A few days ago I saw a webmaster hanging an anniversary banner on his site, so I also looked up when I started doing webmastering, and suddenly realized my first registered domain was 8 years ago.
Eight springs and autumns have passed; I’m no longer the youth of those years but someone approaching thirty, recalling the webmasters and big names of that time.
My first contact with a computer was in fifth grade, in a computer class — that should have been 2004. Then internet cafes appeared in junior high, opening the door to a new world. High school was 2009, when computers slowly became common in ordinary homes, and I started wanting to make my own software. By chance I got into the webmaster circle. Back then it was very popular to build Blogs, BBS forums, download sites, and so on. In my second year of high school I decided to make a site too, but found the pinyin of my name was long registered, so I searched online for an English name, bennett, and on April 8, 2012 registered bennett-ren.com, bought my first virtual host, and uploaded PHP program files via FTP. Back then most used open source: for blogs it was WordPress, for forums Discuz, for portals ThinkPHP. That’s how I joined the webmaster circle.
After joining the webmaster circle I started listening to various big names discuss domain resolution, DNS, various optimizations, and so on. That’s why at work I know relatively more network knowledge — because I’m already very familiar with how sites run, and years of exposure have made me handle sites with ease. The only downside is I haven’t yet had the chance to encounter high-traffic, high-concurrency situations, because a small site I built myself can’t have large instantaneous concurrency; but many code bugs only show up under concurrency.
Some of those webmasters now have done very well and sold their sites for good returns; some have become domain-investment big names; some have graduated and work; and some, like me, have achieved little but the site is still there. Although the webmaster experience didn’t give me any direct return, it gave a very solid theoretical foundation for my later BS development, helping with locating problems and understanding new tech. Over these eight years I’ve completely dropped the open-source WordPress and switched everything to code I wrote myself — though I still used the open-source framework Spring; if you strip away the framework it seems I can’t do anything, so sometime I’ll discuss whether I should learn frameworks.
To highlight the tech-blog character, I still need to brag a bit about the technical summary: the migration to microservices is already planned; in the future I may go from SpringBoot further to the SpringCloud architecture.
