In my previous post, I shared how I found sanctuary in Emacs. But life has a way of throwing you into a "System Reset." To support my dream, I had to pause my professional dev career and move to Guangzhou to run a clothing business.
For two years, I was a businessman by day and a "shadow coder" by night. This is the story of how I kept my soul alive in the most unlikely environment.
1. The 100dB Soundtrack to My Code
Being a business owner sounds glamorous, but the reality was brutal. I was the boss, the laborer, the janitor, and the technician. I slept at 2:00 AM and woke up at dawn.
My "office" was a factory floor with machine noise exceeding 100 decibels. Back then, I used to be picky about having a quiet environment to code. In the factory, that luxury was gone. I had only two hours of coding time a day.
Surprisingly, the roar of the machines became my favorite white noise. It forced me into a state of "Hyper-Focus." I would write code in my head while fixing machines, then let the logic flow through my fingertips the moment I sat down.
2. Discovering the "Airship": Haskell
During this period, I stumbled upon Haskell. If Emacs opened my eyes, Haskell completely inverted my reality.
In the world of C++ or Java, you’re driving a car—worrying about performance, gears, and fuel. Haskell was an airship from another dimension. It didn't even travel on the same roads.
Immutable State: The concept of "no variables" haunted me for weeks. How do you save state? I eventually learned the beauty of thread-safe, lock-free programming through pure functions.
Mathematical Rigor: It taught me that a program should be a mathematical model, not just a list of instructions.
The GHC Philosophy: There’s a joke in the community: "If it compiles, it works." Because of Haskell’s ultra-intelligent type inference, the compiler catches logic errors before they ever hit production. It stops you from doing stupid things (like null pointer exceptions).
3. 300 Patches and a Repository Key
I wanted to build a "Next-Gen Emacs" using Haskell, but the existing libraries were outdated. I decided to update the gtk2hs bindings.
I spent 15 days upgrading Gtk+ from 2.8 to 3.10 and sent a massive 3,000-line patch to the maintainer.
He rejected it instantly. "Too big to review," he said.
I didn't give up. I spent another two weeks breaking that giant patch into 300 smaller, bite-sized commits. I annoyed him with constant updates. I fixed every error he pointed out. Eventually, he grew tired of reviewing my persistent flow of code.
One day, he sent me an email: "Here is the repository key. You have push access. I don't need to review you anymore."
The lesson? If you want to join an open-source community, don't ask "how." Just send patches. Solve their problems until they can't ignore you.
4. The "Still Water" State of Mind
In those two years, I developed a dozen applications between fixing broken sewing machines and managing clients. My goal shifted from "I want to be the world's best coder" to "I want to be better than I was yesterday."
I** learned that the growth of a developer follows a pattern:
Desire: Wanting everything.
Impatience: Learning everything at once.
Habit: Grinding until it’s part of you.
Clarity: Knowing exactly what you need.**
Stillness: Reaching a state of "Still Water" where complex logic flows effortlessly.
5. A Warning to Fellow Dreamers
Many people tell themselves: "I'll make a lot of money first, then I'll do what I love." The danger is that when you finally have the money, you’ve lost the most precious resource: Time. You become a money-making machine, and your passion becomes a distant memory.
I was lucky. The factory noise didn't drown out my love for the terminal. It only made it louder. I made enough to survive, but more importantly, I kept my "Preparing" state. When the opportunity finally came to start my own OS company, I was ready—not because I was rich, but because I had never stopped coding.
Next up: How I returned to the tech world and officially started the journey of Linux Deepin.
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