Drew

My first lines of code were in Turbo C, on a DOS machine in a Chinese university lab. I still remember the green phosphor screen, the compiler errors I couldn't read, and the moment a program I wrote actually ran. That was 2002. Over the next two decades, I rode every wave. University projects in Java with EJB and Struts — building HR systems, e-learning platforms, video training software in Delphi and C++. A master's degree spent less on courses and more on building real software with Java and C#. My first job building recommendation systems for Sears — content-based filtering, collaborative filtering, early machine learning. A year architecting an ecommerce platform from scratch. Then I started my own consulting company, growing it from 5 to 30 engineers, shipping recommendation engines, image search systems, real-time streaming tools with WebSocket. When mobile hit, we built everything — Android apps, iOS apps, H5 mobile web apps. I remember the .mobi domain era. We shipped on devices most people have forgotten. In 2018, I left China for Vancouver and became an IC at AWS — building the infrastructure behind services like SQS and S3. Java, Python, the whole cloud stack. In 2024, I moved to Seattle and joined another big tech company, writing C++ for core infrastructure. I've written code in Turbo C, Borland C++, Visual C++, Java, C#, Delphi, Python, JavaScript, and now C++ again — full circle. I've built for DOS, for the web, for mobile, for the cloud. I've been a student, a freelancer, a founder, and a big-tech engineer. Then in 2025, I started vibe coding entire features — describing what I wanted, watching AI build it. The craft I'd spent twenty years mastering was being automated in real time. And on February 27, 2026, Block cut 4,000 people and Jack Dorsey said the quiet part out loud. Two days later, I launched The Last Programmers. And on weekends, I kept building. Mainly not for profit — for survival. Open-source tools like clouda.ai, built with two decades of programming experience, cloud expertise, and the agentic coding tools that are replacing us. Free tools for programmers trying to stay relevant a little longer, even though none of us know how long "a little longer" actually is. I also write and record — blogs, vlogs, whatever gets the thinking out of my head. Sharing what I'm learning, what's working, what's not. Partly to help other programmers navigating the same uncertainty. Partly to handle my own anxiety about a future none of us can predict. Because that's what programmers do. We build. We debug. Even when the thing we're debugging is our own relevance. And someone who's lived through every era of programming should probably document the last one — while still building through it.