My Attempt to Escape the “35-Year-Old Crisis” as an Asian Programmer
Hey everyone,
My name is Dev Xiyang, and I'm a programmer who's been grinding it out in Asia's tech industry for the past 8 years. If you're in this field, you know the drill: the daily routine of staring at a screen, wrestling with endless overtime and never-ending bugs.
As the days turned into years, and as I got closer to the 35-year-old mark, a sense of anxiety started creeping in. I couldn't stop thinking: Is my career just a cycle of jumping from one project to the next, until I'm no longer considered competitive?
This "35-year-old crisis" is an unspoken fear for many programmers in Asia's tech scene, like a sword hanging over our heads. I didn't want to accept that fate, but I honestly didn't know what the way out was. Drowning in uncertainty, I decided I couldn't just sit around and wait. I had to try something for my own future.
So, I started down a path that you might call straying from my "proper" job. I placed my bets on two fields I knew little about at the time: learning SEO and trying my hand at indie development.
Today, I want to honestly share this "self-rescue" attempt with you, including how I ended up building a bunch of small image tools. My hope is that it might give you—if you're also feeling anxious and lost—a bit of courage to think, "Maybe I could try something too."
From Keeping My Head Down to Looking Up at the Road Ahead
For the past 8 years, I always thought my technical skills were pretty solid, and I found a lot of satisfaction in solving complex problems. But gradually, I realized I was just a cog in a machine. The day-in, day-out overtime was burning me out physically, but it also filled me with a sense of dread for the future. I had no idea how the final product was sold or if users even liked it. All I knew was that my role as a "cog" could be replaced at any moment by someone younger and more driven.
I desperately wanted to try to create something that was entirely my own. It could be small, and it might even fail, but it had to be something that could directly help a real person solve a real problem. I didn't know if it would work out, but I thought, at the very least, this could be my "Plan B"—a small, proactive step I was taking for myself.
But with that idea came the next big question: What should I build? What do people actually need?
To figure that out, I, with my purely technical background, forced myself to dive into SEO (Search Engine Optimization). It was like a whole new world opened up to me. For the first time, I could see what people were actually searching for online. I was no longer guessing; I was looking at real data, at real user search terms. It felt like I was getting a peek at the answer key.
SEO + Code = My "Need-Finding Machine"
This whole process felt more like an experiment. I treated SEO as my "product manager," carefully testing my first hypothesis: build what users are searching for. What if it actually works?
I discovered that "image processing" was a goldmine of search traffic. Countless people were searching every day for things like "how to merge two images" or "how to crop a photo into a circle." These were small needs, but the volume of people asking was huge.
Many of the existing online tools were cluttered with ads or had confusing interfaces. That’s where I saw my chance. Hey, I know how to code! I can build a bunch of super simple, ad-free tools that just work.
How My "Family" of Tools Came to Be
And so, by analyzing user search data, I started building several small image-processing websites, one after another. For me, the entire journey was a series of small, experimental sprints.
For example, I noticed many people writing articles or creating tutorials needed to stitch multiple screenshots into one long image. That led to my first tool, Merge Images. It has no complex features—just drag, drop, and click to merge. Done.
Next, I saw tons of people complaining that their photos were being awkwardly cropped on Instagram. Alright, challenge accepted. I built Square Images, a tool specifically designed to add borders to any photo, turning it into a perfect square ready for social media.
Besides these two tools that I put a bit more effort into, I also created several others on the side:
Circle Crop Photo: To quickly create circular profile pictures.
Mirror Image: To flip an image horizontally or vertically.
Change Image Aspect Ratio: To easily change a picture's ratio to 16:9 or phone wallpaper dimensions.
Crop Image: A dead-simple online image cropper.
Make Image Black and White: For that classic, artistic look in one click.
Compress Image: To shrink image file sizes and help websites load faster.
To make them easy to manage and for people to find them all in one place, I gathered all these little creations on my personal project website.
A Few Final Words
Going from an anxious "cog in a big tech company" to an indie developer who is still finding my way forward, the biggest reward hasn't been the money. It's been regaining a sense of control over my own career through this personal attempt.
I finally learned how to listen to the market and how to turn lines of code into a useful product that makes someone say, "Hey, this is pretty neat." This isn't just about coding; it's about personally building a safety net to protect myself from risk.
I can't call my attempt a huge success, but it has genuinely opened up a new path for me. If you're interested in my little tools or just want to see how one programmer is trying to navigate his career crisis, feel free to check out my project page:
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I'm still at the beginning of this road, but at least now, my future is in my own hands. My best to everyone out there on a similar journey—I hope we can all find our own "attempt" worth making.