Professional Stuff

Introduced Curosr to My Wife

Cursor is an AI powered IDE, based on VSCode. The major difference is that it can provide more tight integration with the codebase, like asking questions with @codebase, also it has a “composer mode” which could help modify files in a more structured way with the diff view. It extremely likes a pair programming colleague, but I am always the “navigator”. I have used it for a while, and I think it’s a good tool for me.

What does the “navigator” mean? Take a look at this article: The Driver-Navigator in Strong-Style Pairing

My wife is also an software engineer, and she is working on a new area recently. So I introduced Cursor to her, and she used Cursor for resolving some jobs. She likes it, and I think it’s great!

But also she share her thoughts about Cursor, because of the Cursor, developer could always be in the “navigator” role, the overall productivity is higher than the single developer, (and yes, especially in small tasks I think). But the problem is it makes the developer always in the intense status, and she feels more tired than before.

When we switching from architecture design to coding/implementation, we change the thinking mode, and that’s a good way to relax, have fun, enjoy the coding, and feel like accomplishing something. But Cursor takes over major coding job, so we’re tired to always stick in one mode.

BTW, sometime Cursor is not even a good “driver”, it makes mess and we need to clean up. Sometimes I think, I should have made it by myself. 😂

Another post about similar point is ChatGPT 正在杀死编程里的乐趣;

Adopting scarf.sh on Chaos Mesh

I have created ticket on CNCF service desk, asking support for setting up with scarf.sh.

But it seems every one is enjoying the KubeCon 🤣

Notion Site is not optimized for printing and reading mode

I like reading posts/articles in Reading Mode, sometimes save the post as PDF, send it to my iPad for reading.

I always print with the reading mode, it could make the content more tidy. BTW, macOS could also using “Apple Intelligence” to summarize the article in the Reading Mode! There is the summary of my last post, 2024 Week 45: Quick Updates.

But recently I noticed some site built with Notion, there is not a good experience for printing and reading mode.

Both Reading Mode and Printing is BROKEN on Notion site. I have to duplicate the post into my own workspace, and export it into PDF in the notion app. 🤨

For bloggers who are using / consider to using Notion site, and future bloggers, please consider this point.

Personal Stuff

My thoughts about the personal stuff are not organized yet so I will just write them down.

It seems after I backed to writing, the journal was also back to normal. It feels really good!

I joined the VanLUG event again, and get to know some new friends. After the purchasing $20 for the membership, I became one of the board members. (BTW at the last board meeting, we have voted to cancel the membership fee for the next year. 🤣) Anyway, compare to contributing by money(not much), contributing effort is more meaningful.

There are tons of things to do, but last weekend, my focus was somehow attracted by meme coins. 🤡 That’s not good, I need to back.

I always make a list about the topics I am most interested in during KubeCon. Here is my list for KubeCon NA 2024. Parts of them already have slides, we could watch them before the conference.

And later I will update my comments/reviews on each topic.

Talks

• All Your Routes Are Ready, More or Less - Dave Protasowski
• When Life Gives You Containers, Make an Open Source RDS: A Kubernetes Love Story - Sergey Pronin, Percona
• How to Move from Ingress to Gateway API with Minimal Hassle - Keith Mattix, Microsoft
• Running Quantum-Safe Applications on Kubernetes - Paul Schweigert & Michael Maximilien, IBM Quantum
• What Agent to Trust with Your K8s: Falco, Tetragon or KubeArmor? - Henrik Rexed, Dynatrace
• What Istio Got Wrong: Learnings from the Last Seven Years of Service Mesh - Christian Posta & Louis Ryan, Solo.io
• The Maintainer Monologues - Sarah Christoff, Defense Unicorns; Jason Hall, Chainguard; Scott Rigby & Karen Chu, Independent; Ryan Nowak, Microsoft
• Per-Node Api-Server Proxy: Expand the Cluster’s Scale and Stability - Weizhou Lan & Iceber Gu, DaoCloud
• Pick My Project! Lessons Learned from Interviewing 20+ End Users for Cloud Native Case Studies - Shedrack Akintayo & Bill Mulligan, Isovalent at Cisco
• How Google Built a New Cloud on Top of Kubernetes - Jie Yu & Prashanth Venugopal, Google
• Better Together! GPU, TPU and NIC Topological Alignment with DRA - John Belamaric, Google & Patrick Ohly, Intel
• Can You Put a Price Tag on Open Source? - Mario Fahlandt, Kubermatic & Bob Killen, CNCF
• Open Source 2.0: The Maintainers’ Perspective - William Morgan, Buoyant; Ashley Davis, Venafi; Deepthi Sigireddi, PlanetScale; Emily Omier, Emily Omier Consulting; Matt Bates, Cofide
• Upgrade Safely: Avoid the Pitfalls of Kubernetes Versioning - Rob Scott, Google
• Kubernetes on Multisites – A Story About Stateful App, Hybrid Clouds, and High Availability - Florian Coulombel, Dell Technologies & Jan Šafránek, Red Hat
• What’s New in Operator Framework?! - Bryce Palmer, Rashmi Gottipati & Lalatendu Mohanty, Red Hat; Attila Meszaros, Apple
• Still Don’t Do What Charlie Don’t Does - Making CRD Changes Safer - Nick Young, Isovalent
• Gamifying Cloud Native: How to Design and Build an Educational Game for Your Project - Calum Murray, University of Toronto, Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering & Zainab Husain, OCAD University
• Object Storage Is All You Need - Justin Cormack, Docker
• The Missing Talk About API Versioning & Evolution in Your Developer Platform - Stefan Schimanski, Upbound & Sergiusz Urbaniak, Independent
• Thousands of Gamers, One Kubernetes Network - Surya Seetharaman, Red Hat & Girish Moodalbail, NVIDIA Inc
• Goodbye etcd! Running Kubernetes on Distributed PostgreSQL - Denis Magda, Yugabyte

Lighting Talks

• gRPC: The gRPC “Standard Library” | Project Lightning Talk
• ⚡ Lightning Talk: Kubectl Debug Lacks an IDE Option. Let’s Fix That! - Mario Loriedo, Red Hat
• SlimToolkit: Improving DX with Containers - Making it Easy to Understand, Optimize, and Debug Your Containers | Project Lightning Talk
• Project Overview: A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the CNCF Landscape - Katherine Druckman and Lori Lorusso, CNCF Ambassador
• Meshery: Visualizing Kubernetes Resource Relationships with Meshery | Project Lightning Talk

I did not feel something special in this week, so just some quick reviews and updates.

Professional Stuff

Bring macOS native module to electron with NAPI-RS and swift-bridge

TLDR; Build browser webpage, or build native app. Electron/Tauri/Wails is not the best choice for desktop app, unless

• cross-platform is a must
• also the app do not ask for tightly system integration
• and you do not care about the look and feel of the app

We developed a in-context AI assistant tool called Haye, https://haye.ai. And we used to decided to use electron as the framework to build it, and now it looks like electron already become the burden of the project. We want to build the native-like experience on macOS, and we always use the webview to imitate the native. And our app want to integrate with the system, like hotkey, notification, Notes, or Shortcuts. None of them can be easily done with only javascript. And there is not so good ecosystem for electron to do this.

In the last week to bring more seamless text selection experience, I discovered the native API about accessibility and NSEvent, I found that it is soo easy to do this in native app. Building a native module now become a must-have for us. Luckily, I found two interesting projects, NAPI-RS and swift-bridge. The first project could bring rust to nodejs, and the second project could bring swift to rust.

I made a poc last week and it works. So I just take a record here.

We use rust as bridge, with swift-bridge and napi.rs, we could get:

• bring seamless native API integration to nodejs
• type-safe and polyfill; Swift -> Rust -> TypeScript, no more any, no more UnsafeMutablePointer;
• standard publish ci bring by napi.rs.

So using these two projects, I have a way to build and publish node native module with swift and macos native API, somehow it is a good news.

I am still exploring the more direct way / best practice to use NAPI and Swift. I will keep updating the progress.

But there is one more thing I still need to figure out, some of rpc framework like GRPC, already have the unified DSL to define the service and message, and it supports multiple languages. I am thinking about if I could use the same DSL to define the native API, and just use it as ffi. I will also keep exploring this.

If you have any idea or experience about this, please let me know.

Haye new version released

We release a new version of Haye. It brings the dedicated window for view chat history and start new chatting.

早上好 / 中午好 / 晚上好 !!

Haye AI 更新啦! 现在除了划词唤起外, 还支持了直接对话模式. 现在已经是我主力的 AI 对话软件了!

想拥有方便美观 AI 聊天软件朋友们, 请立刻用起来! 🥰https://t.co/QGR1TdIV7r pic.twitter.com/CJbr1HfJFt

— STRRL.gpt (@strrlthedev) November 9, 2024

And we offer a discount, the pricing is 50% off, from $9.99 to $4.99. If you are interested in it, please check it out here;

I also bump the minor version of the app, from 0.1.x to 0.2.x;

scarf.sh

Several weeks ago, I read the linkerd’s story, Towards a Sustainable Service Mesh. In a short word, linkerd would not provide stable release for free, only with the buoyant enterprise subscription.

And days later, I found the linkerd’s show case with scarf.sh, How Buoyant Drives Open-Source-Led Growth with Linkerd. Scarf.sh is a tool to help open-source project to track the usage of the project, and also help the project to monetize the usage.

I take a try with my personal project, STRRL/cloudflare-tunnel-ingress-controller, and it is very easy to setup. I will keep tracking the usage of my project with scarf.sh.

BTW if you do not know cloudflare-tunnel-ingress-controller, check it here: Unlocking the Power of Cloudflare Tunnel: Secure, Scalable, and Simple Kubernetes Ingress Controller Implementation for Your Applications.

It looks great so far, and I will share it on the Chaos Mesh development meeting, and consider to use it in the project.

Personal Stuff

VanLUG, meet Hank, and sustainable community

I joined the Vancouver Linux User Group Meeting last week, that’s Annual General Meeting, the boards of VanLUG share the wrap-up of the last year.

Nester is impressive, he shared the updates and the future plan of VanLUG. The community did become more active and more awesome in 2024, but it still facing problem on making value and sustainability.

2024 Year End Report from Nestor

The link of presentation on VanLUG is not correct, I would send email to them for asking the correct link. Once I get it, I will update it here. Updated!

I joined as the paid member, get my vote-card.

BTW, I forgot to take cash, so I borrow $20 from Alex. Then I return it to him with e-transfer. People here are so nice, when I ask for help, they propose to lend me the money. I am so grateful for that.

I also meet with Hank! Handsome big brother! 🔥

🔥🔥🔥 今天在 Vancouver Linux User Group 上面基了 @hankbao pic.twitter.com/0VTOGzentd

— STRRL.gpt (@strrlthedev) November 10, 2024

Crypto

After big election completed, the crypto market is getting fire again. Bitcoin is hitting $90k.

I still not get the point of the crypto currency, I use to chase “value” in the market. So I dig into the projects, finding out what them really make.

But there are not so many projects really make sense. I am still looking for the project that could bring the “real value” to the world.

Maybe the currency itself is the value, and that’s why even memocoin could go high. But I still not get it.

Passion or Profession

Last week I completed 虚伪的真心话 (超思考)by 北野武(Takeshi Kitano). Takeshi Kitano is a famous Japanese comedian, actor, and film director, and he is of the same age as people from my grandparents generation.

I am an east-asian, and I think China, Japan, and Korea are the three countries that have much similarity in their culture and history. So recently days I have been reading several books of Japanese / Korean authors, and I think that’s a really good way to learn and think.

There’re several different thoughts in this book, like “fast-food entertainment”, “useless politics”, “chasing dreams, selling dreams”, and “not earning too much money”.

The one most impressive to me is about “chasing dreams and selling dreams”. For me, in the past years of my life, I have always wanted to do something that I am passionate about. But in recent years, I have found that it is not always good and risk-free to only do what I am passionate about. I think it is very important to make an effort on other things that I have no interest in, and that’s something I have lacked in the past years.

Another aspect of this idea is bring the “good feeling” when user using the product. People may not really want to “be successful” or “be rich”, they do like the feeling of “being successful” or “being rich”. So making products / selling resources to people “want to become a engineer”, “want to become a designer”, “want to become an individual developer” would be a good way to make money.

But would a product so like that make value? I think it is a good question for me to think about. 😳

Professional Stuff

Setup CI with self-hosted macOS runner

We used to use FlyCI instead of using GitHub provisioned runners, because the former one is cheaper. But FlyCI announced that they get pivoted to AI CI/CD troubleshooting and the runner hosting service would be stopped(FlyCI: Discontinuing FlyCI macOS Runners - A New Chapter for FlyCI Wingman).

I agree that providing computing resources as github action runner is not a good business model. But AI CI/CD troubleshooting is an another trap. It’s way far from enough context from only the code base and CI/CD logs for now. But if it could be done one day, I would be very happy to see that!

So I have to setup a self-hosted macOS runner to pack my apps. Thanks to tart and tartlet, it is very easy to setup a self-hosted runner.

Eat own dog food on Haye

Last week I got my OpenAI account banned with no idea. I lost using chatGPT app and also the API key.

As a replacement, I use the new feature of Haye to continue the daily usage of chatGPT.

或许是天意, 倒逼我自己吃自己的狗粮 https://t.co/lzgBTRkqwZ pic.twitter.com/BAglXjxpAO

— STRRL.gpt (@strrlthedev) October 23, 2024

We turned our Apple Developer account to a organization account

After a 3 months of inactivity, we finally have new progress on our products. We’re going to release one new version of our product and also start 2 new products on testflight.

Personal Stuff

New Games

Monster Hunter Wild starts its public beta test on 2024.10.30 - 2024.11.04, it is a pretty great game.

I have played about 16+ hrs in the past 3 days, and I am still not tired of it.

The new generation of Monster Hunter brings lots of new actions and mechanics, and it is becoming more and more easy to get into. Players would have more fun in the game, and pro players would have more possibility to hit the ceiling.

I record some of my gameplay and would like to share to you:

试着用 steam deck 玩了下怪猎荒野

一帧不卡 两帧流畅 我这十五帧要起飞了 🤡

就是 bug 还是不少，视频尾最后居上了但是卡死了 pic.twitter.com/L7NPEo6dFG

— STRRL.gpt (@strrlthedev) November 2, 2024

Factorio Space Age is the new DLC for Factorio, it brings lots of new stuff into the game, but I still not start to play it.

BTW, the factorio team also has a great blog called FFF(Factorio Friday Facts), share stories about engineering and gaming design, I love to read it!

Link: https://www.factorio.com/blog/

You could also subscribe it on Follow: link

2025 would be a great year of games, with MHW, GTA6 and others.

New life in Vancouver

I have been in Vancouver for about 3 months(which also means my temporary driver license is going to expire, damn), I found that I have lost the first passion of exploring the city. Instead, I back to the busy ordinary life, without new exploring and communicate with new people. That’s not good.

The one big reason I want to move to another place is to get new experiences and information, also to meet new people. But now I am working at home, not working with a local team, and I have no friends in Vancouver. That’s not good.

I should make a plan to change it. Maybe any suggestions?

At last, it takes me about 90 mins to complete this blog, hope you enjoy it!

Background

In the last 3 weeks, we just turned the personal Apple Developer membership into a organization membership, also changed the name as “Boring Design LLC”. I am working on replace old certificates and with new ones.

I just realized that I nearly forgot how to get the new certificates for electron app signing, so here is a cheat sheet for that, maybe it will help me again in the future.

Before Start

If a application is not signed, macOS will show a warning dialog when the app is opened, and the user needs to right-click the app and select “Open” to open the app. If the app is signed with a Apple Developer certificate, the app could be opened by double-clicking.

There is an app called Apprancy, to check the signing status (and more) of an app, like this:

Get the Certificates

We are going to use “electron/osx-sign” to sign the app, it will look up the correct certificate from keychain, so what we need to do is to get prepared with the certificates, download them from Apple Developer website, and install them into the keychain.

1. Prepare a Certificate Signing Request(CSR) Apple requires a CSR to generate certificates, we could generate it from Keychain Access,:

No need to tune the settings, and remember to check the “Save to disk” option.

2. Generate and Download Certificate from Apple Developer

Login into Apple Developer -> Account, then jump to Certificates

Click the “+” button to create a new certificate, and notice that we should create 2 certificates, one for “Developer ID Application” and another for “Apple Distribution”.

“Developer ID Application” is used for distributing the app outside of Mac App Store, and “Apple Distribution” is used for distributing the app in Mac App Store.

Download the certificates and install them into the keychain.

Setup Signing

By default, “electron/osx-sign” will look up the correct certificate from keychain, so we don’t need to specify the certificate explicitly. But we could specify the certificate explicitly by setting the identity option in the osxSign option if we have multiple certificates in the keychain.

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{
  "osxSign": {
    "identity": "Developer ID Application: Boring Design LLC (XXXXXXXXXX)"
  }
}

Option reference: https://github.com/electron/osx-sign/blob/main/src/types.ts

Setup Notarize

Notarization is a process to submit the app to Apple for scanning, and Apple will return a ticket if the app is notarized successfully. We could use “electron/notarize” to notarize the app.

I use the following options:

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osxNotarize: {
  tool: 'notarytool',
  appleId: process.env.APPLE_ID || "",
  appleIdPassword: process.env.APPLE_PASSWORD || "",
  teamId: process.env.APPLE_TEAM_ID || ""
}

and it requires:

• Apple ID: your apple developer account email
• Apple Password: the app-specific password, generate it by following the guide
• Apple Team ID: the team id, could be found in Apple Developer -> Membership

It could also be used inside the CI environment, like GitHub Actions, by setting the environment variables.

Pack it

After setting up the signing and notarization, we could finally get a signed and notarized app:

That’s perfect, let’s ship it!

Long time no see! Half years passed since my last weekly recap.

Lots of things happened in the last 7 months, and I think it’s time to get a quick update on my life.

Professional Stuff

I changed my job 2 times, from Limit Labs to RSS3, and now, GitRoll. I would not like to the comparison between these companies, but the one same thing I could feel is business is hard, and its really hard to complete the 0-1 process of making profit.

Boring Design

At Boring Design, we are still working on the Haye. And what a coincidence, when I working on the main chatting view of Haye, my ChatGPT account got banned by OpenAI. 😅

或许是天意, 倒逼我自己吃自己的狗粮 https://t.co/lzgBTRkqwZ pic.twitter.com/BAglXjxpAO

— STRRL.gpt (@strrlthedev) October 23, 2024

We’re also working on exploring the native integration with macOS, using Electron has some limitations, and we want to provide not only beautiful UI, but also more powerful integration with macOS system.

Cloudflare Tunnel Ingress Controller

Cloudflare Tunnel Ingress Controller is side project I am working on, it’s effortless way to using native Ingress to expose services in Kubernetes cluster to the internet.

I noticed there’re more adoption and contributors to this project, and more options and production level features are built by the community. Maybe I should spend more time on this project.

Personal Stuff

I moved from Hangzhou to Vancouver. Welcome to huddle me if you are in Vancouver!

I realized that my english is not good enough to communicate with people in English, so I need to make a new plan to improve my English, as daily practice, writing, and reading.

Lots of good routines are broken, like daily exercise, good sleep schedule and weekly recap. I need time to rebuild these routines.

Others

There’re still lots of things I want to share, like lots of new tech, new idea, new products, but I already spent 1 hours on update the blog, update hugo and them, and write this post. I need to back to work now.

Last Post: Gap Year Wrapped - Timeline

Timeline

I’m so excited to continue recording my gap year life the second part. Let’s start it.

February 2023

My major in the university is Digital Media TechKnowledge, so a lot of my university classmates works in Gaming Area like NetEase, Tencent, BiliBili and miHoYo. And actually I am also a hard-core gamer for most kind of games and I still have a dream to build my own game.

And finally, I have a chance to build a game, which is a VR game during the Global Game Jam (GGJ). It’s a global activity that calls for lots of game designer, developers to join the activity in person or online. In two days, 48 hours, to create an amazing game and at last we would show games to the partners.

Video:

I also we also have a trip in Beijing, actually I have oNOgood experiment experience in Beijing. I prefer to Tianjin, it’s more than a modern city then Beijing.

BTW, I also met 象牙山刘能 in Beijing, and that’s the most exciting thing in Beijing.

We went the Universal Beijing Resort, expect for street pop-up event and float parade, the rest are all duplicated roller coasters.

In one work, not good as the Disneyland in Shanghai.

And I’m starting to prepare for the master degree and we find an advisory services for some references to pick school, and the paperwork.

At the last, we traveled to Qiandaohu, and it is very great trip.

March 2023

After I buy the Volkswagen car, I have a dream which is making an Itasa Car, which means I will paint some anime characters on the surface of the car.

I picked Hatsune Miku and which is virtual idol for 16 years. We started to design the itasa car with a designer in this month.

I started to do something new, like streaming on YouTube and learning some principle of the design from Google UX and online courses from Facebook design. I also started to have a learning about English the TOEFL exam recently.

It’s also a great time enjoying Sakura flower. 🌸 I am very luck because there are several Sakura trees in my community.

April 2023

And then this month I took the first TOEFL exams and I got 89 which is not very good but it’s kind of enough for some normal school. I still need need to make more effort to get a higher score about 95 or a 100 but yeah it’s basic score for some applications.

We also travel to Yueyang again, took some beautiful memories.

We also attended the the Itasa Car Exhibition at ChangSha, 痛一会@长沙. Meet many nice and awesome guys, who love ACG deeply, and keep sharing the happiness to others.

After we back to Hangzhou, there was also a great news: BIRLAND(玉鸟集) started trail opening! In the next several months, we will have a great time in BIRLAND, meet many new friends and old friends. 🥰

May 2023

After travel to Yueyang, I also travel to Shandon, my hometown.

And in this month I also made new friends like daddy like 面包, 智子, LAKR, 炸鸡, Houge.

June 2023

We drove to Nanjing for 鸭血粉丝汤. Nanjing is the last city we traveled before the Covid 19 pandemic. Nanjing really impressive me with its delicious food 鸭血粉丝汤.

During this month, Apple announced the new device: Vision Pro. I think it worse me spending money to buy it.

This DIABLO IV was released. We spent a lot of time on it.

I also spent lots of time on making new friends and keeping connections with old friends. I met 图拉鼎 in this month, met the OriginCode from HZLUG, and I also met friend 深海带鱼, and we have a great time in the piano room.

July 2023

I registered as a Apple developer. Why I choose Apple Developer, well, you know, as an engineer, is not the final step to making living hood to making project or product, is selling your product to the end users. I think App Store is one of the best way for developers to sell their product.

I ams also a big fans of Apple product, I believe it will give me more chances.

Also away meet new friends like Xiaowen and Xinyi. Both of them are very professional in their domain area, and both of them have their different opinion to the differences things, that’s really impressive me.

And my left foot got really injured, (it does still not recover until I write this article). 😰

August 2023

I have a chance to travel to Shenzhen and Hong Kong.I travel to Hong Kong because I want to apply my credit card and banking account from the overseer oversee bank, and Hong Kong is one of the best choice. We applied for HSBC bank and ZA bank.

We also went for a special restaurant is called a magpie, the restaurant owned by one of my favorite Youtuber Cadence Gao.

We also travel to Longyou to met one of my friends who is also my ex-colleague. Longyou is a beautiful city which also have great food and awesome rally racing track.

Comparison with the Career working in Company

I will try to make a comparison Career in company and gap year life.

For the conclusion of career in company, I think the keyword is SIMPLE.

While I was working in company, we have clear goals(or maybe not so clear), we always have a direction in the professional domain. It might be making money or build projects or products and it’s very simple and intuitive.

For the conclusion of gap year life, I think the keyword is UNLIMITED.

I start to consider making my value in some form like building products, trying to make some investments, and making myself and my family happy. I started to think it, but I still have no clear answer to these questions. But at least, I started to think about it, rather than spend all my time on working.

I am very very thanks for all of the friends, who helps me to making living hood during the gap year. I really really appreciate it. Thank you very much. 🥰

Pros for The Gap Experience

I have more free time and then I have more free thoughts, and I start to explore the possibility of our life.

Cons for The Gap Experience

Cons are also obvious, I used to be an employee of a company, so my mindset was very simple as an engineer. So in the short term, I could not make a good living hood as before. Without the stable income, the mental pressure is very high.

Takeaway

That’s the last 6 months for the gap year. I tried to use Siri Dictation to speed up the post writing, and it’s really helpful.

Gap experience is really a great experience. But it makes me not submerge in the endless career life and company work, and it give me a really great chance to think about the life and the future.

At last, I would reference a tweet from 花果山大圣, which introduces his opinion about the hard-working and the gap experience:

It’s a long tweet thread, this is only the opening one

开个thread记录一下，为什么我以前如此坚决的反对996（不惜离职来对抗），以及这两年不上班后，我认为gap year是必要的 （哪怕俩月呢）

— 花果山大圣 (@shengxj1) July 11, 2023

Thanks for reading this non-structured post, I hope you enjoy it.

About Me

Hi! I am Zhiqiang. I am a full-stack software engineer majoring in cloud computing area. I am the maintainer of Chaos Mesh, also I am enthusiastic in any kind of open source software.

On August 31th 2022, I left my job at PingCAP and started my gap year.

I will write a series of posts to review my gap year.

Fortunately, I have history weekly-recap posts, although it definitely less frequently than weekly, it’s still very helpful to review my gap year.

This is the first one, I am going to review my gap year in a timeline, and record some important moments.

And I would write another 2 (or 3) posts, to review my gap year in different aspects.

There would NO any suggestion and advice purposes from this post, only my personal life. I would share my thoughts in later post.

Timeline

TL;DR, the timeline content might a little boring and flat, the main contents are photos with simple introductions.

I am going to reproduce the journey of my gap year in a timeline.

If you don’t want to read the whole post, you can just jump to the Summary section.

August 2022

My last day in PingCAP is August 31th 2022, which is also the birthday of Hatsune Miku.

Several interviews were in progress, majoring in SRE / DevOps, and cloud infra development.

Travel to Kunming, Yunnan.

The Wujiaying Subway Station, one of my most familiar station during the college life.

Flied a drone around Yunnan University.

Fei Yang TEPANTAKI, the last meal with my university roommates.

Fried Potato, the my favorite snacks in Kunming.

September 2022

Started the idea for a new start-up based on Chaos Mesh, but still kept interviewing. The new company’s logo inspired from “Faerie Dragon”, a naughty creature live in your infrastructure, break something but finally fix it.

Back to the normal social activities, organized several Hangzhou Linux User Group Hacking Saturdays events:

Got a surprised moon cake present from Agora:

Travel to my hometown, Dezhou, Shandong.

One of my favorite home-made dishes by my mom:

Also here is a night-view panorama photo of my hometown:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/op9nJUHz3HrZaDXy8

And I bought my new iPhone Mini, I love this device soo much! 🤩

I think buying a new iPhone start inspire me to think more on “making good products”.

October 2022

I traveled to Yueyang this month.

I bought the Windows Dev Kit 2023, I thought it would the best ARM computing device, but I am wrong.

Both WSL and Hyper-V could NOT work well on this device. And there is no graphic acceleration API available on video codec, so I have no more usage on it.

I found that as me get fitter, I love climbing mountains more and more. I realized that working out is a very important part of my life.

November 2022

This month I complete the 4-rounds technical interview with Binance, but I got the message that they would not hire employees from China Mainland anymore. 🥲

Also we were going to stop the start-up idea, because we found that it’s hard to raise enough money at that time. So we just paused that idea.

I started to play Ingress again, and this one I joined some in-person activities, meet some new friends.

And I attended the DevJoy in Shanghai WeWork, lots of funny booth there.

Get lots of stickers. 🤣🤣

December 2022

• Buy new Car
• Affected by Covid-19

We bought a new car. Liangzhu Culture Village locates in rural area of Hangzhou, it’s a very beautiful place, but it’s hard to get out of here without a car. And the winter is soo cold, I think using e-bike is not a good idea anymore.

I think we got affected by Covid-19 when we are registering the car, we get in touch with soo many people these day. My girlfriend got fever first, then me 3 days after.

It’s really hard to buy medicines and covid tests these days. But very thanks to my friends, they gave me some Ibuprofen suspensions, it really helped us a lot.

We were luck we were the first batch of people who got infected, we were also the first batch of people who got recovered. After we recovered, we have a car to travel around Hangzhou. That’s kind of a little scared, there was NOT ANY PEOPLE on the street, and NO ONE in the shopping mall.

People horded foods, drinks, snacks for the next several days, lots of goods are out of stock.

January 2023

• Spring Festival at HangZhou
• new toy: Insta 360

We decided to stay at Hangzhou for the Spring Festival, because of the Covid-19. But we still had a great time.

I am going to share some photos and videos here, I think it’s better than words.

Please start watching at 2:10.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/cQy6FUpQTYnzFRUf7

https://photos.app.goo.gl/Q6U1B47bhw3wcsEy7

https://photos.app.goo.gl/F97iDVPWjFLSPQmt6

https://photos.app.goo.gl/x5JHDdRfUDQ5jurn6

People were getting better from Covid-19, and the city was getting back to normal.

Summary

That’s the first 6 months for the gap year. Overall, I have more activities and trips than before. And I recorded more moments, let met find that there are many different ways to enjoy life.

I do not have soo many continuous writing time, so I just post the first 6 months in this post. I would update the rest half year and other topic in the next post, about:

• my personal finance during the gap
• what I got and what I lost comparing to the previous life
• products, engineering, skills
• the plan about the future

Thanks for reading the non structured post, I hope you enjoy it.

Next Post: Gap Year Wrapped - Timeline (Second Half)

The Background

In the last few weeks, Caicai and me are working on the product, Haye AI, which is an in-context AI assistant.

We dedicated our part time to this product, and we are following the fancy ideas and state-of-the-art technologies to make it better.

And days ago, Meta released llama 3, which really changed something.

The New Open Source Model: LLaMA 3

LLaMA 3 is really impressive in various of aspects:

• it supports responding in multiple languages, like Chinese. (But sometime it would respond in Pinyin, and some single words are still left in English.)
• the overall performance is much better than LLaMA 2, closing to GPT 4
• some online API provider provides llama 3 in extremely low cost, and fast response speed, which makes llama 3 become the most cost-effective AI model right now.

We used to use gpt-3.5-turbo as the major model for most of the tasks, with some predefined presets. I spend hours and hours to modify the prompts in the playground, and the results are not always good. Once I changed the model to gpt-4, the results are much better, but we can’t, because the cost is too high(about 10x - 15x of gpt-3.5-turbo).

So we are really happy to see llama 3, and we are trying to integrate it into our product.

Problems

There are several problems we are facing:

• llama 3 is not natively support function calling, which is a key feature in some tasks
• still not have reliable LLM Providers to provide llama 3 API
• even different LLM Providers have different API, event most of them are announced as “Open AI Compatible”, but they are compatible in different ways
  • groq does not support function calling with Streaming API, which means I must manually split the tasks based on it requires function calling or not
  • deepinfra, fireworks, together just ignore the function calling in the request
  • openrouter could support function calling with stream, but it respond tool call in the content, not it the expected tool_call field, which is not following the Open AI API standard

We’re still waiting for that there would be available resources on Azure, or other big cloud provider which could let me rust the reliability. At the same time, I would like to work on the function calling feature, possibly I would build a simple layer as an LLM-Agnosticism “function calling” adapter based on “Reason - Act” prompting.

BTW: 这是使用 Haye AI 的翻译功能翻译的.

背景

在过去的几周里，我和 Caicai 一起致力于开发产品 Haye AI，这是一个上下文感知的人工智能助手。

我们抽出业余时间来开发这个产品，并且我们一直追随着时髦的想法和最先进的技术，以使其变得更好。

几天前，Meta 发布了 llama 3，这真的改变了一些东西。

新的开源模型：LLaMA 3

LLaMA 3在各个方面都非常令人印象深刻：

• 它支持多种语言的回复，比如中文。（但有时它会用拼音回复，而且有些单词仍然是英文。）
• 总体表现比 LLaMA 2 要好得多，接近GPT 4
• 一些在线 API 提供商以极低的成本和快速的响应速度提供 llama 3，使其成为目前最具性价比的 AI 模型。

我们过去通常使用 gpt-3.5-turbo 作为大多数任务的主要模型，配合一些预定义的预设。我花了很多时间修改 playground 中的提示，但结果并不总是好的。一旦我将模型改为 gpt-4，结果就好得多，但我们不能这样做，因为成本太高（大约是 gpt-3.5-turbo 的 10 倍 - 15 倍）。

因此，我们非常高兴看到 llama 3，并且正在尝试将其集成到我们的产品中。

遇到的问题

我们面临着几个问题：

• llama 3不支持原生的函数调用，这是一些任务中的关键功能
• 仍然没有可靠的 LLM 提供商提供 llama 3 的API
• 即使不同的 LLM 提供商都宣称与 “Open AI” 兼容，但它们兼容 Open AI API 的方式也不尽相同
  • groq 不支持使用 Streaming API 进行 tool call，这意味着我必须根据是否需要 tool call 手动拆分任务。
  • deepinfra、fireworks 和 together 直接忽略请求中的 tool call。
  • openrouter 可以支持使用 stream 进行 tool call，但它直接在content中回应了工具调用，而不是预期的tool_call字段，这不符合 Open AI API 的标准。

我们仍在等待 Azure 或其他大型云服务提供商提供可靠的资源，以便我能够信任其可靠性。同时，我也希望能够开发函数调用功能，可能会基于 “Reason - Act” 提示构建一个简单的层作为 LLM 不可知的"函数调用"适配器。