15. A Life Filled with Gratitude

When I was young, my family was not well off, and life was not going smoothly. Without financial support, the choices available to me became quite limited. Yet in such an environment, I still didn’t go astray; if anything, my path as I grew up could be considered quite smooth, even though life was much harder than that of middle-class families with more abundant resources.

My parents worked almost themselves to the bone to raise our family. We weren’t rich, but it was enough for me to finish college.

Starting from junior high school, I’m grateful to homeroom teacher Ms. Lin for helping me get my tuition reduced, and I’m also very thankful for the support many classmates gave me during those years. These things had a huge impact on me.

In high school, there was the NT$10 from the cram school that helped reduce my tuition, and homeroom teacher Mr. Huang, who understood my family situation and gave me support.

During college, the department took great care of me: Professor Zhou, the department chair, quietly slipped me money when I was in urgent need; the senior students who knew about my family circumstances ran around to help me negotiate resources with the alumni association; Winston and Professor Cha helped me; Professor David earnestly told me not to casually drop out. There were also roommates who were willing to support me. I was very immature in college. The lady in the department office helped me with administrative work and coordinated with other departments so I could earn enough credits to graduate.

After joining Sudo as an intern: thank you to the founders Eric/Yvette/Andy/陳楷 for being willing to give me, then a complete blank slate, a chance, and thank you to the core development team for giving me so much perspective and so many methods of doing things. I’m also grateful to the colleagues I worked with early on, who brought me a lot of inspiration and stimulation when I was still so naive.

My teammates at 17: Eason and the development team. That was the period when I grew the fastest and was happiest at work. Only after working somewhere else did I realize how precious it is to have a group of colleagues who fit together so well.

LINE: including Denny, who referred me in; the manager who cared about me when I was in Japan and was so frightened by a stranger knocking on my door that I called the police; the manager who drove me to Costco; the manager who helped me change my mindset a great deal; and the colleagues I worked with. They introduced me to the amazing Ben Eater, and we even studied IoT together and tried to build a Software UART from scratch.

Twitter friends: there was a period when I was going through a rough patch on Twitter. After I posted, many strangers I had never met sent me private messages to encourage me. I’m truly grateful to all of you.

Huli: we originally only knew of each other online, and then became partners working together. Thank you for accepting my invitation, and thank you for listening to all my random thoughts and troubles.

Haru, who has always supported me and cared for me with unwavering dedication.

For more than the first 20 years of my life, I almost got by entirely with other people’s help. Looking back now, maybe that was just luck. Although I’m not like Elon Musk, who can apparently call the shots so effortlessly, I’ve finally gained a little ability to help other people too.