It has been more than six years since I started this blog. Back then I was still in middle school; now I’m already a sophomore in college. This year made one thing especially clear to me: there are so many outstanding people around me. Only after meeting people who are truly excellent did I slowly begin to recognize how ordinary I am.

The most important decision I made this year

For a long time, I kept imagining that maybe the technical skills I’ve learned so far would be enough to land a decent job, even with my current vocational college diploma. But whenever I looked at job listings for positions I actually wanted, the minimum requirement was usually a bachelor’s degree. And when I talked with people around me, I found that many of them not only had stronger academic backgrounds than I did, but were also better than me technically.

That realization led to a lot of internal struggle. After spending almost all of 2024 caught up in that kind of mental exhaustion, I finally decided to take the full-time college-to-bachelor upgrade exam. This is my last chance to get a full-time bachelor's degree.

I know very well that although this degree is officially recognized and legally carries the same effect as one earned through the regular college entrance track, it still faces plenty of discrimination in actual hiring. Even so, this is the only road left for me right now.

The kind of year it was

To be honest, this year was mostly spent doing outsourced work just to cover living expenses. If I check my Git server commit history, nearly 90% of it is for client projects. Without that work, I really would have been broke by the end of each month.

Looking back through the year, these were the things most worth noting.

• December: I commissioned artwork and character illustrations for my own OC. I’m really grateful to the artists.
• November: Because of an issue related to a Double 11 promotion, I filed a lawsuit against JD.com. I still don’t know how it will turn out.
• October: I joined Alibaba Cloud’s 1024 event and managed to get quite a few freebies from it.
• September: I finally put the Tesla P40 GPU I bought in 2023 back to use. I turned it into a Moonlight game streaming machine, and also bought another Raspberry Pi 4B to run PiKVM for remote control.
• Late August: I fractured my right foot in a fall and had to stay home recovering for a month.
• July: I took on an outsourced quiz-event project. Because the database indexes were not configured properly, the event crashed three times.
• July: I discovered poor management of official SSL certificates for a certain NAS brand and posted a video about it, which drew a lot of attention. The reaction was very divided. Some users thought it was making a big deal out of what amounted to a test certificate and an expired website certificate. Others felt that the exposure of official certificates was enough to show the company was operating unprofessionally.
• June: The storage capacity of my internal file server exceeded 100TB. Since it uses a dual-server backup setup, actual usable capacity is about 50TB.
• June: I planned to connect my home power system to Home Assistant for centralized management, but the project was abandoned because the maintenance cost was too high.
• May: A project team I participated in won a provincial third prize. I’m very thankful to the team leader and the supervising teacher for their help.
• April: I bought a QNAP NAS and started using it as secondary storage for important files. I also moved my surveillance system over to QNAP’s QVR Pro.
• April: I replaced all the wireless routers at home with ASUS AiMesh. That said, ASUS routers really are hard to use.
• April: I routed my entire home network through a global proxy setup with automatic traffic splitting, which improved my work efficiency.
• April: I took part in a school competition, but because I was overconfident, I ended up winning nothing.
• February: I replaced an R720 server with a retired personal computer to gain better expandability. Some incompatible PCIe cards would cause the server’s fan speed to spike, so the old setup had its limitations.

What I learned from the second and third semesters of college

During my first semester, I used to think I was probably one of the best students in my class. But later I realized that even in a vocational college, there is always someone better. No matter how much I compare, there will always be people ahead of me.

The problem is that I can’t stop comparing myself with others, and that turns into endless self-inflicted mental pressure.

Take performance evaluations, for example. I can never compete with students who hold positions in the student union, participate in rural assistance programs, or do volunteer work. When it comes to grades, I can’t compete with people who spend weeks drilling question banks every day for every single course.

My time is limited. I’m not a genius. I can’t handle outsourced work, performance metrics, GPA, and subject competitions all at the same time.

Things I’m grateful for this year

• Yuyun
  I’m grateful for being hired as an online part-time customer service worker. That was the first formal paycheck I ever earned in my life. I also made a fair amount through its promotion program.

• All the clients who gave me outsourced work
  Thank you to everyone who came to me with project work.

Plans and expectations for next year

Next year, the most important thing for me will be preparing for the 2026 college-to-bachelor upgrade exam. I hope that when I write next year’s annual review, I’ll be able to say that my exam performance improved significantly.

This year, whenever I had spare time, I downloaded every anime series currently available to me and stored them locally. Next year, I want to finish organizing that collection and set up an internal anime site.

I also hope I can earn a scholarship for my second academic year.

OC commissions from this year

A few numbers from this year

I’ve been gradually reducing the number of websites I run. Maybe I’m past the age when I enjoyed endlessly tinkering with that kind of thing.

Personal blog

This will probably be the last year I include webmaster platform data from search engines for my personal blog. From now on, I’ll most likely just post traffic data from my own analytics site instead. Search engines, especially domestic ones, are giving personal websites less and less visibility, and it feels less and less meaningful to keep tracking those numbers.

• Baidu
  I honestly have no idea what Baidu is doing.

• Bing
  I switched Microsoft accounts this year, so I no longer have the data.

• Self-hosted analytics

KagamineFans

This is a site I plan to keep running.

• Self-hosted analytics

Internal Git repository

To avoid living too tightly each month, I kept taking outsourced work regularly, and now nearly 90% of the repositories are client projects. I’m genuinely thankful to the people who trusted me with those jobs.

• Git platform statistics

I’m still very grateful to every friend who helped me this year. This annual review is messy in the same way as always, but that’s probably the most honest way to write it.