"I don't understand code, I switched to development at the age of 36"

This is the story of a person who has successfully transitioned from a management position to front-line development in his middle age.

Han Kai is 36 years old, from Inner Mongolia, working in a high-tech enterprise in Beijing.

Years ago, he was an experienced project manager; now, he has become an operation and maintenance engineer who often "fights fire" in the middle of the night, and has to independently complete some development projects.

A few months ago, the government unit stationed by Han Kai made a request. In order to solve the problem of summer care for the children of employees, they hope to develop a small program where parents can scan the code to sign in and sign out, and form an information daily report for easy management.

Government business is Han Kai's old line. For more than ten years, he has been providing IT support to the government.

"To G business has several characteristics, frequent needs, multiple changes, and quick response." According to the traditional development model, it takes two or three weeks to invest at least four people in PC-side development, mobile-side development, testing, and project managers.

This small program on-line, Han Kai answer is " one day when a ."

Government public service enterprise declarations, project announcements, personnel leave and sales, and administrative department equipment maintenance... In the past few months of development, Han Kai has successfully developed more than ten small programs for customers.

people to middle age, start

After the Spring Festival, 36-year-old Han Kai is ready to give up ten years of project management and take the initiative to transfer to development and operation and maintenance.

Unlike in the early years, only a few lines of scripts and project experience can "make the world", today's operation and maintenance is becoming more professional, not only has endless tools, but also has an in-depth understanding of business architecture and code, on-site programming, basic and development No difference.

This seems a bit "untimely": According to the statistics of China Internet Network Information Center, programmers over the age of 35 .

36 is an embarrassing age, and there are still more than 20 years to retire, but he is already an older employee at an Internet company, and he is ambiguous between "human resources" and "human burden." The external environment is also not optimistic. The epidemic has brought a lot of pressure to the company. There are many colleagues around who smiled and greeted the company in the morning, and had already packed up their desks in the afternoon and were ready to leave.

Han Kai has also been troubled by the so-called "35-year-old red line". He started to figure out how to lay a "safety pad" for his career as soon as he was 30 years old.

The child in the family was still young, so he decided to do the opposite. With the simple desire to "start a business when you have the opportunity," he began to pay attention to the latest technology and industry trends.

Han Kai's previous work was only management, not coding. At the beginning, I searched for various open source projects on the Internet. I just felt that if you use the traditional way to do development, you have to build your own server, etc., which is a big project.

It was a colleague who first recommended the technology of cloud development, saying that with the help of a cloud-native integrated development environment and tool platform, the effort of server construction and operation and maintenance can be saved, as long as the logic of the front-end business is implemented.

"Isn't this sleepy coming to give pillows?" For people with insufficient development capabilities but rich experience in projects, Han Kai thinks it is more appropriate.

After half a year, Han Kai, who basically forgot the code, started cloud development again. The new crown epidemic has led to the closed management of the community, and Han Kai simply "retreats to practice" at home and participates in an online development training camp run by Tencent Cloud. Thirty days later, "I feel that I have already mastered it, and it is quite the magic of cloud development."

Drag and drop, three-step development of small programs

Don’t look at Han Kai when he was a project manager when he didn’t write code by himself, but his job was not easy at all-he had to apply for development budgets with the government and for development resources with the company. In case of business peaks, just coordinate the development of resources. It may take a week, "How can the government wait? The company feels that I am making a fuss and taking up development resources is not good enough to make money."

Although the development experience is insufficient, but with ten years of project management experience, Han Kai has a very precise grasp of customer needs, and the project control is also in an orderly manner. Perseverance is because we need to go deep into the customer's business and combine new technologies to solve the customer's practical problems.

For Han Kai, cloud development amplifies the advantages of project experience. It originally required a team of projects, and one person did it-before, only full-stack engineers could do it.

In March 2021, the mini-build low-code platform released, which further reduced the difficulty of product development on the basis of cloud development.

To put it simply, micro-building is the modularization of developers' common functions in the cloud development environment, and users can combine functional modules in the form of building blocks according to their actual needs.

originally complicated system engineering has become a simple "drag and drop".

The emergence of the mini-tap gave Han Kai a new idea to solve the problem: “Using the mini-tap to do government business is particularly relevant. The original requirement is simple. Just drag the functional module and it is fast and good. I will do the work alone. If it's done, how can it be necessary to coordinate resources and budget?"

Speaking of the experience of using micro-build, Han Kai found that the official component library is very easy to use, and it runs smoothly according to the logic; PC, WEB, and mobile have different development systems, and the cross-terminal capability of micro-build reduces the overall technical difficulty. In the past, traditional development had to buy a cloud server, and after initialization, if it was based on Linux, it had to deploy middleware, install the database, allocate permissions, and do security protection. Based on cloud development, now only one-click publishing is required.

More importantly, the explanation cost is very low, and there is no need to introduce the customer whose technology it is. "When you talk about WeChat, he will use it every day."

Low-Code Evangelist: Everyone is a Developer

There is a barber shop next to Han Kai's house, which has been in business for more than ten years, and the method of accounting is still very "primitive": there is no stored-value card, and one note is written in a notebook.

This year I finally forget it, the boss bought a stand-alone membership management software on the computer. "It is considered to have entered industrial civilization from slash and burn." Han Kai quipped, "but it is still backward. Other member systems use small programs, which can be directly operated on mobile phones."

Han Kai thinks that such an easy-to-use development platform of Weisha should be known to more people. He started to promote Mini-Tap in his spare time, and wrote a lot of articles on zero-based entry and low-code development on the Internet.

From writing one article a month to writing one article a day.

Regarding low-code development, some developers think it is too simple, and using too much will weaken development capabilities. As a former project manager and pragmatist, Kai Han has his own understanding of technology:

“Customers don’t care about the complexity of the technology, they just need to be simple, practical, and at a competitive price; the boss doesn’t care, he only considers the input-output ratio. Therefore, the technology that can improve efficiency and allow users to make money is a good technology. In fact, it is low. The code is not simple at all. The reason why it is simple is because someone has done it for you if it is difficult."

"Developer Evangelist" is an identity that has emerged in recent years. It promotes the promotion and development of a product or technology through technical creations such as speeches, articles, codes, and presentations-Han Kai’s ID on the Internet is " low-code preacher ".

"My position is definitely not to preach to programmers, but mainly to preach to people who lack development experience but have development needs, and help them master the ability of low-code development to meet the needs of work and entrepreneurship." Han Kai said.

At present, Han Kai has published nearly 160 technical articles in the "Tencent Low Code" column, and has also gathered a group of "xiaobai" developers from all walks of life, such as the owner of the jade shop, the curator of the fitness center, and the owner of the cafe. Wait. They don't have a development foundation, but they are also exploring the use of widgets to develop small programs for product management or business promotion.

Speaking of his followers, Han Kai found that many people are 30+. "They are all business-minded and want to develop small programs that suit them. Although low-code development is not like writing articles, it requires a little bit of foundation, but I think they can do it because I am here too."

Whether it's a 36-year-old transitioning engineer from a management post, or developing a small program with a zero foundation, they are actually very similar. "There are always some stereotypes. We must believe that the barriers to programming are very high, and that people's ability to accept new technologies will decline in middle age." Han Kai thinks that is not the case. " low code is that everyone can learn and also Learn to learn. ”

"It's hard to avoid anxiety in middle age, but don't set limits to yourself. Action can fight anxiety, and it's never too late to start."

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