Now that you look back at your "geeky" old self, you would probably say "Everything will turn out just fine."
In today's world, or at least at Alibaba's hackathon, developers are definitely treasured.
A 36-hour hackathon named Ant Technology Exploration Conference (ATEC) Developer Challenge kicked off at Alibaba's Computing Conference Thursday morning in Hangzhou's Cloud Town, east China's Zhejiang Province.
Organized by Alibaba's subsidiary Ant Financial, the competition started roughly at 10 a.m. local time and will wrap up Friday afternoon.
Over 1,000 "hackers" from more than 200 companies across China, mostly start-ups and small businesses, registered for the competition. Most of the companies build services and solutions for the Internet and China's booming sharing economy.
The competition aims to discover talent to support mini-programs on Alipay where Ant Financial originated.
"Alipay has always had mini-programs on its platform such as the utility payments app, although we never emphasized the service," Alipay's spokesperson told CGTN regarding the fact that its rival WeChat has a more famous mini-program platform in China.
"Now we have opened the platform to the developers, and they are given the chance to serve our users directly," he added.
The participants are asked to deliver a fully functional prototype running on Alipay's Mini-program platform. The winners' prototypes should be user-friendly, highly technical-merited, creative, easy to sell and market-valuable.
The winners will take away prizes valued as high as over 3.3 million yuan, roughly 500,000 US dollars, and chances to "exchange ideas" with Ant Financial, according to the company.
During the one-and-a-half-day competition, the developers are welcomed to grab a bite at the free fueling station that serves potato chips, candy bars, soda and canned Chinese herb tea.
Free live music, cheer-leading and massages are also provided to get the development going.
But the company is not the only one who endorses people who code.
While the hackathon was in full swing in the morning, a middle-aged woman sneaked in and posted a flyer on site with information about her daughter, aiming to find her a Mr Right who has to be a "programmer" she wrote in bold on the flyer.
The mother said both she and her daughter consider programmers as the best fit for marriage and family as they are "down-to-earth and reliable."
The security guards later persuaded the woman to remove the ad.
Alipay, a product of Ant Financial, called this incident a "strategic deployment" on its official Weibo account, saying "Come on friends, don't let the lady go home empty-handed."
Another hackathon organized by Alibaba is going on simultaneously in Silicon Valley, US state of California. Winners will take home prizes valued over 50,000 US dollars.
