18.1.5.1. Programthink (编程随想, Ruan Xiaohuan, 阮晓寰, programmer on GitHub)

His Chinese username literally means "Random programming thoughts".

Very popular Chinese language anonymous blogger that publishes software programming tutorials and political content since 2009, often negative about the CCP, in particular anti-censorship and anti-CCP-brainwashing.

He was likely arrested in 2021 according to an anonymous report to Radio Free Asia (RFA, 自由亚洲电台, USA government media), consistent with an abnormally long lack of posts:

His wife apparently later stated the exact arrest wast on May 10th 2021.

In 2023, after 2 years of arbitrary detention, he was sentenced to 7 years, full name and photo came out, he is actually called Ruan Xiaohuan (阮晓寰), previous names were just wrong:

He was born in Quanzhou, Fujian Province (辽宁省) in 1977. he served as the chief engineer of the information security system of the conference during the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. The blogging started in 2009. His wife’s family name is Bei (贝), given name undisclosed.

http://www.qz1z.com/themeArticle/14-29b32fe5bda846b0b73fbd8656376087 is a student listing of Quanzhou No. 1 High School listing someone with the same name as the 1990 high school junior. It is the only hit we can find on the Internet. Unsurprising, since even regular people are mostly anonymous online in China. https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1731886110528251526 is one of the rare Chinese sources possibly about him.

according to his wife, ms. bei, she and ruan xiaohuan met as classmates in the chemical engineering department of east china university of science and technology (华东理工大学). ruan was obsessed with information technology and entered the network security industry after graduating from school. when he was working at Venustech (启明星辰), he was the chief engineer of network security for the beijing olympics; he resigned from his full-time job in 2012 to focus on open source research and development.

She said that her husband was arrested but the case was a mystery, and she learned to "over the wall" in order to clarify the situation.

One day, I saw a report about the disappearance of "Programming Caprice" in an Internet cafe. The time of disappearance and the total number of blog posts were consistent with Ruan’s case. Programming Caprice stopped updating for four months, which happened to be when Ruan was ill in bed. She seemed to have known each other before, so she decided that this was her husband.

She also recalled that about a year before Ruan was arrested, the Internet at home was often disconnected; later, when the couple went out for a walk, Ruan often "killed the carbine" and went home to check; afterward, a neighbor told her that the police rented the house a few months ago. The upstairs room of her house.

The Chinese Wikipedia also gives a bit more details:

He joined a computer interest group in 1990 when he was in junior high school. Out of interest in the DOS virus he came into contact with, he wanted to figure out its internal implementation mechanism and studied by himself in the computer room of the school. Assembly language and C language [2]. In 1996, he was enrolled in the Chemical Engineering Department of Shanghai East China University of Science and Technology, but he loved computers and gave up his diploma[3][4][5]. Served as the chief engineer of the information security system of the conference[3][4].

Mentions in other sections:

Programthink
Figure 228. Programthink uses Rodin’s The Thinker sculpture as its avatar, to encourage people to think for themselves rather than blindly believe the Party. Sources: GitHub images, . real world images. The other pages of the indictment can be seen at: https://twitter.com/EricLiu_USA/status/1638560342874923010.
229744733 cf6e813e 645f 4513 91e0 1af984c86437
Figure 229. Ruan Xiaohuan in 2014 while traveling. Courtesy of his wife. Source.
229744864 ba542c3d 6027 49f2 9671 a755144ca98f
Figure 230. Ruan Xiaohuan’s work desk, kept unchanged since his arrest. Source.