stlplaceI 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.
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).
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).
In the news:
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…
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:
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.
I have done similar things in the past, except before all the AI tools, I was mostly googling, including using answers from stackoverflow.
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 🙂
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.
========
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.
========
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 🙂
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.
The best time is now; the second-best time is tomorrow. –anonymous
Career
Per my age and typical stereotype, I think I am expected to wind down my career in the software field now (my LinkedIn profile here). I understand career is more than a LinkedIn profile or a resume, but here in the USA IT IS one of those things that MATTER, in addition to title, experience and compensation history. Useless or but fun fact: I started my LinkedIn profile in 2008, about 17 years ago.
US companies are mostly snobs, in my not too humble opinions. I mean CEOs or the higher ups, not the average Jane and Joe. Doesn’t matter whatever they say publicly – their mission is making money for the owners, not for employees. This is quite obvious from the recent high-profile layoffs such as Amazon laying off 14,000 back-office people/white collar workers last week.
And I have my favorite quote related to that topic too. When questions by reporters why he took $55 million exit package in 2002, when he was forced out, former CEO of EDS, Electronic Data Systems, Dick Brown famously said: I have an expensive wife. I know I know, I don’t have expensive wife. But I also have two daughters who like to buy things. Or should I ass that they have good taste? 🙂
Sorry a bit off topic 🙂 Last month (Oct 2025) I passed 25 years’ work anniversary in the USA. I started working here on Oct 2nd, 2000. A lot has changed since I started working here. I have seen quite a bit of industry underwent paradigm shift. From the Internet bubble (web 1.0) burst to web 2.0 (remember delicious, Flickr and digg.com?). And now we have web 3.0 and more. My career wise, I changed from working in the CAD software to mostly enterprise web applications, with a bit of consulting and iOS dev in between.
I don’t want to be forced out
I have seen coworkers who are about 50 years old, being laid off, at multiple places. Some of them were caught off guard. I was much younger or a bit younger then. Now I am at that age. And I don’t want to be in their shoes. I have literally seen grownups crying when they got laid off.
Also, right now I felt I can still do some meaningful work. If the time comes that I feel I cannot contribute in a meaningful way, I will just quit.
Re: AI, we all know the AI is causing a lot of disruptions and anxiety among IT/software workers nowadays. But I also believe at least for now, my job is not impacted. And if I can learn those AI tools and they can actually help me doing my job.
How much money is enough
One problem is most of us don’t know the answer to “how much money is enough?”. Or my favorite answer is “a little bit more” (it’s both a joke and also has some truth to it).
But seriously I need to think about this question as the date of retirement is approaching, either I want to face it or not. Some of the things I am thinking about regarding this topic.
1. My retirement is probably going to be different from my parents’ retirement. They have a more traditional retirement. My dad has a pension, and I don’t. And they stopped working completely when they retire. I think I will likely do some work (not too strenuous), for example, I will manage my 401k and IRAs, as well as doing other things I like to do (music, walking outside, does that include swimming??? 🙂 And some social life too (not drinking at the bar, I mean probably I am good enough, I can play music at the bar, again just for fun, not for money 🙂
Do I continue to mow my lawns? If I am health enough and feel like it. If not, I can either outsource it or sell the house and move to a townhouse or condo. Note selling the house will be a joint decision not solely mine.
2. I will probably have some hobbies and some travel. But probably equally important, I need to manage my 401k and IRAs, making sure they have decent return and will last. This is also something my parents don’t do. Sorry I am getting repetitive here – signs of my age and the need to retire 🙂
Still TBD as of 11-03-2025 (JIRA board doesn’t look good in terms of velocity 🙂
I need to calculate how much my 401k and IRAs were earning in last 3 5 or 10 years or so. If the total earnings (capital gain + dividend) are approaching my take home pay of my day job, that will be a good sign. Obviously, I need to fact into my financial obligations: the big-ticket item will be my kid’s college costs, and it will also be a big unknown because the US higher education industry is very similar to the US healthcare industry in terms of price transparency 🙂 You may read more about the college cost here as I learned last year. Note that’s applicable for the American students only (I assume US citizens and permanent residents, not sure about the children of visa holders), and not for the international students. Consult an expert on this topic, if applicable.
3. When applicable, I am thinking some side hustles including but not limiting to Uber or eBay to make some money and have something to do.
Cannot counting on that for meaningful amount of money though – ideally main income stream should come from investments, as said in this old saying “if you don’t make money when you sleep, you will work until you die.” I for one definitely don’t want to work until I die.
PS:
(YT 油管）75-Year-Olds Share Their Biggest Regret at 55
(YT 油管）Ayen何璟昕 – 時間不等你【粵語新歌】 [Official Music Video]
(Old blog post from yours truly, originally written about 20 years ago) Monday is not my favorite day
YT Shorts: Early retirees shares truth about early retirement
I did a production release last week, by that I mean I was the release tech lead for the web app production releases for my current employer. It’s mostly uneventful, but like most other production releases, there is usually some learning opportunities. This time the opportunities lies in couple small areas: 1) Validation of database insert statements, make sure the spelling of the select statement is exact; 2) Staging the artifact for production, via GitHub action. I was a bit new to both “staging artifact” and GitHub Action, this time I learned on the spot, with help from a colleague.
Friendly crowd
This reminds me of another thing, that is for artist, for example a musician or a singer to perform. There is pressure on live performance too. Similar to production deployment, if we have a friendly crowd (customers in the case of websites) and a collaborative team, things will be a bit easier.
Saturday night all-nighter
Some more tips on production deployment. I did do a few at my current job, and I did some at Mastercard (MC), my previous employer. The deployment was usually more stressful at MC. The main problem there is the production release usually happens on Saturday night, and it could be an all-nighter because the expectation is there, also it’s not easy to find all the right people quickly during the night. I recall once, I had to page my colleague, and he came on quickly, but we waited hours for the person to generate a new key (the old key expired, and the server would not start during restart). So basically, I could not completely go to bed, I laid down in the couch with headphone on, and I imagine my colleague did the same. Btw, the reason I asked help from my colleague was it’s the first time I encountered something like this (he has much more experience).
Lesson learned
At my current place, I did almost make a big mistake last year during production deployment. The issue was the UNIX engineer didn’t fully understand my instruction. Although one can argue my instruction was not very clear. But the end results was the engineer deleted much more arguments in the J2EE server configuration and the server would not start because of that. Luckily earlier I took my PM (project manager) colleague’s advice, and did a backup or save of the “before” arguments. So at least we have some references for the arguments as the UNIX engineer already deleted a bunch. Also the engineer called his senior engineer and he was able to bail out both of us. From that small incident I learned “don’t assume other people will always understand or follow the instructions”. Try to write good instructions, and also back up things as needed. Talking about backups, I usually do some DB backups when I delete something. That saved me once as I was trying to fix an issue at Mastercard. Basically when I realized my earlier fix didn’t work, I restore the data from my backup, and tried another approach. The second time it worked.
Performance
Back to artistic performance. I haven’t performed or competed for a long time. But I can see my older daughter got nervous before this sort of thing. And for my younger daughter: she tries to avoid those sorts of things, as much as practical, from junior tennis tournament to violin federation(performance) at UMSL, to string/music ensembles at Community Music School at Webster University. I can understand though. Because as I said in my other posts, I got nervous before Gaokao and other important exams too. The trick is, balance the nervousness with other important things such as preparing for the exam or the performances.
Btw, if you are in Yueyang, Hunan and surrounding areas, please note this – (Update 07-24-2025, from 何璟昕的微博) 听民谣，来岳阳🎶 我会参加7月25号、26号的湖畔音乐节演出，地点在岳阳港工业遗址公园，这次准备了3~4首从来没有在现场演出过的新歌曲，欢迎大家来玩！
I worked in the USA for almost 25 years. This is actually the 2nd time a coworker or a colleague died while on the job. We (software engineers) all work from home at my current place, and I did see him once at a company function (probably Diwali?). And although we were not on the same team for the most part of my 4-year tenure here, we did have some interactions mostly around the app dev env setup, and so on. Recently due to re-org we are getting on the same team, and under the same manager. Because the new manager is basically a micro-manager, and we even briefly chatted about his management style. I did notice something a bit off because he seems quite weak, and slim on the video meetings (compared to last time I saw him in person, maybe 9 months ago). But I didn’t speculate much. The news came on 7/9/25. He died from cancer. This colleague is originally from India. And I am guessing he is probably a few years older than me.
Last time something like this happened, it was almost 20 years ago, when I was working for UGS/Siemens PLM software. It was an American colleague, and he worked for a special project for our company in Japan (more specifically Toyota’s main part supplier Denso) for a few years (maybe 5 years). And just got back. And he was diagnosed with liver cancer. He did smoke and I assume he drunk a bit when he was in Japan. He is a fun-loving American guy (probably my current age at the time he came back). And I believe he was not married or didn’t have kids. His mom was in 70s. Some of my female colleagues (a Japanese colleague come to mind, later she switched career form language localization to nurse) made some special comfort food when my colleague is gravely ill. So that was very nice of them (her). We used to be lunch buddies, and I recall riding on the gentleman’s GM Tahoe. I attended his visitation too. My former boss (also an American guy, probably in his early 50s), joked we can probably have a drinking party at the funeral home (because the mentioned colleague likes to drink or hangout with people). Note his joke was in good taste (per American standards).
Both colleagues died from cancer. I am going to the visitation for my colleague today, if nothing urgent happens. (Update 07-10-2025) I went. The visitation is a bit different from American ones (for obvious reasons), but I did like the music and so on. I was likely the only Chinese person there, there are a lot of Indian friends including a few I know, and a few Americans.
Other deaths or close call
Technically there was another young colleague died unexpectedly recently too: but I only knew his name before that and never knew him or worked with him in the past. While they didn’t explicitly say, I was under impression that the younger colleague died from suicide: probably related to PTSD from the military service. My impression is he was deployed in the war zone(s). And he worked for police department in St. Louis area, before joining my workplace (we are a veteran friendly place) as a software engineer (he attended code academy before the job). Now I remember his mom and stepdad’s sadness when we were there. Because he was probably in his early 30s or late 20s. His parents are probably my age 🙁
Couple years after I left UGS/Siemens, probably in holiday season of year 2010, I bumped into my former boss at Macys’, and he told me one of my colleagues (he was a few years younger than me) died suddenly (after I left the company in fall 2008). It made me quite sad, because I had quite a bit overlap with colleague and he is from India btw. To made things worse, in the company benefits annual enrollment, somehow, he didn’t indicate that he wanted the company provided life insurance. I believe his wife didn’t work and that’s just adding salt to injury.
A few years later at Mercy Health, I met a very nice colleague who was fighting the breast cancer. I don’t know how she did eventually. But I really liked the atmosphere my Mercy coworkers (that’s also the place call colleagues as coworkers) created to support her. She is wonderful too. She has some hens, and from time to time, she would bring eggs to the office, and colleagues can have the eggs (free will donation to a sort of colleague coffee/snack fund). The comradeship (we are in this together) is something I felt is solely missed in this post pandemic (work from home) work place.
Chinese colleague’s husband
About 20 years ago, I think it was year 2005, my Chinese colleague’s husband, who was 41, passed away due to cancer. I remember that because I was about 34, and he is about 7 years old. His wife and I worked at the same company then. I also attended the “celebration of life” at the time, at the request of my colleague (his wife). He seems like a nice very guy. I also recall one of his Chinese friend, a good friend, tries to come up with some humor or fun stories to cheer up the crowd. Note this was a bit unusual for Chinese people because from Chinese culture perspective, funeral is usually associated with a lot of tears. And I saw some of that today (7/10/25) at my India colleague’s visitation too.
PS:
I recall one of my AVP (Assistant Vice President, he is more like a VP if we are at a different organization, my current place is a bit thrift to hand out VP title to IT people), recently said (he actually said it in the visitation for the young colleague I mentioned above), one of the most important jobs for the leaders is showing up in occasions like this. I tend to agree. Note he said “leader” not “manager”. Everyone can be a leader at workplace. I recall also many years ago, while at UGS/Siemens, I drove to Illinois to attend a visitation for a colleague. And he was pleasantly surprised to say the least. So, there is that.
For those of us that are still in this world, I encourage us to be happy and healthy. And music is a great diversion or hobby to have, in my humble opinion.