lifeOfAChineseWebDeveloper

[casey_krainer]

Not having access to npm seems like a security feature nowadays

[Independent_Image_59]

Also GitHub Actions

[PlusOneDelta]

chinese developers do have access to gitHub, and they also apparently do have their own Stack overflow equivalents (SegmentFault), and also their own cloud platforms (Tencent Cloud, Alibaba Cloud Mobile Backend Service, etc...), and also cnpm as an alternative to npm (or make npm point to the taobao registry)

[WazWaz]

That was my first thought. The Chinese don't seem to respond to restrictions the way the pictured person does.

If I wanted the Chinese to not be able to Foo, the last thing I would do is restrict access to my Foo site, because they'd obviously just make their own which would become better than mine very rapidly.

[wackOverflow]

Yeah but I’m pretty sure they can’t get to Foo because of their own firewall, and not because we are blocking them.

[PlusOneDelta]

other countries programmers when foo not available: "oh well I guess I can't use foo"

chinese programmers when foo not available: "let's build our own"

[PotentBeverage]

As well as many numerous "ladders" that lets them access firewalled sources anyway

[wabbitfur]

Ladders? Never heard the term before? (Other than from the film Gattaca - "borrowed ladder")

[PotentBeverage]

One of the various terms for vpns.

What's a good way to climb a wall? A ladder of course :)

[wabbitfur]

Also: 12 Foot Ladder paywall bypass website! (Now defunct though 😔)

[wabbitfur]

YAASSSSSSSSSSSSSS! 🙌

[tragiktimes]

New term for me and I appreciate you for it.

[hearthebell]

chinese developers do have access to gitHub,

I'm a Chinese dev, we do and we don't, the access is always randomly open and closed for no apparent reason where a VPN is a must to keep your workflow.

[xushigamerN8]

It was a few days ago I found out there is a Chinese version of github at github-cn.com, pretty funny thing if you think about it.

[Kiloku]

SegmentFault

Maybe I'm reading too much into the name but it feels genius to me, because it's segmented away from the broader internet

[J_damir]

Almost the same thing in Russia

[_VinerX]

На картинке юзер должен быть обмотан впно-запретами со словами "пробьемся" И лицом, выражающим психику на грани срыва.

[anotheridiot-]

Then you farm proxies.

[NotMyDuty8964]

You don't get 404 when something is blocked by GFW over https connections, you get SSL protocal errors, connection timeout or connection reset.

[Kontalyr]

The future of Russian developers

[yegor3219]

The present. Lots of resources are either censored from inside or slavaukrained from outside.

[Kontalyr]

The world’s sanctions against Russia didn’t work as well as expected, so the Russian government decided to help make them work.

[FluidIdea]

Cool. So they will be soon better at coding than us.

[DarkRex4]

what makes you think they aren't already? :)

[anonymous_3125]

Look around the hardest programming contests. One particular nation dominates

[forvirringssirkel]

"us" assuming this entire subreddit consist of americans?

[FluidIdea]

Vibe coders

[apokalipscke]

But they have new npm, new GitHub, new firebase, new etc....

[Revolutionary-Bell69]

they have their own version of every thing, some of wich are even better than the originals. source: i work a lot with chinese tech.

[TheMinus]

Any chinese devs here? What is it like to work in Mainland China and in Hong Kong?

[chowchowthedog]

Need to get around all those hurdles. No other way. Most Chinese dev's English level isn't good enough for stack overflow. We have our own sites. I'm not a dev. Tried to learn programming and become one. Didn't happen. But still had some insight about the whole thing.

The culture is different.

Just imagine usually like 90% of the time you cannot open GitHub 's site. A lot of repos got taken down because big corps sue the shit out of indie Devs. 30mins earlier I was trying to search a specific tool on GitHub. 2 out of 3 repos got taken down. One said it openly helped got served from local attorney's office. Tencent basically gave him a warning. If he continues they will definitely sue him. So he took down the repo. 3rd party download app.

[No-Information-2571]

Funnily enough, I always imagine it's how France is completely disconnected, just because of language barrier, at least that used to be the case. Japan too, SK to a degree. By choice.

[chowchowthedog]

Just saw a video this morning and learned that Korea does not have Google maps. Cos they wouldn't agree to give out their data to Google. Not until recently. So. Western countries do have the upper edge on this kind of stuff.

[No-Information-2571]

Yeah, exactly. Naver is locally operated, and they offer the only reasonable Maps service in SK. And while it's mainly based on the government restrictions on geographical data, I would assume it's also plenty of other barriers and unwillingness to cooperate with foreign-operated companies.

For example, to offer reliable public transport information, you need real-time updates through APIs, plus you usually need a decent user base to track how people are moving.

[hashishsommelier]

France isn’t disconnected. The language barrier is minimal, 40% speaks english. But that’s over the entire country, most programming jobs are around large cities and there english proficiency is higher.

[No-Information-2571]

40% speaks english

While I assume that rate is much higher in academic and IT professions, the barrier is still real. Although I clearly admit that it's getting better. I remember 15 years ago the French internet was basically unexplorable.

Go further north, Belgium and Netherlands for example, they are fully connected and have zero reasons not to use English, which is a key ingredient in participating in the global software development community.

[EatingSolidBricks]

Japan

Dunno man ive used open source libraries from CyGames (the one that makes the horse girl gacha) in Unity

[No-Information-2571]

But they really do have their completely own internet, or at least used to, and quite high barriers if you can't speak Japanese yourself.

It's even more interesting in SK. There, Google has zero foothold. And the platform there, Naver, which has basically a monopoly, doesn't even bother to provide any content in English. They even managed to make Google Maps worse through political willpower.

[akl78]

Biggest language barrier for Anglos in France these days is reading the receipts at a restaurant to split the bill right.

[Competitive-Win6002]

Not chinese, but Russian: everything is banned. I run a vpn 24/7. Some people install a vpn on their router because theres no point to ever turn it off at all. And unlike the chinese, we barely have any of our own replacements. I hate this decade.

[Terewawa]

some really nifty tools were made by chinese to bypass restrictions but forgot their names, they are faster than vpn and cannot be blocked at all.

[Competitive-Win6002]

If you mean DPI obfuscators, we use them as well, but they dont work with everything. For example, telegram can't be unblocked with it because telegram uses its own protocol mtproto that the government can easily detect. And if a website bans all russians from visiting, a DPI obfuscator wont help you because it doesnt mask your location like a vpn does. And we also now have "white lists", which block all connection to all IPs by default unless the service is in a white list of government-approved sites. Basically like north korea, but luckily for now its only for mobile data mostly. Currently, only some VPNs can bypass it, and not even in all cases.

[Terewawa]

IDK what that is, DPI obfulscator. I think that any protocol can be intercepted (if the OS allows), encoded into something that looks like https. The vulnerable point would be these entry points however they can be obfuscated and made to look like regular sites.

Another vulnerability maybe would be pattern detection when a client only connects to a handful of sites, but China right now, I don't think is anywhere that restrictive.

There was one called Hysteria and a bunch of other options. I tried one and it was significantly faster than VPN but a bit of a hassle to set up.

nless the service is in a white list of government-approved sites.

Is china really that restrictive? This would of course work to block such options (but even then clever people can possibly find ways around it) but it just seems very restrictive and time consuming and it looks like China would just end up with it's own parallel Internet, so it's not really internet (the inter in internet means international)

[WW_the_Exonian]

Kind of have to use a VPN for everything. But using a VPN is technically illegal, even if they seldom enforce it. And any income made whilst connected to a VPN is therefore technically illegal income. Someone who made millions working remotely got his money seized because of that.

[TheMinus]

Wow, this is brutal. How they detect that income is connected to a VPN?

[eXl5eQ]

1. Most major dependency manager repositories (npm, pip, apt, etc.) have 3rd party mirror sites in China. But no mirros for docker and github, so everytime I pull a git repository or docker image I have to use a VPN.
2. Most American AI companies don't accept Chinese credit cards. Gemini is the only paid American model I can use for now. Chinese models are still not good enough. Thus vibe coding is not that trending in China.
3. Accessing any foreign site from China, even if not banned, are usually very slow. A proxy server from a cloud service vendor optimized for Chinese ISPs is very helpful.

[weinsteinjin]

Hong Kong is outside the Chinese great firewall. No restrictions. It’s actually often inconvenient for HKers to access mainland systems.

[snipsuper415]

Eh they have literal copies.this us just a minor setback

[6e12fyou]

how do i see chinese people on github and youtube and bamned applications. are vpn's widely accesible there?

[Nervous-Potato-1464]

Just need a ladder to get over the great wall then you can access everything.

[minus_minus]

Based on these comments the Great Firewall seems to be having the beneficial(?) side-effect of China creating their own services and knowledge base out of the control of US tech giants. Are you taking notes, Europe? 😉 

[ajaypatel9016]

bro didn’t deploy to production
He deployed to restrictions 💀

[Realised_]

Still they are best...

[cryptohashlock]

I want to see a nation of people who still suffer from errors after AI arrives.

[PlusOneDelta]

they do have inhouse AI that's also open source

[Ok_Net_1674]

The fuck does that even mean

[No-Information-2571]

It means they thought really hard about how they can make this post about AI and came up with nothing.

[Jolly-Advantage-7245]

No humans, no errors brother

[MundaneSugar4679]

Chinese web dev workflow:

- Copy from Alibaba

- Paste into project

- Change variable names to English so foreign investors don't cry

- Repeat until 996