The darkest moments in 20 years have made me the indomitable “cockroach” I am today.
Many young programmer friends or those aspiring to start a programming career can read about my 20-year journey of growth. This is not to evoke pity nor to inspire, but I hope that when you encounter difficulties on the path of pursuing your dreams, reading my words can give you some strength.
To make it easier for everyone to read, I’ve kept it concise. For more details, you can subscribe to my blog https://manateelazycat.github.io.
2005: That year I was 17 years old, carrying 3,000 yuan to Beijing to seek my fortune. I went to internet cafes every day looking for a job, sleeping in a basement. It was my first time venturing out alone on a whim. Back then, internet cafes did not allow minors, so I had to stand at the door every day and ask kindly for the older guys to give me a pass to get online. I interviewed with several companies but was politely rejected. Almost out of money, I returned home, ending my first adventure in less than half a month.
2006: After returning home, I found a job at a bookstore, working while studying, earning 150 yuan a month. While sorting books, I self-studied Java, C++, and J2ME mobile development. In the Nokia era, mobile games were cool. I was alone—no artists, no level designers. I read books at work during the day, and after work, I recorded PC game playbacks, took screenshots, and used Photoshop’s eraser tool to extract sprite materials. To get complete angle sprites, I would circle the enemy 360° without firing, so I could erase 8 frames of sprites from different angles afterward. This period helped me develop the skill of not shooting bullets and surviving until the final level of a flight game. Over two months alone, I handled the engine, level design, art, packaging, and testing, creating my first complete flight game. Then I moved to Chengdu, and after applying to 30 companies and repeatedly being turned away (what job could a high schooler find?), I finally found one that accepted me. There, I developed my first commercial mobile game “Mechanical Police,” which topped the Baibaoxiang chart.
2007: Working on games in Chengdu, I earned 1800 yuan a month. It was not much, but it was enough for me to live on. I could earn money writing games every day, but it didn’t improve my skills. After work, I studied Ubuntu, Emacs, and Elisp. That year, I wrote over 100 Emacs plugins. Though poor, I was passionate about technology, scavenging for valuable knowledge from various Wikis daily. Every time I learned a previously unknown technology, I felt extremely happy. A large amount of Linux and Emacs knowledge brought me great joy during that period.
2008-2009: To provide a better life for my wife, I quit my job in Chengdu and borrowed 100,000 yuan to start a garment factory in Dongguan. The factory required 16-hour workdays and only one day off per month. Outsiders saw me as the boss, but in reality, I worked amid 100-decibel knitting machine noise, repairing machines and carrying over 1,000 kilograms of raw materials up to the third floor daily—sometimes 120 kilograms in one go. In the noisy and dusty environment, I still insisted on studying technology for two hours every day. During that time, I self-studied Linux, GTK, X11, Haskell, and other technical details, meanwhile increasing my Emacs plugins to over 400. To this day, I remain China’s most prolific Emacs plugin developer and the top Gtk2hs contributor.
2010-2018: Together with Mr. Liu, I established the Deepin Linux team. For eight years, I mostly lived at the office, writing the desktop environment and Deepin series applications from scratch. I still worked 16 hours a day. Writing a Linux operating system was an incredibly happy time for me; I could hack the system’s core daily. My programming languages expanded to more than 20. I could write 2000 lines of code daily. In a focused state, the code flowed endlessly from my arms through my fingertips, eventually compiled inside Emacs to form the final product. Over eight years, our team grew from 2 to 300, then 4,000. Today, Deepin is a standard in domestic government procurement. I know many of you despise localization, but you must acknowledge that back then Deepin open-sourced all code under GPL3, promoting the use of WeChat, QQ, NetEase Cloud Music, Sogou Input Method, and Baidu Netdisk on Linux. Countless nights of coding made Deepin available in 70 countries, amazing outsiders with China’s Linux development level—a truly remarkable feat. It felt like the J-10 fighter, despised by many Chinese keyboard warriors only looking at specs, finally defeating the Rafale. During this time, I learned not to respond to keyboard warriors with anger but to strike back hard with strength.
2018-2019: I was forced to leave Deepin (the reasons are not for gossip here), marking the hardest period of my career. I was very down during that time. I remember the first day the GitCafe boss learned I was out, he flew from Shanghai to Wuhan to comfort me and drink with me; I’ll never forget that. Many who never call also reached out. During that time, I understood what true friendship was, what betrayal was, and what were interest-driven relations—I saw the world’s warmth and coldness. After six months of depression, I read extensively—economics, history, design, materials science, entrepreneurship, management, sci-fi… that year, reading so many books greatly raised my awareness. I still loved programming. On days off, I created EAF and lsp-bridge. EAF is an Emacs multimedia general programming framework, elevating Emacs from a Text OS to a Multimedia OS, a true Hacker OS. lsp-bridge remains Emacs’ most powerful and fastest LSP programming solution. In the summer of 2019, I took my family on a 6,000 km self-driving trip to Qinghai, reconciling with my past under the Qilian Snow Mountains. To this day, I’m grateful for that difficult year and a half—it made me a stronger person. Without those setbacks, I wouldn’t have read Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Miracle of Mindfulness nor had the courage to start my own company.
2019-2025: Returning from Qinghai with only 2,000 yuan in my pocket, I found an angel investor who invested 4.5 million yuan. Together with old Deepin comrades, we founded Li Nai Kr Xi (a pun on “Linux”) on September 30, 2019, the day before the Military World Games. A few months later, the pandemic hit. We survived those three years by doing projects. Starting in 2022, we invested tens of millions to design and develop LazyCat Microservices, a brand new operating system aimed at enabling all user devices to ignore terminal OS differences and form a truly free, controllable Internet of Things, where all data and code can interconnect. We also give developers and users the freedom to control their data and code. These six years saw my transformation from a technology developer and product manager into a full-time salesperson. What is sales? Sales is shamelessness: if you care about your image, a customer’s rejection will make you upset for days; shameless means strong-minded and unafraid of rejection. Sales is patiently communicating with customers about their dissatisfaction and pain points, converting listening into development requirements, and satisfying customer needs is paramount. Sales is doing the small things well, having responsibility, admitting mistakes proactively, and bravely recognizing your shortcomings and improving them to earn customer respect.
This is my 20-year entrepreneurial journey. I hope it can help you. Thank you to all the great people who have read this far.