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“我们去看鱼吧。”我莫名其妙地说。 “看鱼？去哪里？”楚楚抬起头，用困惑的眼神看着我，似乎我说的不是去看鱼而是去看E.T.什么的。 “当然要去有鱼的地方了。”我说。 “怎么突然有这样的想法？” “我也不清楚，好像远处什么地方突然有鱼在招呼‘来看我，来看我’一样，或许在哪里也有未曾谋面的鱼渴望
Eighteen years in the field, and I still can't answer a simple question: what exactly is it that I do?
If I sit down and make a list, over these eighteen years I've picked up — maybe not mastered, but at least gotten competent at — something like this: 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, ignition systems for launch vehicles, PCB layout, analog circuit design, power electronics, STM32 and DSP embedded systems, wiring electrical cabinets, PLC programming, host computer software, embedded firmware, general programming in C, C++, C#, LabVIEW, Python, JavaScript, building PCs, fixing PCs, Windows, Linux, NAS administration, basic SolidWorks and SketchUp for mechanical and 3D modeling, MATLAB, PowerWorld power system simulation, professional office software, Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere, Blender, PMP project management, engineering cost estimation, proposal design...
And if you count the work outside of engineering — business operations, sales, marketing, product design, and so on.
It's hard to explain all of this clearly. Yet I keep feeling that my major in automation somehow covered all of it, at least a little, and I simply went out and practiced every last piece. If I'd studied something more specific, I might have gone deep in one direction and actually achieved something. Knowing a bit of everything, it turns out, makes it very hard to achieve anything.
In software there's a term for someone well-rounded: "full-stack engineer." But that only covers a small slice of front-end and back-end work. For someone like me, doing automation across all these domains, I think I'm closer to a "one Dragon engineer" — a one-stop-shop, everything-included kind of engineer.
Years ago, chatting with my friend Xiaobo, he mentioned a line from Murakami's Kafka on the Shore that had stayed with him: "It is not because of their shortcomings but because of their strengths that people are drawn into greater tragedies." Many years later, it suddenly clicked.
The word that defined 2023, the year that's now ending, has to be ChatGPT. Before it came along, shuttling between so many different domains always wore me thin. It caused real trouble for people around me, for my partners. Then ChatGPT arrived like a supercharged toolbox. Ideas that had been sitting in my head for years, things I could never finish — suddenly, overnight, they seemed possible.
This year I turned forty. The world still confuses me. At the start of the year I bought a book by Hisashi Otsuka called Life Gets Exciting at 40. The year did not get exciting because of that book. Still, I carry the hope.
On my birthday this year, Jacky Cheung released a rare new song, "Another Ten Years." I've been listening to it on and off all year. I stopped playing Jeff Chang's "Thirty-Something." And a line from The Grandmaster keeps coming back to me — Ip Man's words: "I started learning martial arts at seven. Before forty, I had never seen a real mountain. When I finally did, I realized the hardest thing to get through was just life itself."