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• Comparison of Ruby creator Yukihiro Matsumoto's use of Japanese and English in programming contexts |
• Openness to having non-English speaking guests on a podcast, such as Matsumoto |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:05\] In this episode I talked to Shiya Lou about how China does Node; software development is done very differently in China, pretty much because of the slow translations of documentation and books from English to Chinese, but also because of this Great Firewall of China you've heard about. It'... |
\* \* \* |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's start with what your name is and where you're from. |
**Shiya Lou:** My name is Shiya, I am from China. I moved to the U.S. when I was 14 and I stayed there for about eight years, and then I moved back to China for a year. Now here we are, I've already been back for about a year or so, so that's why I'm here at the conference, to share a little bit about my experience, tr... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** For those out there in the developer world - and any world, really - we hear about news from other countries, right? I've definitely heard about, but haven't looked too deeply into, because I guess it didn't matter to me - not so much like in a negative way, but it didn't impact my day-to-day life s... |
**Shiya Lou:** Right. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So kind of give me a peek into your experience then, having lived and grown up in China, then moved here, then moved back... What's been your experience with the way we do the internet, I guess? |
**Shiya Lou:** Okay. I'm gonna start off by saying that China isn't really a communist country. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's not...? Where does that come from? |
**Shiya Lou:** I guess because the central party is called the Communist Party, but it's not exactly what you would picture what a communist regime is like... Although I don't really wanna talk much about politics... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** No, I'm just glad you corrected me there. I don't want to put any misinformation out there, it's not my intent. |
**Shiya Lou:** Okay. So I came to the U.S. in 2007, and at that time the Great Firewall wasn't built yet. Everything was open, Facebook was available, Wikipedia was as well, and I logged on to all these websites back home. In about 2008 and onwards, the Great Firewall started getting built, and it's been perfected over... |
\[03:59\] That causes us a lot of trouble in the developer world, because everyone's used to use Google CDN or put a Facebook login on your site - that is just never gonna work in China, because the mass majority actually don't have access to these websites. I guess when transitioning from the two worlds, the biggest t... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So these networks that we're so used to using actually are bubbles. |
**Shiya Lou:** Right, yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** We don't think about it like that; we think that we create our own bubbles by choosing our friends, our networks or whatever, or the communities that we're involved in, I guess just by choosing one like Google. So Bing works in China? |
**Shiya Lou:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** How did they get around it? |
**Shiya Lou:** Well, Microsoft has pretty good relations with the Chinese government. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** But Google doesn't. |
**Shiya Lou:** Google doesn't. Google is more of an internet company, and Microsoft started off as a software company, and that is how the basis went. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So give me the basis of your talk, then. You're obviously sharing some of your experiences with living behind a firewall, living behind, basically -- what would you call that? Separation? How do you describe this firewall and what it does to the community behind it? |
**Shiya Lou:** Okay, so it's a very common practice for developers to log on to a VPN, that then goes across the borders every day, for work. That's the first thing that you do every day, to start working. For us, in the beginning it's actually okay, since as long as you are on VPN you can have access to everything... ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** On the what? |
**Shiya Lou:** We're on the hunt by either the security departments... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** They're looking for you? |
**Shiya Lou:** Right, right. So I was using one when I just went back, and then three months later it closed, so I had to use another service. A lot of my friends set up their own foreign servers. I just ended up using some services, and it's constantly unstable, and you have to look for the newest, best ones. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. So I guess the thing I'm trying to figure out is that outside of the personal experience you've had as a developer, as someone trying to build stuff, for sure here in the United States - or even in other countries outside of China, I guess, from this example - we're used to, if there's informa... |
**Shiya Lou:** Right. I will say that the first lesson for software developers is how to connect to VPN on your own. Then I think the biggest barrier there still though is language, much less of developer experience in terms of whether you can get across, because for us developers, we can always get across. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. I was taking notice to something that's near and dear to us here at this conference (Node Interactive). Obviously, around a Node Conference, anybody who is in the Node community knows what npm is, so seeing Cnpm, which is China's npm -- so you had the language barrier, but then you also have ... |
**Shiya Lou:** \[08:15\] Right. I think the language barrier is only an issue in countries that don't use English as the working language. In China, a framework or an open source project like Node is only gonna be popular if it has Chinese documentation and advocates in China. So very luckily for Node, there was a few ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Really? Wow... So they actually have an in-hand, physical books, versus online documentation. |
**Shiya Lou:** Yes, right. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Solve that problem, somebody. |
**Shiya Lou:** Yeah... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So how current are these books? How often does a popular or somewhat popular software development book get translated? |
**Shiya Lou:** I would say it depends on -- I'm not sure exactly how it works, but I think the more popular (O'Reilly books, for example) have a translation in the pipeline as soon as it's released. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. So they're released in English -- do they release all the languages, too? The reason why I ask that question is because you said earlier "working language." I think what you mean by that is if I'm a professional and I'm doing work or something work-related, or something like that, then when y... |
**Shiya Lou:** No. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Are you familiar with other countries how often it's not the working language? |
**Shiya Lou:** For example Japan is one of the bigger countries with English as a working language. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. So in Japan they don't go to work and speak Japanese, they go to work and speak English, primarily? |
**Shiya Lou:** No, they would speak Japanese... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** But they would read English...? |
**Shiya Lou:** It depends on the company. Is it an international company that's primarily US-based? Most of our co-workers, even in China and Japan will speak professional English and write pretty good English, but it is harder beyond that. It's hard to make pleasantries in English. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. So with your talk, what were you really trying to make people aware of? What was the core goal for you? |
**Shiya Lou:** Okay, so while I was in the U.S. I'd also never consider how certain websites are inaccessible in China. When I build my own site, I just use Google CDN, or Facebook logins and all these features, but when I'm back in China it's such a big problem, and also, there are so many internet users in China that... |
The practice of people getting around these problems are very counter-intuitive than what we believe that are good practices in web development. I guess this talk is really just for people to be aware that there are these caveats that you need to think about when you have visitors from other countries. There's so many ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's a good thing, I like that, China-friendly. I'm China-friendly. I mean, I wanna be friendly with everybody. We're obviously at a developer conference... |
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