OnionTalk

I’ve seen a lot of posts recently — in the Chinese-speaking world and the English-speaking world — talking about harness engineering. Most of them just cover the concept, with very little detail. And honestly, some of the systems described are so complex I can’t believe they’d keep running without crashing. So over the weekend, I built something myself. It’s funny — I’ve built a lot of personal projects, but most of them die within 10 iterations. When I say dead, I mean they spiral: adding a feature causes bugs, fixing those bugs creates more bugs. ...

After the layoff, I suddenly had too much time. Ideas were everywhere, but everything felt vague. Should I grind interviews? Build projects? Try something new? Too many options, and somehow I couldn’t pick one. So I did what most people do — I went into full sprint mode. I tried to smash frontend fundamentals and system design in a week. Late nights, aggressive goals, pushing hard. It worked… for a few days. ...

Today, I want to talk about focus. In today’s information society, focus is actually a very rare quality. There are endless short videos on Tiktok, nonstop articles pushed by influencer, and never-ending posts on X.com . The feed never stops. There is always something new competing for your attention. Many times, even when I am doing important work, I still cannot resist getting distracted and picking up our phone to scroll through social updates. ...