Author | Wildcard Editor | Jingyu All day today, people on X have been discussing: “Happy 1024 Programmer’s Day—could this be the last one?” Coincidentally, the date fell on a Saturday. On Weibo, the trending topic was “This year’s Programmer’s Day comes with a day off,” accompanied by a caption noting that AI tools are taking over repetitive coding tasks, allowing programmers to finally enjoy a holiday without being interrupted by urgent requests. For the fifth consecutive year, Shadowstone has awarded golden keycaps to outstanding programmers; this year, they added an extra “F5” key, symbolizing continuous updates and iterations. At the award ceremony, a young colleague joked, “This year’s golden keycaps should really go to AI.” One organization’s holiday post put it even more bluntly: “For this year’s Programmer’s Day, we’ve expanded our hiring—anyone who can direct AI to do things counts as a programmer too.” Meanwhile, on Xiaohongshu, some programmers posted under the hashtag “The Ancient Era of Programming,” sorting through their old books: “Illustrated HTTP” was selling for three yuan per copy, while algorithm textbooks went for ten yuan each. Another post titled, “Programmers’ Books—Even Duoyu Won’t Take Them,” revealed that among the few copies eventually sold, the most expensive was none other than “The Mythical Man-Month.” A holiday has been given a day off, its recruitment pool expanded, and even its “bible” is now discounted on secondhand marketplaces. Holidays don’t usually die because they’re canceled—they perish when no one needs them anymore to affirm who they are. To understand this, we first need to trace the origins of this particular holiday. 01 From Coders’ Secret Code to Everyone’s Celebration 1024 was never an official holiday. Its distant cousin is Russia’s Programmer’s Day, established in 2009 as “Day 256.” When it reached China, the date became unstable due to leap years, so it was replaced with the more memorable figure of 2 to the power of 10. Around 2015, October 24 gradually became the de facto “Programmer’s Day.” This was once a secret code known only within the developer community. Growing up alongside it came an entire set of self-deprecating nicknames. Around 2006, “IT Migrant Workers” began circulating online; from 2009 to 2012, “coder” spread rapidly, followed by terms like “code slave” and “code livestock.” The premise of such self-mockery was a threshold: only those earning significantly more than their peers and performing work others couldn’t comprehend could afford to call themselves migrant workers. In 2021, China’s Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security included software professionals in its statistical category of “New‑Generation Migrant Workers,” prompting programmers to flood social media with posts like “Coders Really Have Become Farmers”—a tone marked more by amusement than anger. Then, this secret code stepped out of its niche. In 2020, CSDN
