Forty Years' Autobiography
Eighteen years in the field, and I still can't answer a simple question: what exactly is it that I do?
Let me try to lay it out. Over these eighteen years, I've picked up skills that, if not quite expert-level, are at least well above basic: CAD drafting, EPLAN electrical design, test system design, energy-saving systems, HVAC, water treatment, natural gas and coal mining systems, traffic automation, automotive electronics, aerospace power distribution, landing gear, launch ignition systems, PCB layout, analog circuit design, power electronics, STM32 and DSP embedded systems, wiring electrical cabinets, PLC programming, HMI/SCADA software, embedded firmware, and software in C, C++, C#, LabVIEW, Python, JavaScript. Building and fixing computers. Maintaining Windows, Linux, and NAS systems. Basic SolidWorks and SketchUp for mechanical and 3D design. MATLAB. Power World for power system simulation. Professional-level office software. Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere, Blender. PMP project management. Engineering budgets and proposals...
Add in the non-technical work — running a business, sales, marketing, product design — and you start to see the problem. I've always felt that my major in automation somehow touched all of these things, and I simply went and practiced every one of them. Had I studied something more specific, I might have gone deep in one area and actually achieved something. But knowing a bit of everything makes it hard to achieve anything.
In software, there's a term for someone who does it all: "full-stack engineer." But that only covers a small slice of front-end and back-end. For someone in automation like me, the more accurate title might be "one Dragon engineer" — a one-stop-shop engineer who does the whole chain, from hardware to software to everything in between.
Years ago, my friend Xiaobo told me about a line from Murakami's Kafka on the Shore that stuck with him: "People are not drawn into tragedy by their weaknesses, but by their strengths." It took me many years to understand what that meant. The defining word of 2023 was probably ChatGPT. Before it, shuttling between so many domains left me stretched thin, often causing confusion for the people around me. But ChatGPT arrived like a supercharged toolkit — ideas that had been gestating in my head for years could suddenly be realized overnight.
This year I turned forty. I'm still confused about the world. Early in the year I bought a book called Life Gets Exciting at 40. The year didn't get exciting because of it, but I still hold on to the hope. On my birthday, Jacky Cheung released a rare new song, Another Ten Years. I listened to it on and off all year. I stopped listening to Jeff Chang's In My Thirties. And a line from the film The Grandmaster kept echoing in my head — Ip Man saying: "I started learning martial arts at seven. Before forty, I had never seen the mountains. When I finally reached them, I realized the hardest thing to overcome was simply life."
