Original link: https://www.yunyoujun.cn/posts/the-birth-of-yunlefun
cause
One afternoon in the spring of 2018, I bought the domain name yunle.fun on a whim.
and recorded in the site chronicles as follows:
I have registered a new domain name: yunle.fun (yunlefang), and I will use this name if I can open a studio in the future (laughs).
That is to say, from a long time ago, my mind was full of unrealistic fantasies, such as wanting to have a studio of my own.
And the fundamental reason is nothing more than wanting to not go to work, financial freedom and other clichés.
Also share with you.
Thinking about it carefully, I decided to build a blog in the first place.
I Wen Yuta in the “Supernatural 9” animation, runs a supernatural blog with a strange screen name, and wants to get rich through affiliate marketing.
So, at the end of 2016 with the broadcast of the animation, “Yunyoujun’s Station” was born.
Only today, although the blog has gradually gained some traffic, there still seems to be an insurmountable gap from the original motivation.
About open source and commercialization
As an amateur, I am very keen on open source business. I have written some open source projects and participated in some well-known open source projects.
Including the code itself of the previously inexplicably popular “Portable Small Air Conditioner” and “Isolated Edible Manual”, I also made it open source (public).
Most of the blog’s traffic must also be thanks to this.
Through this, I met many friends from the open source community, learned a lot of code design and implementation ideas and development experience, and even got some good interviews and job opportunities before graduation.
But there is no doubt that the definition of open source and the community culture make it difficult for the creators of the project to directly obtain some financial benefits.
Even the maintainers of Log4j2 (an open source project widely used by companies all over the world) are complaining that they work voluntarily for free, and are constantly being scolded by others (a loophole was previously exposed).
The author of Faker.js, with millions of weekly downloads, was unsustainable because of the fire. After asking for help to no avail, he added malicious code and emptied the code repository.
Regardless of whether this behavior is ethical or not, it can be seen that even some of the most well-known open source project authors have difficulty achieving financial freedom from it.
At the same time, there are plenty of cool full-time open source authors who can support themselves purely on open source sponsorships.
The father of Linux, Linus Torvalds, received compensation from the Linux Foundation and received stock from Linux-based commercial companies such as RedHat.
Compared to React, which is backed by commercial companies, Vue runs entirely on the community, and its author Yuxi You is almost one of the highest paid authors on Patreon (a sponsored site).
Sindre Sorhus is the individual developer with the most stars on GitHub (open source community), and the downloads of NPM packages he maintains are even more amazing.
antfu’s strong productivity on projects and plugins has attracted over 300 backers on GitHub.
In addition, there are some companies started by open source organizations, such as Vercel and Nuxt Lab. While actively maintaining the project, they are also exploring the commercialization of some projects based on this.
Of course, this situation tends to exist only with some of the most well-known creators/organizations, and with their abilities, getting a full-time, higher-paying job isn’t a problem at all.
They are either the pioneers of a class of frameworks/tools, or the developers of numerous and well-known projects.
It seems a little out of reach, at least to me, and their success is hard to replicate.
At the end of the day, their projects are more or less connected to commercial projects.
And I think that’s why they have received so many sponsorships to open source full-time.
About Yuque
When it comes to commercialization, the owner’s “Yu Que” (a document collaboration tool) has recently undergone a commercial transformation.
The article “Details and Thoughts on the New Pricing of Yuque Personal Edition” was published, limiting the total number of documents for ordinary users to 100 (including small notes), and prohibiting the public sharing ability of free users.
Yuque is a good document sharing tool in China. It organizes documents in the form of a knowledge base. The person in charge, Yubo, also mentioned the concept of warehouses borrowed from GitHub in the interview.
Also recommend it to those around you. Commercialization is understandable, but it is inevitable to feel a backstab.
After receiving a lot of feedback, Yuque adjusted the limit of ordinary user documents to 100 per month.
But I think it’s nothing more than an understatement.
It attracts many people who recommend it, people with sharing spirit, don’t they value the sharing function more?
In many interviews, Yuque also mentioned that he prefers to use “sharing” to describe his commercialization path, and to describe himself with a knowledge-precipitated community. He mentioned that many users use it to record and share their lives.
This change almost shuts out the average user who prefers to share but uses it relatively infrequently.
At the same time, the product strategy of drastically changing user rights also gave me a sense of distrust.
And I always believe that “the people are the main body of history”.
When I was impulsive, I made such a comment in the circle of friends.
My Yuque membership will not expire until almost 2025, and I may still need to use it for a while due to inertia, company, etc., but I have decided to start the relevant migration work.
Although this may help this product gain profit points quickly in the short term, and maybe it has many decision points that I cannot consider, but in my personal opinion, this is a failed commercialization path that hurts most users.
At least, I don’t want my studio – Yunlefang to follow this path.
About Cloud Music
After talking for a long time, what will the studio do? How to survive?
I have probably been thinking about it since I registered the domain name four years ago, but after all, there is no clear idea and action to put it into practice.
But I have a vague impression of it and what I don’t want it to be.
In the name of Yunlefang, the first word is taken from the beginning of the net name “Yunyoujun”, which also means that it is related to the cloud and the main web.
And Le I read it as Le, which means that it can bring happiness.
Fun is the root domain name, which stands for “interesting” and homophonic “fang” at the same time. I didn’t have the courage and confidence to make it a mature company, so I positioned it as a small workshop, one that hopes to bring happiness and interesting things. Small workshop.
My slogan for it is: make the world more interesting and colorful.
rise
As with my own signature, I hope it creates something that will be remembered by others, interesting or useful.
I imagine that every product the studio will make in the future will have a simple LOGO and representative color, and as it continues to grow, I will make the world colorful.
It still seems a little vague. I registered this domain name at the beginning of 2018. At that time, I planned to make a small game about the adventure of paper airplanes in the universe as its main business, but it was gradually stranded due to academic difficulties.
But it doesn’t seem to be completely in vain. In the process of developing it, I wrote a virtual joystick and extracted it as an example to open source it and named it cocos-creator-joystick .
I shared it in the Cocos Creator forum, unexpectedly received a lot of favorites and encouragement, and became my first project to break double-digit stars.
Later, I also updated to version 3.0 and went to the homepage of the Cocos store, of course, it is free.
The rest is for later, but without a doubt, it was the first open source project I was inspired by, and probably the starting point of my open source career.
In the second half of 2018, I mentioned the first PR of my life to Element (a popular UI component library, Vue 2.x), which was merged. At that time, Leopoldthecoder, who should be the person in charge of the warehouse, also helped me to correct the following format. .
In 21 years, I was fortunate enough to join the Element Plus (Vue 3.x) team as one of the maintainers.
Everything seems to be a causal cycle, inextricably linking all kinds of things together.
So from my experience, I ultimately want it to be a positive embrace of the community.
Use the things shared by others, and go further to do things that are worthy of others to continue to share.
Inherit
Gentlemen, I hate wheels.
I hate to go on detours that everyone knows are detours because of some unspoken resistance when better tools and options exist.
Before working, I thought that when I entered a so-called Internet giant, I would learn more things that I couldn’t learn in the open source community, and at the same time, with the company’s perfect infrastructure, development would become more efficient.
But it doesn’t. Some people in the company make what they think are good tools, and some people have to use tools made by others.
And my job is on the more user-friendly side (and probably one of the most visited apps in the company), which obviously falls into the latter category.
The person who decides the direction of the tool is not the person who uses the tool the most, but the person who uses the tool the most is tired of dealing with user-oriented business development every day, and often trips over the bugs of the upstream tools. One step is a day.
I don’t hate using tools, nor do I hate reporting problems upstream.
Rather, this is the case when participating in open source community projects and writing your own.
But doing the same work, I can use the community tool flow to be several times faster than the company’s tool flow, and at the same time, I encounter fewer problems, and even if I encounter it, I can quickly search for a solution.
Once there is a problem with the excellent projects of the community, someone will soon find out and give feedback, and they are also maintained by the best group of people in the world.
And the company’s project is closed, I can’t search on Google/StackOverflow, I can’t use my own experience,
Even after the people who maintained the internal project left one after another, the project itself gradually fell apart, but had to be maintained for some historical reasons.
By the way, it seems that I have heard a notorious word, KPI open source.
Within a few months of joining the company, I fully experienced the pain of working overtime in the company and learned the meaning of some slang words.
For example, “overtime is not encouraged” means that you have to work, but there is no overtime pay.
After finishing my work and making up my sleep on the weekends, I lay in the rented house I recently moved in, thinking about life.
Maybe it’s my poor ability and inefficiency, or maybe I’m lazy.
So do I really need this job? Do I really need this decent salary?
Am I really happy with this salary? Does the work I do really make sense?
Did I really grow from it and learn something indispensable?
I still go back and forth on various price comparison sites and regret buying items that have dropped in price.
It’s still impossible for me to buy my own space in Beijing, which is so expensive.
As a dead man, I don’t have any luxury goods or must-see places in life.
I suddenly found that the joy I had when writing code and the sense of accomplishment when I finished writing the project were gone when I was working.
It is nothing more than from one demand to another demand, and it is like a tool on the assembly line, which is used until it is worn out and discarded.
I just want to be happier doing some interesting things, such as writing the code I want to write, watching the drama I want to watch, continuing to lie in bed leisurely in the afternoon, going to the roadside in the evening to grab the dog’s tail grass, and occasionally want to write novels Drawing illustrations.
And I suddenly realized that the cost of realizing this expectation is actually not very high, and it is not impossible.
Taking advantage of the National Day holiday, my father took me around town on an electric bike for a while.
It’s barely summer, with the cool wind blowing, looking at the rows of electrical towers and the vast scenery, what I think of is the scenery under the animation filter, and what interesting things will happen on the stage of such a seaside town What about the story?
The bland, warm, tear-jerking Air or the Robotics;Notes driving a tall robot to thwart a conspiracy to conquer the world?
Suddenly penguins hit the road? Strange shadow? Broken air conditioner remote? Invaded by a virus to a falling satellite?
There are so many stories in the summer town, and the idea of continuing like this and not going back to work was born in an instant.
Finally, back to reality, my father introduced me to the new townhouses built in the next town. There are two upper and lower houses, more than 5k and one flat, and a two-story garage with one million yuan.
Not three or four thousand, nor one or two thousand, just one million, and the Beijing toilet price villa will be brought home.
Therefore, I think the purpose and operation of Yunlefang has become more clear.
The business scope should be content that can be done remotely without geographical restrictions.
Based on the excellent solutions of the community, we can integrate or implement a tool flow platform that is comfortable for our own development.
If it is good enough and generic enough, I also want to keep it open and share it.
change
Originally, I thought I was still quite a long way from some ideas, but after being lucky enough to travel twice, I found that it was not so far away.
In “Four Stacks and a Half”, Ozu said to the protagonist, it’s useless, you will always waste the opportunity.
So the protagonist reincarnates again and again, regretting not living a rosy life and meeting Ozu.
But in fact, it’s just that the protagonist has never had the courage to take the step of returning the gingerbread bear.
“Would I have lived a different college life if I had chosen another path?”
Like the protagonist, I questioned myself more than once and fantasized about different situations.
If you don’t try to take that step, you’ll never get the results you want.
I, who registered a domain name four years ago, may not have the strength and courage, but now may be the time to take this step.
Based on experience and the premise of surviving, Yunlefang should undertake some work on front-end development.
Yes, that is outsourcing.
But I don’t want it to be pure outsourcing, I want it to be a meaningful and win-win project.
In the sense of responsibility and obsessive-compulsive disorder of a project, I verbally promise that I will do my best to optimize some interaction details that come to mind.
I hope to be able to participate in some of its own design ideas to realize a product that people are willing to share.
For example, a tool site like The Quarantine Edible Handbook.
Of course, considering its own public welfare nature and “we do not produce data, we are just data porters”, I will never make it a commercialized payment behavior.
But similarly, I also want to explore a new open source model that can be combined with commercialization for niche developers to continue to operate.
For example, open source templates of similar applications can accept commercial customization work on replacement data and functions.
Use the influence of open source and surrounding, as well as the social value of the project itself, so that more people are willing to share, and maintain commercial operation through the exposure of shared traffic.
Or some promotional videos like the UP masters of station B (such as handmade Geng), which are interesting and can also be promoted.
Therefore, all parties with similar ideas are welcome to contact me.
Of course, in principle, advertising methods that are unsightly and user experience are naturally strictly rejected.
combine
Taking advantage of the opportunity of Double Eleven, I tried it with a few friends.
Its strategy data comes from “What’s Worth Buying”, “Douban”, “Xiaohongshu”, “Taobao”, “Tmall”, and “Jingdong”, and some interactive simplifications have been made.
You can quickly find some of the cheapest purchase strategies on the entire network for different types of goods.
“We don’t produce data, we’re just data porters.”
It is somewhat similar to the previous recipe tool, but the data becomes a commodity.
I’m not sure if it’s really useful and helpful to you, but I think it will be a form of commercialization and an exploration of Yunlefang.
You may wish to click “Read the original text” for a brief overview.
It’s no exaggeration, based on my own development tool flow, I still only spent about six hours on the first version, and the whole process of developing it was very smooth.
Then I spend some time that does not need to be very complete to constantly improve its details.
And if implemented using the company’s tool process, I’d probably have to spend more than three times as long and not smile.
At the same time, I think this will also reflect the differentiated competition between Yunlefang’s small workshop and normal commercial projects.
Do you really like bulk marketing pages full of pop-ups and useless animations?
I will open source it shortly.
This means that users can also customize some of their own data to use.
In addition, it may be possible to segment fields and customize different types of data.
This is the first exploration project of Yunlefang, and I don’t want it to be the last.
About “The Great Family”
One day, on the crowded subway at work, the person next to him was casually reading a physical book in his hand.
It made me, who was standing by the side, feel guilty, and then turned on my phone to find this e-book cached in my phone – “My Spiritual Home” by Wang Xiaobo.
The opening article is titled “About the Great Family”, and the book defines it as:
There are “star chasers” and “office workers” among today’s youth, but those who want to create a great cause don’t have a clear vision, so let’s call them “the great family”.
…
I was so angry that I roared, who gave him the software package? But he said, people just have to give money, no matter what it does.
I thought it was right, if anyone gave me $30,000 to $40,000 a year to “play” the software package, I would “play” him too.
…
They believe that any good dream can come true—in other words, a dream that doesn’t come true is inherently bad.
…
No matter how it ends, the path will always be there – one has to be prepared to dream and be prepared to work for that dream.
irrelevant
Finally, I wish you all the freedom of wealth, and you don’t have to watch the day of Double Eleven to buy things again!
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