 "China's internet censorship is throttling software development")
If you’ve ever been to mainland China, chances are you’re familiar with the Great Firewall, the country’s all-encompassing internet censorship apparatus. You know the despair of not being able to open Facebook, the pain of going mute on Twitter. But with a good VPN, you can magic many of these inconveniences away – at least temporarily.
For software developers based in China, however, it’s not that simple. You’re not just censored from certain websites. Basic building blocks that you use for product development are suddenly beyond your reach.
"There’s a whole parallel universe over here," DC Collier, founder of Shanghai-based chatbot start-up Rikai Labs, told me back in June. "I think Chinese developers are doing development work with one hand tied behind their back."
When Tech in Asia asked him how he deals with the Great Firewall, he says he travels overseas when he has a couple weeks of "serious coding work" ahead of him.
The scope of the Great Firewall has grown along with the internet. In terms of software development, it means that a growing number of services are permanently or sporadically blocked.
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One of those is NPM or Node Package Manager, an important tool for Node.js. To access NPM in mainland China, you’ll have to find workarounds like using a Chinese mirror. Another is Github, a popular version control and source code management tool that is occasionally blocked or at least throttled to be excruciatingly slow.
Things get worse when you try using anything related to Google: Google Analytics, Google Fonts, Google Maps. All blocked. Even open source tools from Google are inaccessible without VPN or some kind of detour, such as Tensorflow.
This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here