I am Fishenal — a forty-year-old dad, and a developer still trying to leave a small mark online.
A few years ago I was let go three times. Now I spend my days with my daughter, and in the gaps I try to make things of my own: to say something that is mine, and, if I am lucky, to earn a little from it.
I was born in Dalian, a coastal city in the north of China. I studied in Shenyang as an undergraduate, then entered a graduate program in Shanghai. From college through my master's, I studied industrial design.
After graduating, drawn by games and by some front-end skills I had taught myself during internships, I joined a browser-game company and began to work. Nearly fifteen years followed — game studios, an esports company, large internet firms, a bank, a foreign manufacturer, software houses. I would not call the path successful. I only know that I kept showing up, and finished whatever sat in front of me.
Looking back, I feel I have lived inside a kind of isolation. At school I believed I could not do industrial design well; in companies I believed I did not belong in programming. Time still pushed hard, until it pushed me under the waterfall. There was no way back. So I keep going — making what I can, with whatever experience I still have.
I would rather make something alone and quietly than spend time among people. When I was young I wrote many essays and poems, turning inward in the late hours to put feeling into words. I listened to classical music; I read novels of every kind and watched films. I was drawn to art that stood apart, to stories that were strange and gorgeous. Now I am older. My sense of the world has thinned; even my dreams are less interesting than they once were. It is a pity, but no one wins against time. We grow old. Everything in this world will, sooner or later, leave me behind.
The isolation I feel in programming comes from the same place. Perhaps I care more for the human and the emotional; work, though, asks me to meet the machine with a cool head. I resisted at first, then forced myself into the groove. In design, too, I had years of drawing as a teenager. When competition began, inferiority came easily, and I was never good at showing what I had made. The education I received taught me to be too modest — to keep myself small, to perform as little as possible.
So my life has swayed. At the age when one is meant to settle and build a home, I was still being moved along by fate. Still — God gave me a daughter I love without measure. That may be the greatest luck of my life.
Here I will write what I think, and the projects I have made or worked on with others. If any of this finds you, you are welcome to subscribe. I hope what I leave here can offer the world a thin thread of value — and that it might also help me a little, in practical ways.