Hello World: A First Attempt, and an Answer That Never Came

Hello World is often the first program people write when they learn to code: a simple instruction that tells a computer to display a greeting. For many of us who enjoy tinkering with technology, it can also mark the beginning of a lasting fascination with programming.

Over time, I've come to think that everyone has their own "Hello World": a first experience in which the world responds to them, and they begin to see themselves in a new light. It is usually something small, too small to count as an achievement, yet significant enough to leave a mark—like the first sign of life on a screen when a system starts up.

01 / Ping ｜ The First Contact

I came to computers late. When I was younger, internet cafés were off-limits to me, and my family wouldn't let me go to one. We didn't have a computer at home either. This was a time when owning a computer was still something of a luxury. So the first time I actually sat in front of one was during my freshman year of college.

In 2008, I went to a coastal city to attend university. That spring brought the Wenchuan earthquake; that summer, the Beijing Olympics. That fall, as a freshman, I ran my first ping command from the Windows command line in a computer lab.

The screen filled with IP addresses and rows of response times measured in milliseconds. All it took was a single command to receive a response from a distant computer—and to see how long the round trip took. For an eighteen-year-old who had just stepped out of a world without computers, it felt almost like magic. I could reach out and "touch" the world, rather than simply being carried along by it.

I didn't think of it as programming at the time. But years later, I realized that although it wasn't the first line of code I'd written, it was my first successful run in life—not something typed into an editor, but a moment of astonishment: So I can make something respond to me.

02 / Hello World ｜ The First Greeting

From 2008 to 2015—seven years.

I graduated in 2012 and worked for two years in the coastal city. Then I decided to move to Chengdu. I'd heard about China's Western Development campaign years earlier, and I wondered whether Chengdu might offer better opportunities. At the time, the city's metro system had only two lines. I arrived in 2014, imagining that I could find a new direction there.

But the job hunt didn't go well. For a long stretch, I was essentially stuck in job-search mode: going to career fairs and sending out applications online. I applied for so many jobs that when a recruiter called, I sometimes had to ask which company they were calling from. This went on for nearly a year, and the pressure was considerable.

It was during this period, when it felt as though nothing was within my grasp, that I discovered GitHub and came across a personal website project that suited me. In 2015, I was still unemployed, but I had plenty of time on my hands. Following the project's README step by step, I managed to get the website running locally. Then it automatically generated its first post, titled "Hello World."

I opened the local address in my browser, and those two words sat quietly on the page. Strictly speaking, I hadn't written the post myself. It was the first greeting generated by the website. Still, I sat there for a moment, almost dazed. I'd made this happen.

Code, command lines, and READMEs—all these abstract things that had once seemed to belong to other people—became tangible in those two quiet words. A system I'd brought to life with my own hands was saying hello to the world in its own way.

Looking back, what made that "Hello" so meaningful wasn't the achievement itself, but the circumstances in which it happened. At a time when so much in my life was beyond my control, I'd at least managed to get one system running the way it was supposed to. For the first time, I began to understand that I could create something of my own, rather than simply being carried along by circumstances.

03 / Gap ｜ The Unglamorous In-Between

But after that first hello came not a steady climb, but a long, unglamorous stretch of uncertainty.

First, there was that nearly year-long gap. Under enough pressure, you can go numb. You keep going out as usual, refreshing your inbox as usual, even when you've long since lost any real sense of what might happen next.

And there was something I couldn't bring myself to say out loud: I hadn't told my parents that I'd already quit my previous job and moved to Chengdu alone. On the phone, I'd tell them I was doing fine, that something would work out soon. Then I'd hang up and go back to sending out applications and attending job fairs. Away from home, the hardest part wasn't being busy. It was having to swallow every difficulty on my own.

By the end of 2015, I finally found a job at a startup. I'd chosen the company because I believed in its potential. But once I joined, I found that reality fell short of what I'd expected.

The role was much the same as the one I'd had on the coast. With my previous experience, I should have been able to settle in more quickly, but the opposite happened.

Looking back, I realize that work wasn't the whole problem. I'd spent years on the coast building relationships with people I knew. In Chengdu, almost all of that was gone, and I hadn't made any new friends. I felt isolated, and that inevitably affected my work. It wasn't that the company treated people badly. I simply struggled to adapt to the environment at the time.

After work, gaming became part of my daily routine. Every day followed much the same pattern: commuting, sleeping, eating, and playing games. Life became mechanical.

There were nights when I genuinely began to doubt myself. Should I have stayed in that coastal city? Had I made a mistake by leaving?

In code, you can roll back because an earlier version has been safely preserved. Life can be rolled back, too—or so I thought. I could always leave Chengdu. But when I seriously considered doing so, I realized that rolling back wasn't a simple undo. It meant facing another fork in the road: should I return to my hometown, or go back to the coastal city where I'd worked before? Neither option was a straightforward return to the way things had been.

I knew that being young gave me room to take risks. But taking a risk isn't the same as pressing Undo. It simply brings the next decision closer. In the end, all I did was grit my teeth and carry on.

And through those mechanical days, one question kept surfacing: What was I supposed to do with my life?

When I moved to Chengdu, I'd been full of enthusiasm. There was the promise of development in western China, the prospect of a new city, and the idea that I could start over. But once I settled into the daily routine of commuting, sleeping, and gaming, that enthusiasm had long since faded. The gap between expectation and reality was disorienting.

What did I actually want? I couldn't say.

Some nights, I'd open the website running locally on my computer and stare at that "Hello World" post for a long time. I'd managed to get it running. It was something I'd made with my own hands. Yet as I stared at the screen, I had no idea what I really wanted to do with it.

Looking back, part of what kept me from falling apart during those days was that first "Hello" I'd held on to. It didn't solve any of my problems. It simply reminded me that I was capable of making something work—even though, when the site first ran, I had no idea where I'd be the following month.

But being able to create something and knowing what you want are two different things.

After staring at the screen night after night, I began to realize that I was facing a different kind of problem: figuring out the requirements.

These weren't requirements handed to me by someone else. They were questions emerging from my own life: What kind of system did I want to build? What kind of life did I want to live?

A program couldn't answer those questions for me. The requirements had to come from me, and so did the answers. The system could only wait, quietly, until I knew what I wanted it to do.

But at the time, I still had no answer. Many nights, I stared at the screen and came away with nothing.

Awakening isn't the finish line. It simply gives you the chance to keep going. And "keeping going" was never meant to be some grand, inspiring declaration. Sometimes it just means waking up each morning and getting through the day ahead.

04 / Run ｜ My First Run

Life went on, one day at a time.

Years later, looking back, I began to understand what that first "Hello" had meant. Many people might see it as a triumphant moment at the starting line. To me, it was more like a confirmation of my own existence: a program announcing "I exist" to the world for the first time, and a person, in that moment when the world responds, beginning to see himself more clearly.

My own "Hello" came late, and without much fanfare. At eighteen, I reached out to the world through a command line. Years later, in an unfamiliar city and during a difficult period of my life, I finally gave that first impulse a tangible form.

Yet those two moments showed me something important: I could reach out to the world, and I could leave something of my own behind.

Hello World is only the first line. There are still requirements to figure out, errors to face, structures to refactor, and systems to keep running.

I'm still writing what comes next.