In today’s job market, freelancing is becoming increasingly popular and has become a choice for many. Recently, a friend of mine organized an end-of-year gathering for freelancers in Shanghai, where participants shared their career experiences and insights. Within an hour of the event announcement, the registration exceeded expectations and quickly filled up, highlighting the growing popularity of freelancing.

I have been a freelancer for 135 days now, and today I’d like to share some of my thoughts and methods during this journey.

On December 11, 2024, OpenAI experienced a major outage caused by a failure in the Kubernetes cluster control plane. For outsiders, this may simply seem like an interesting incident, but as an insider, I analyzed this failure from a technical perspective.

After reviewing the incident report, I came up with three questions:

• What is the Telemetry service used for?
• What are the “expensive requests” mentioned in the report? Why would this program generate a high volume of resource-sensitive API requests?
• Why did it impact the business systems?

After stepping away from traditional jobs, I realized there are so many other ways to make a living, and my perspective has broadened. In the past, I never paid attention to ways of earning money outside of employment—perhaps even looked down on them. Now, whenever I see something, my first thoughts are:

• How does this make money?
• What are the entry barriers?
• How big is the market?
• If done well, can this generate significant income?

Changing my mindset has opened up new horizons full of possibilities.

At 35 this year, I was laid off in March. It’s been a tough year, perhaps a turning point in my life. I’ve taken a courageous step forward to see if I can survive independently. So far, my efforts have been in vain, and I’m taking things one step at a time.

Difficult times are always agonizing. Be mentally prepared for a long period without income and start with what you’re good at.

If there’s something you really want to do, do it while you’re young.

With 2025 just around the corner, reflecting on the plans I made at the beginning of the year, I’d summarize them in one sentence: “50% completed, major plans abandoned, and life took a 180-degree turn.”

This article was written during a time when a loved one was undergoing treatment in the hospital—a moment for rational reflection and a profound questioning of the soul.

When a loved one is diagnosed with an illness that modern medicine cannot cure, we are faced with a difficult choice: while treatment can prolong life, it often brings more pain and suffering. Could our well-intentioned efforts unintentionally become a form of “doing harm out of kindness”?

Seeing a post from a computer science undergraduate asking, “Is it still worth choosing computer science this year?” I’d like to share my thoughts on this.

Computers Are Not the Same as the Internet, but for many people, the term “computer” is often synonymous with the internet. The discussion below is all about the internet industry.

Recently, I joined a feedback and communication group specifically created for Bilibili (B站) content creators. In this group, Bilibili’s operation team shared many practical and insightful tutorials. The quality of these tutorials is indeed excellent, with well-summarized content. However, the advice they provide to creators is mostly from an operational perspective, focusing on the characteristics of “good videos,” which leans towards an altruistic viewpoint.

In contrast, the book It’s No Accident: Harnessing the Head Effect of Knowledge Planets (published by Knowledge Planet) reveals that most top content creators often start from a self-serving perspective when creating WeChat official account content. They share their knowledge and insights, thereby attracting followers.