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.

Subway Wujiaying Station

Flied a drone around Yunnan University.

Yunnan University

Yunnan University

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

Fun & Young TEPANTAKI

Fried Potato, the my favorite snacks in Kunming.

Fried Potato

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.

Logo Inspiration

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

HZLUG

Got a surprised moon cake present from Agora:

Agora Present

Travel to my hometown, Dezhou, Shandong.

Hui Meng Gong Yuan

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

Traditional Dishes made 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 love Yueyang

Yueyanglou

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)