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.
Ayen何璟昕 He Jing’xin (earlier she used Ayen Ho for her English name) is very special and quite talented artist, musician and social media influencer (自媒体作者 zi mei ti zuo zhe). She was born in Guangdong Province and she lives in Beijing metro area now.
Sometimes people used the term “北漂(Baike, Wikipedia) bei’piao”。From what I observe, Bei’piao is quite common for musicians and some other artists, because Beijing is also China’s No. 1 culture center, in addition to be the capital of the country (the political center, and many good universities including the 2 leading ones). Here is an example of Shanghai singer who is also 北漂ing.
Live Performance
2025.10.18 CCTV 15 《15号音乐房子》 20251018 大概不到五分钟左右：漫步人生路；25分钟不到一点：祝福（粤语版）；44分钟左右：人生何处不相逢（粤语），中间有一小段国语版 最真的梦。这里有粉丝团的剪辑版（微博）。Technically speaking, CCTV show is recorded not live. But I will categorize it as live as I think it still has a lot of pressure.
(Update 08-01-2025) I found an old video of Ayen何璟昕 on Bilibili – 56红人馆 第204期 南方姑娘何璟昕北上追音乐 小清新曲风书写心情. You may need a Bilibili account in order to watch. Personally, I have a Bilibili account which is tied to my WeChat account.
(Original June 2025) Here is my earlier post on her. The article was probably too long for a person who heard about Ayen何璟昕 the very first time. Below is an updated and a shorter version.
Also Bilibili: 南 屏 海 滩 it’s a combination of 南屏晚钟 (YT) and 上海滩。There are some similarities between those two song’s melodies.
Most of the video links go to Douyin 抖音. How to watch Douyin without an account? Basically, you need to complete the Chinese version of captcha (slide the shape/the object into its place). Also, you dismiss the phone number pop up after that. Btw, this is her Douyin live URL/address. Note I haven’t watched her live show yet, because before today 07-30-2025 I was under impression that we need a Douyin account in order to watch any live show. My assumption could be wrong.
Update 10-26-2025: also recently I happened to find another tip that get to DY on the mobile browser on the phone. That is the so.douyin.com DY’s own search engine. It only works on the phone though. It seems DY uses some “innovative” tricks on the front end.
(Original) I think this Douyin short video showed her skills very well. The song is 抖音《素顏》許嵩、何曼婷【動態歌詞Lyrics】Ayen was doing a cover, but it’s not a very straightforward cover. She puts efforts and creative thoughts into it. She has two versions of herself in the video.
And she did dance too. Ayen used to joke she didn’t know how to dance. I don’t know. But I know she learned dance in last few years. Personally I felt her dance move is good. Note dance is not her strong suite.
Top songs Ayen covered, many covered with acoustic guitar. This is a tough task, because I like many of her covered songs. I have created many playlists on YT or YT Music. Here is one example.
I noticed a QQ Music playlist created by a friend is also very popular – much more popular than my list – understandable from the point that in mainland China there are a lot more listeners for both Cantonese and mandarin songs, compared to the listeners outside CHN.
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Lullabies 催眠曲
Btw, for lullabies, my recommendation is to listen to them from a MP3 player, not from the phone. Because ideally, we don’t want to look at phone extensively before bed, and also, we want to keep the phone outside bedroom – for less distractions and better sleep. I learned this trick back in 2012, from the CEO of Arch Coal my employer at the time. But I had to admit I failed many times and recently I am more serious following this best practice. A related thing I started to do is to use Apple Watch to track my sleep.
That being said: here is my YT playlist for lullabies. I have a similar PL on my iPod Nano I use for sleep or before sleep (we are talking about lullabies or songs during sleep, right 🙂 I got the songs from Ayen’s Cover songs on the U drive.
This is my favorite lullaby right now 11-25-2025
A related thing I started to do recently is to use Apple Watch to track my sleep – after the suggestion of my 15-year-old. Previously I used Fitbit sleeping tracking for a while, but I haven’t used the Apple Watch sleep tracking since its debut in 2020 (I switched from Fitbit to Apple Watch a few years before that), mainly due to the fear to facing the reality of looking at my sleep data. Oh well, not a really good excuse and also let me back to the topic.
Similar singers
I saw some people commented on YT that that Hong Kong based 王菀之和陈洁丽的风格有点像Ayen何璟昕。我觉得读者可以自己去做判断。
PS:后记
How to show your support? Here is Ayen的店 at Taobao淘宝。She has her own branded guitar and other peripherals (附件，周边）in addition to her top selling Ayen翻唱經典歌曲集.
