Preface

After resigning at the end of January, I spent time at home for the Chinese New Year, then traveled around Shanghai, Zhangjiajie, Chongqing, Suzhou, and Nanjing. I didn’t return to Shenzhen to start job hunting until mid-April. Initially, I wasn’t sure if I would have time to attend KubeCon China 2025 in June. However, I was fortunate that the company I received an offer from highly values technology. During the interview, my leader mentioned seeing my KubeCon experiences in my blog and said the company strongly encourages participation in such technical exchange events, even supporting giving talks with full expense coverage.

So, less than a month after joining, I went on a company-funded trip to KubeCon China 2025 in Hong Kong (:

I asked my colleagues if they were interested, but for various reasons, I ended up being the only one attending (sad

Preface

I had known for a while that KubeCon China would be held in Hong Kong this year, and while I was interested, I initially got deterred by the steep price of KubeCon tickets.

Sometimes you just have to believe in the magic of luck. By a twist of fate, I learned about KubeCon’s ‘End User Ticket Program’ from my friend @Kev and snagged a ticket for free. I also invited three friends from the 0xFFFF Community,@Chever-John,@0xdeadbeef, and@MingLLuo, to join in. We rented an Airbnb in Hong Kong, explored quite a few places in the city, and had a fruitful trip.

I also tried to invite other friends and colleagues, but they couldn’t make it for various reasons, which was a bit of a bummer.

It’s February 2024, exactly 10 months since I started using NixOS. The beginner notes I wrote initially have received a lot of positive feedback and some sponsorships, becoming one of the most popular entry-level tutorials in the entire community. Since I created a dedicated GitHub repository and a separate documentation site for it in June 2023, it has garnered 1189 stars, and besides me, 37 other readers have submitted PRs:

I have dabbled with many niche technologies, and this year, the main ones I explored are NixOS, window manager i3/hyprland, and Neovim. NixOS, in particular, took me to a whole new level - I even created an open-source bilingual booknixos-and-flakes-book to help beginners get started. Additionally, I worked on several NixOS-related open-source projects like nix-darwin-kickstarter and ryan4yin/nix-config, which all received positive feedback.

Based on my experiences with these niche technologies and the frequent questions I receive (e.g., why did I choose NixOS / Neovim /Flypy Chinese Input Method? What are their advantages? Can they really improve productivity?), I would like to briefly share my thoughts on them.

Since the article is so long now, for the convenience of readers, the content of this post has been moved to a separate site:

• Document Site: https://nixos-and-flakes.thiscute.world/
• GitHub Repo: https://github.com/ryan4yin/nixos-and-flakes-book

Thanks for the feedback, criticism, suggestions fromReddit❤️

Gossip

Another year has passed in the twinkling of an eye, and this New year, the global epidemic has set a new record. After Christmas, the daily increase in the United States has directly exceeded 1 million. In China, poor management in Xi’an has led to hunger.

COVID-19 has been for more than two years.

Back to the point, after leaving from W Company at the beginning of this year, I was very lucky to join the current company, Mobiuspace, and I was mixed in the process of integrating into Mobiuspace. However, I am quite satisfied with the overall results, the current work has been on the right track, but also found a lot of opportunities.

Ah, there are still ten days to get rid of the city and return to that reassuring mountain forest, waiting and anxious, wondering why the remaining ten days are so difficult.

The final review is a mess again. I am really lazy…

It is so unrealistic for me to have such a big dream that I have finished thousands of lines of code. I kind of want to accept my fate.