot as a colleague or a coworker in pair programming, but we always need to verify in addition to the usual “trust”.

I noticed one approach that one coworker was using. Ask Copilot questions, and use the answers directly, and so on. It seems to me this is a bit like a junior engineer’s approach. And I can see one downside of this approach, see below picture, original source: this is a joke but it has some truth.

Vibe Coding (from XHS, or Red Notes)

I have done similar things in the past, except before all the AI tools, I was mostly googling, including using answers from stackoverflow.

Categories
Software development

How to pick college major or find career

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K to 12 Education

I talked about this recently, here on YT in English. I just came across on the Chinese app Red Notes (XHS) professor Yang Zhen Ning talked about this and I agree with him (he talked in Chinese on this).

He talked about the education in the US compared to Japan too when answering Bill Moyers’ question in year 1988. Please note I am by no means trying to compare myself to the great and recently passed Yang Chen-Ning.

From my observations there are a lot of shortcomings in the US K to 12 education, and similar can be said to the oriental K to 12 education too. I think about it, I think one thing I liked about in general, is the parents, teachers and society in general don’t force kids to learn or take on a major or career solely for the sake of the money. I guess another way of saying it is: the liberty (freedom of choice, free will) is more appreciated here.

Passion

Because with that passion, I mean long lasting passion, not just a 5 minutes thing, a person can overcome many things including but not limiting to some deficiency in K to 12 educations. We all have that – even if we were K to 12 educated in China 🙂

So, try to find your passion, hopefully early in your life. 25 is not too late. For me personally I started my 1st full time job in the USA when I was 29. And now 25 years later, I think I made the right choice. Yes, I know the AI is trying to eat my lunch, but I am mastering the AI tools to make sure so that they won’t be successful in terms of “eating my lunch”.

(11-03-2025) I came across this from LinkedIn, and I liked it a lot. I pasted the picture below : t’s the content of that LinkedIn post.

I agree with Adam 100% here. Yesterday afternoon I happened to talk to a friend who is 12 years younger than me, and he shared similar sentiment with me. Thanks for the reminder, my friend 🙂

Categories
Business Career Software development

H-1B

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I received my H-1B visa about 25 years ago. I went directly from F-1 student visa to H-1B worker (without the OPT or Optional Practical Training) because I quit from the Ph.D program from my graduate school at the time. I was probably one of the first batch of the international graduate students took that route in my school. Do keep in mind the US job market and economy was in much better shape at the time (1999 and 2000) compared to now. The current job market is the worst job market I’ve seen in last 25 years.

I came across a thread re: H-1B on linkedIn re: this topic. I pasted the content below as not everyone has LinkedIn. You may find the discussion below the post interesting too.

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I’m seeing a lot of takes about the new H1B $100,000 fee. What I rarely see is this issue framed from the perspective of the unemployed senior software engineer with 10–20+ years of experience who has been searching for months; or the recent CS graduate who can’t land their first job.

The reality is that the H1B program has been heavily used for cheap labor. When you count renewals, there are over 600,000 H1Bs in the U.S. Roughly two thirds (400,000) are in technology; and the vast majority of those are software engineers.

Multiple studies by the Center for Immigration Studies; a group that is generally pro immigrant; have found that H1B employees in technology earn about 30% less than domestic engineers. With around 1.2 million employed software engineers in the U.S., that means roughly one third of the field has been replaced by H1Bs over the past decade. This isn’t a case of “we can’t find enough domestic engineers.” This is “we’re going to replace our existing engineers with cheaper labor.”

The most glaring example came recently… Microsoft laid off thousands of employees and then applied for thousands of H1Bs to replace them.
So yes, the program is heavily abused. I’m not calling for it to be axed; the original purpose of H1B was to bring in the best and brightest to fill genuine gaps. That’s still important. But the way it’s being used today is a complete distortion of that purpose.

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The US is obviously going through a lot of changes since the new administration took over in January 2025. But I didn’t expect things happened so fast: probably some other friends felt the same way too.

另: 我已经很久没有特别注意美国h-1b 签证的情况了，总的感觉是比我那时候更难弄。现在美国国内就业市场不好，移民和拿工作签证的非移民也就成了替罪羊。现在的新移民让我想起很多年之前，在上海上下班的时候坐公共汽车，售票员一般让大家往里面挤一挤，让下面的人多上来一些。但是对已经上了公共汽车的人来说，也就是美国公民和绿卡持有人，让新移民或工作签证人员上来（进来）意味着自己的活动空间变得更小，或者说自己的饼可能要分给别人。

其实在我看来，同是搬砖人，相煎何太急。当然问题是亿万富翁宁肯自己手上的饼都烂掉，也不肯跟大家分 🙂

我是在网上看到这一张图的，觉得蛮贴切
Categories
Saint Louis Software development

IT Recruiters

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Having worked in the IT/software field for almost 25 years, I think it was beneficial to know a few good recruiters, at least it’s something I felt important in the old days in the IT/software industry. Another reason to have recruiters, is because that’s their livelihood and they have incentive to help or work for you.

I still recall Michael Banocy: about 20 years ago, it was probably year 2007 or 2008, I recall he said to me “make sure you have some marketable skills, and then you will be okay”. Although I haven’t worked with Michael directly after that, his words left me impressions. I just realized he retired in recent years. He is probably 15 years senior than me.

The first time I worked with recruiter, it was for a contractor position at Unigroup (2010). Note: I have comments for most of my past employers or clients here, if you are interested. Please note they are by no means comprehensive, it’s just my quick notes and hopefully it benefits people in the future.

I worked with another recruiter in 2012 for another contractor position, about 2 years later after the 1st contractor position. Those 2 plus the earlier position at Unidev, which technically is a contractor position for Union Pacific railroad, are all the contractor positions I had. Btw, I talked about contractor vs employee here. I worked with recruiters after 2012 too, but I believe I found all my positions myself the the exception of my current position, and the Mercy Health position. In both cases, I already know the recruiters because I knew them from working with Technology Partners earlier (2010).

I also worked with recruiters a bit in year 2019 and 2020, when I was working for Ascension, as we were hiring quite a few people at the time.