Time flies, Meituan is ten years old, meituan technical team has gone through ten spring and autumn.
When Meituan launched on March 4, 2010, the company, numbering about 10 people, started out in a three-bedroom apartment. There are only 5 people in the technical team, and 4 of them are still working in Meituan.
Today, Meituan is the third largest Internet company in China by market value. Its technical team has reached more than 9,000 people, covering 8 technical fields including front-end, back-end, system, algorithm, testing, operation and maintenance, data and hardware.
At the 2013 Annual meeting of Meituan Company, Wang Xing quoted a famous saying of Mei Yiqi, the former president of Tsinghua University: “A great scholar is a master, not a building.” M: It’s important to choose what kind of things you do with what kind of people you choose.
Recently, Meituan College of Technology has interviewed more than 20 students of meituan technical team, including three “veterans” of the early founding team of Meituan, and many technical backbone of Meituan App, Meituan takeout and other departments, and listened to them talk about their stories of growing up with the company. There are quarrels, there are friendships; There are sweat, there are tears; There are grievances, there is growth; There is confusion, there is firmness. We have excerpted some of their most impressive fragments, and shared with you the ups and downs that the meituan technical team has experienced in the past 10 years, as well as the touching and expectations it has gained.
Time has begun
On March 4, 2010, Meituan.com was launched.
In the following six months, group buying is the most popular entrepreneurial field in the Internet field. Like bamboo shoots after a spring rain, emerged thousands of group buying websites, which is often referred to as the “thousand regimens war”.
It’s about who to be with and what to do
Fu Dongping, a founding member of Meituan’s technical team, recalls that in 2010, Meituan’s technology was not very strong, but the team was young, enthusiastic, aggressive and responsive. We are on call 24 hours a day, even the second day of the third day of the New Year is still fixing the Bug, but also do not feel tired. “It’s not the office environment that matters, it’s who you’re with and what you’re doing,” he sighs. If it’s meaningful and exciting in itself, it’s worth investing our youth in. If these people are good and motivated, they deserve to be trusted by each other.”
A security breach? I have to work overtime
Qin Yafei, a founding member of Meituan’s technical team and the first code submission for Meituan, signed his name on the company’s internal communication tool, Elephant: “We are born in this era, and we are lucky to participate in the wave after wave of Internet technology.”
Qin Yafei was deeply impressed by a crisis in 2015, when they heard that a hacker conference was going to attack Meituan’s system. The contest was “Cracking Meituan’s payment system on the spot”. Mu Rongjun, co-founder of the company, personally led the technical team of students to work overtime continuously to sort out possible hidden links, searched bugs and loopholes overnight, looked at the code in white box until dawn, and finally found the problem, and finally completed the repair.
Favorite trait: Meituan is a learning organization
What Pan Weizeng, a founding member of Meituan’s technology team, likes best is that Meituan is a learning organisation. The entire founding team is very good at learning and thinking and summarizing and sharing and encouraging people to do that. I remember that once at a party, Wang Xing talked about the dialects of different places and helped us to classify them. When the conversation became interesting, he even took out a thick language book to prove that what he said was reasonable and well-founded. On another occasion, Wang recommended a book on seeing the world from a geographical perspective, and gave away a number of copies. Pan Weizeng did have a new understanding of the world pattern after reading it, which helped him a lot.
I’m writing code in my dreams
When he joined meituan’s technical team in December 2010, He was still a technical novice, doing everything he had never done before. He transferred from DreamWeaver on Windows to Vim on Linux (Ubutun), from only knowing how to use jQuery to be able to read YUI2 source code, and write complete scripts independently. Mi is thrilled to think that every CSS and JavaScript presentation interface is accessed and used by hundreds of thousands of people. In the early days, the technical team of Meituan worked late almost every day, but he was hardly tired. He was so excited that he dreamed about the code and the company, and he also recorded these dreams on the table.
The early slogan of Meituan’s technical team was “Awesome or out.”
Zhang Jiajia graduated with a master’s degree on December 18, 2010 and was recruited by meituan. Although Meituan is a new and small company, it attaches great importance to recruiting excellent students from fresh graduates early on.
What impressed him most was that the slogan of the technical team at that time was “Go Big or Go Home”, which Was translated by Qin Yafei as “Awesome or Go away”. Everyone agreed that very image is also very appropriate, has been used for many years.
What Zhang remembers most is that Mu rongjun told everyone in 2010 that meituan’s technical team would soon expand to about 100 people. At that time, the technical team of Meituan was only a dozen people, zhang Jiajia thought, More than 100 technologies, meituan is trying to do a big thing. Zhang Jiajia said: “You see today, our technical team has more than 9000 brothers, really let me sigh with emotion.”
Efficiency is the core competitiveness of Meituan
Xia Jiaojiao was one of the few female students in the early stage of Meituan technical team. She chose Meituan after careful consideration between Meituan and Baidu. She joined Meituan on February 21, 2011. In her impression, Wang would stand in a corner of the office every weekend and share his thoughts of the week with all of them, and what he shared each time inspired and encouraged them greatly.
Mu also often discusses problems with Meituan’s technical team. At one point he asked: What is the most important thing for meituan’s technical team? There are many answers, but Mu rongjun’s answer is “efficiency”, which is meituan’s core competitiveness.
Strategic layout movement
In 2010 it was nokia and MOTOROLA, and the concept of “mobility” was just beginning to gain traction. At the end of the year, Wang Xing came back from an inspection trip to the United States. Sitting on a broken table in the company’s small warehouse, he talked to the technical team of Meituan about the mobile strategy. Then Chen Liang (now the senior vice president of Meituan) and two or three classmates spent one or two months on rapid development around the Spring Festival.
On March 4, 2011, the first anniversary of meituan’s establishment, Meituan began to have its own client.
According to Wang Huiwen’s review, Meituan stood out in the war of thousands of teams, a very important factor, is to seize the wave of mobile technology dividend. In 2011, mobile revenue accounted for only about 7%-8% of meituan’s total business, which reached 30% in 2012 and 70% in 2013. In 2014, it was over 95%.
Since then, with the development of the business and the growth of users and data volume, Meituan began to set up a special search, recommendation and data team, as well as more professional product managers. While the original team members grew rapidly, more and more external technology talents joined in.
Technical students dare to bang on the table and quarrel with the boss
Ma Shengchao is the first engineer of Meituan Mobile terminal recruited by Chen Liang. He joined the company on February 11, 2011. Some of the details of that time have been so fresh in Ma shengchao’s mind, as if it just happened yesterday. For example, when I first came to Meituan, the technical team did not even have design and art. In addition to reviewing the code for Ma Shengchao, Chen Liang also carried a stool to design pictures with a little operator, which is how the opening screen of the first version of Meituan’s client came to be. At the early stage, the technical and design students of Meituan were not afraid of their Leader. They often quarreled with Chen Liang for a project and even beat the table……
Ma shengchao said that what has influenced him most is the saying “Done is better than Perfect”, which comes from “Done is better than Perfect”. To this day, he uses it as a principle for everything he does: move forward iteratively. To perfect, as the first action.
I have a relationship with the company
Xie Yuchen felt with the United States group special fate. He was a fresh graduate who joined meituan on March 4, 2011, just one year after its founding. The date of his engagement to his wife was also March 4. On the day they got their licenses, Meituan announced a merger with Dianping. This is really not his intention, in fact, they set the date of getting the certificate very early.
From 2011 to 2013, Meituan has been in the Top position in the industry in terms of technology in the process of mobile Internet. Although the technical level was certainly not high at that time, the whole team had a strong sense of technical pride. At that time, Xie Yichen and Qin Yafei were in charge of data development. Although they had less accumulation in relevant technical direction than BAT, they had made self-requirements according to the standard of an “Internet giant” from the very beginning.
A: Why is the boss so angry
Android programmer Lei Earth (hired on April 11, 2011) still remembers that there was a big problem with Meituan Android client, which directly affected user experience. Chen Liang, who is usually Nice and responsible for mobile technology, lost his temper in the office. People gradually realized the importance of the first value of Meituan — “customer focus”. It was a big deal that technical problems affected user experience and the company’s reputation.
Don’t put limits on yourself
Zheng Gang, an early member of the data development team (joined on June 27, 2011), was shocked by the company’s annual meeting in 2014. Wang Xing set the goal for Meituan in 2020: the total trading volume of the platform is 1 trillion yuan. A few days earlier, the students in their data group had made a prediction, and the highest number did not exceed 200 billion. After all, meituan’s data in 2013 was only 18.8 billion yuan, so 1 trillion yuan is unimaginable. Now Meituan is close to achieving that goal. Zheng Gang said, “I was greatly influenced by Xing Ge. He often told us not to set limits for ourselves. I also often tell my classmates that tactically there is no goal that cannot be achieved if you are willing to work hard.”
At that time, the biggest challenge for Meituan’s data team was that technical resources could not keep up with business development, and several members of the data team had to deal with multiple business lines such as human resources, sales and marketing. How to do? They began to teach meituan product managers to write SQL, so that everyone learned how to query data. At that time, there was a very famous book called “MySQL Must Know must Know”. When Meituan was recruiting product managers, it generally added a requirement: know how to use SQL. It is said that this was a major feature of meituan product recruitment at that time.
In its early days, Meituan was more like a tech “direct-sales” company
Chen Hongbing (early Android development team member of Meituan, joined on July 15, 2011) worked in some pure technology software companies before. After he joined Meituan, every morning when he went to his desk, he would always meet meituan’s sales students holding a morning meeting in the office, which reminded him of a “pyramid selling company” holding a general meeting. Chen Hongbing frankly, feel at that time the United States more like a technology “direct sales” company.
Simplify complex things, standardize simple things, streamline standard things, automate process things
In ding Zhihu’s eyes, one of the biggest characteristics of Meituan is that the founders have almost the same technical background. No matter Wang Xing, Mu Rongjun, Wang Huiwen or Chen Liang, they attach great importance to technology and devote enough to technology. Meituan, for one, was an early pioneer in equipping technical teams with ergonomic chairs and macBooks.
Xia Huaxia (the current chief scientist of Meituan) has the greatest influence on Ding Zhihu: “We should simplify complex things, standardize simple things, streamline standard things and automate process things.
I spent my own money to experience the product flow, and I fell in love with watching movies
HongGuangYan (early mobile backend Java development team members, on March 5, 2012 recruits) is responsible for the development of the cat’s eye to choose a business, in order to ensure the quality of products and research and development experience, he will spend their own money to buy a ticket, though I didn’t really enjoy the movies, but because they are doing products, responsible for the user experience. If as a developer have not experienced buying tickets, certainly not, it is likely because of some technology or use problems caused by the product process can not run. “Later, I really liked movies a little bit because I bought tickets a lot.”
It is worth mentioning that in the early stage, The cat’s Eye film business was actually led by Wang Xing himself. In every meeting, Hong Guangyan and other technical team members of Meituan will feel wang Xing’s careful thinking closely. Wang Xing’s questions are very sharp, and if he does not do things logically, he will talk to you sternly about it.
Every day as soon as I get into bed, I feel: today I have made progress again
Chen Xiaoliang (early iOS development team member, joined on November 12, 2012) recalls that Meituan mobile was always filling in the holes and paying technical debts in the early days. At that time to test a version, often can detect hundreds of bugs, and a test engineer, he desperately to open the Bug, r & D students desperately to change the Bug, we work very high. “There is no time to think about such things as technology strategy,” Chen admits. It took us two or three years to build the engineering system for mobile.”
There was a lot of momentum. Work overtime? There is no such concept, no such requirement. However, you will see a lot of people coding spontaneously in the office after 9pm. At that time, Chen Xiaoliang often went home at more than 11 o ‘clock. Anyway, it didn’t matter that his home was very close to the company. He really didn’t feel tired. For the longest time, he worked 60 days in a row. “At that time, I was filled with passion. Every day WHEN I lay in bed, I felt that TODAY I made progress again. Haha.”
The elephant prototype took two days and one night over the weekend
Now, tens of thousands of people in Meituan use the communication tool Daxiang every day. The earliest version was created by Wang Kang (a member of the early Android development team of Meituan, who joined on February 22, 2012). It was Wang Xing who decided to do IM, and the task was given to Wang Kang. At that time, Wang Kang was on his way to the driving school, just got there and immediately transferred back home. Over the weekend, Wang Kang spent two days and one night making a Demo version. On April Fool’s Day, Meituan’s students received an email saying that they had their own communication tools. At that time, everyone couldn’t believe it, thinking it was an April Fool’s day joke, but later found that it could be downloaded, and it worked, the students were amazed.
Meituan technology in the eyes of female product managers: The first impression is Low, vulgar and copycat
Product manager Liu Xiangpin attended her first technical team meeting after joining Meituan on March 5, 2012, wearing a pair of red heels. At that time, the team was small, meituan Android and iOS client combined, only about 10 people, a small conference room can be filled. Then go in a look, a group of small young wearing slippers, big shorts…… Since then, Liu xiangpin felt in Meituan never wore those heels again. “Really, my first feeling was that the team was really Low and cheesy and copycat, ha ha ha! Of course, we have to admit that we worked very hard and worked very hard.”
What impresses Liu Xiangpin most about technical students may be the process of “love and kill each other”. She put forward a version plan early, proposed 5 requirements, the result of the technical team to launch 6 requirements. “Do you think these early technical students are very good? Not at all, I tell you. These unreliable guys, they have only launched 2 requirements I proposed, and there are 3 pending requirements; At the same time, there were four ‘wild requests’ online, asking what was going on and saying they had done what they thought they needed to do.”
“Why is the relationship between a product and technology so good? It was a revolutionary friendship that was nurtured in the course of battle.
The rapid growth
After several years of hard construction and continuous pit filling, the technical team also completed the earliest infrastructure construction, but also established a relatively perfect engineering technology system. Meituan group purchase occupies the absolute leading market share. Meanwhile, a large number of technical talents from Google, Baidu and Tencent have joined meituan’s technical team.
Choice needs courage, more need to believe
Xia Huaxia (early technical director of the Engineering Department, June 8, 2013) came back from Google and joined Meituan. His story is very interesting: he went to pick up his wife from work at Meituan and found that the monitoring tool of Meituan was well done. Although the underlying system was open source, its functions were simple, intuitive and easy to use. Later, I came into contact with many technical students of Meituan. I found that although the whole technical team was very small, it was very pragmatic, with a good technical atmosphere and a very serious working attitude.
Later, Wang Xing and Mu Rongjun formally threw out an “olive branch”. Xia Huaxia felt that meituan was doing something meaningful and chose to reduce her salary to join this small company. Then he formed the technical engineering department and began to do basic components, performance optimization, including technical storage, load balancing, middleware systems and so on. Later, I took over the operation and DBA system optimization. In addition, Xia Huaxia also established Meituan Technical College together with several technical colleagues in the early stage, responsible for the training, communication and publicity of the technical team.
Be prepared: Even when traveling, you need to carry your computer
Zhang Xiaohu (early head of mobile background technology) joined Meituan on May 2, 2013 and was mainly responsible for the background team of mobile group, which was divided into four directions: group purchase mobile, Cat’s Eye movie, Elephant, infrastructure (RPC, cache, message queue, etc.). At that time, the proportion of transactions on mobile terminals was increasing, and the main problem was heavy traffic, and the system was prone to problems at weekends. At that time, he had a classmate in his group. When the group went out, he would carry his computer on his back just in case. He actually met a breakdown situation, opened his mobile phone hot spot, and began to fix the Bug in the mountain. Zhang Xiaohu’s memory is deep, once with his children just arrived at the north gate of Orson Park, received an alarm, all the way to deal with the fault, later his family also more understanding of his work, said that he would not go out on Saturday in case there is something unexpected in the company.
Especially motivated to recruit better people for the company
Wang Dong, who joined Meituan in March 2014, was mainly responsible for the platform search and recommendation as well as data product technology, with a team of about 30 to 40 people.
For Wang Dong, the most impressive thing is the school recruitment. At that time, in order to recruit good students, it was really hard, every day from eight in the morning, until nine in the evening. Then back at the hotel, he had to revise his written exams, often staying up until after 2 a.m. At that time, it had to be coffee, of course, to help the company get better talent, and it was very exciting. Wang Dong said, “I feel very lucky to have brought out a lot of excellent students, including Zhou Xiang, Cao Hao, Qi Yiping and so on, who are now playing their value in meituan technical team.”
After the project went online, I felt a sense of accomplishment when I saw the data fed back from the log
Qi Yiping (an early member of Meituan mobile recommendation and personalization team, who joined meituan on June 6, 2013) felt very good about the technical interview of Meituan. The interviewer asked him what books he had read and what skills he had learned, which made a particularly good impression on him.
Qi worked with four to five young interns on the search and ranking functions of Meituan’s App, including personalized recommendations and “guess what you like” on the home page. Search sorting went live for the first time. Qi Yiping and an intern worked together to complete online development, offline data calculation and training process design. Qi yiping said, “After I went online, I felt a sense of accomplishment when I saw the data from the log. No matter how much overtime you work, you don’t feel hard.”
The most intuitive feeling is that everyone has a glint in their eye
When Cao joined Meituan on March 3, 2014, the App had a recommendation search team of only a dozen people. He and several colleagues, in addition to the algorithm, also need to engage in the research and development of feature engineering, from zero to one to build the ranking system of Meituan. When it came to the purchase rate alone (how many people buy per 10,000 people), the effect increased by 30-40 percent. At that time, Meituan also did user research and received good feedback from users. They generally said that it was not only faster and better, but also more accurate. They could quickly find the food and shops they wanted to eat on meituan App.
“In 2014, our search and recommendation team was really energized, just as we were in the new era of mobile,” cao said. At that time, the slogan of the technical team, ’30 kilometers a day’ gave us great strength. The immediate feeling was that everyone had a glint in their eye.”
In order to enter the United States, I lost Baidu 5000 yuan of liquidated damages
Joining Meituan was a bit of a twist for Zhou Xiang. When he graduated, he signed a contract with Baidu and later received an Offer from Meituan. He especially wanted to join Meituan, and he also read a lot of entrepreneurial stories about Wang Xing. In Zhou Xiang’s mind, Meituan was a Cool technical team. Finally, Zhou Xiang paid baidu 5000 yuan of liquidated damages. “Now, of course, it all seems worth it.”
In June 2014, Zhou xiang and his three classmates from UESTC joined the Meituan App recommendation group. They also lived together and would continue to discuss work after returning to the dormitory every day, so everyone grew up quickly. At the time, the recommendation group was often experiencing performance problems and was woken up by an alarm at 2 or 3 a.m. to fix bugs together. What I remember most is that one of my friends took a taxi back to the company at 4am to solve a very difficult problem. “Back then, it was really diving into technology to solve business problems,” Zhou says. I often work overtime, but I really enjoy my skills without complaining.
A culture of continuous learning and an emphasis on talent development
Wei Yongchao (an early member of Meituan search team, who joined meituan on January 6, 2014) was greatly influenced by meituan’s culture of continuous learning and its emphasis on talent cultivation, especially the Leader’s attention to the growth of subordinates. Meituan embraces change, and Wei Yongchao reports that the relationship has changed many times. Wei Yongchao learned a lot about technology from Wang Dong (now the technical director of Meituan Food delivery) and was able to think from the perspective of combining technology with business. He learned from Liu Pengcheng (the current head of meituan in-store technology) how to promote the learning and growth of team members from the perspective of team talent cultivation, and Meituan also provided many challenges to arouse his thinking. Wei Yongchao and Zhang Jinmao (now the technical director of meituan basic RESEARCH and development platform) learned to point out the problems from the point of view of things, try to stand as a bystander to provide help to team members, and now also helped many technical students to grow at a high speed.
Takeaways go wild
As early as the end of 2012, when the group purchase war was just beginning, Wang Xing thought there were other opportunities in the catering industry for Internet, so he asked Wang Huiwen to set up a new product department and lead a small team to explore new businesses. Wang Xing probably did not expect that the take-away food explored by Wang Huiwen’s team would become meituan’s biggest business today. Until now, it is still breaking world records. At the same time, the delivery platform capabilities that have been built up from the food delivery business have made it possible for AI, robotics and other technologies to be used.
On November 18, 2013, Meituan delivered its first order.
On July 27, 2019, the daily order volume of Meituan takeout exceeded 30 million.
Today, Meituan Delivery has become the world’s leading minute-based delivery network, serving more than 3.6 million merchants and 400 million users nationwide, covering more than 2,800 cities and counties, with more than 700,000 daily active delivery riders.
As long as you are good, I will obey you and work with you
In 2015, Hong Lei (chairman of The Front Channel of Meituan, who joined meituan on June 24, 2013) received an assignment and transferred from Meituan platform to take charge of the front delivery team. At first, he was a little hesitant, but after a brief communication with his classmates, he accepted the challenge gladly. He got great support from the team members, and he was proficient in front-end technology, so he quickly got along well with his friends. Hong Lei thought that Meituan’s engineer culture was very good. “As long as you have good technology, I am convinced by you and can work with you.”
Countless sleepless nights add up to a better user experience
After Wang Dong went to takeout, the most unforgettable year was 2015 and 2016, when the order volume increased rapidly and the system was under great pressure. In the middle of the day, the system often sends an alarm. At this time, everyone will gather in meituan takeout’s “battle conference room” to solve online problems together.
In October 2015, the recommendation algorithm of the takeout team was responsible for students to do it by themselves. Every day at 8 or 9 o ‘clock in the evening, after finishing the work of the whole day, they combed the buried point data of users bit by bit. After more than a month, the problem of on-line embedding point was finally clarified, which laid a solid and reliable foundation for the subsequent application of the algorithm.
In 2016, in order to achieve the performance system migration without affecting the business, the operation team and the data team of the delivery technology Department gave up the Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day holidays and worked hard for more than 20 consecutive days to support the achievement of the performance management goal.
It is these countless sleepless nights that add up to a better experience for users, businesses, riders and front-line developers.
Hundreds of CaseStudy documents are our precious asset
Fang Jianping, head of the platform Department of Home Delivery System (since August 5, 2014), said that because there were many accidents in the food delivery system over the years, the students in this group wrote a lot of CaseStudy (accident analysis report), and the food delivery team attached great importance to this work. Basically, for every accident, no matter how big or small, everyone insisted on finishing the CaseStudy as soon as possible, organizing the review, analyzing problems and summarizing experience. After several years of accumulation, Meituan takeout has accumulated hundreds of CaseStudy documents, which is also the most valuable asset of the technical team of Meituan. Up to now, the trading system team often organizes reviews, including training for new recruits.
From delivery architecture to unmanned delivery
In May 2015, Meituan’s delivery service was already taking shape, but the system was unstable, with several outages per week, and several of them occurred during peak meal times. Xia Huaxia was ordered to takeout to set up the architecture team. He spends his days in what he calls a “war room” with many technical backmen, working on weekends to iterate, upgrade, test and monitor the entire system. After more than two months, the system stability was finally improved from 98% to 20 times, nearly 99.9%, which basically supported the sharp increase of orders in the summer of 2015. By 2016, with the implementation of our architecture optimization, operation and maintenance automation, test automation and other work, the stability of takeout has been improved to nearly four 9.
In 2017, Xia Huaxia successively handed over the mapping, delivery technology, delivery architecture and other work, and fully focused on the internal hatched Meituan unmanned delivery project. It pays off. Meituan’s unmanned vehicle landed during the epidemic and started delivering vegetables in Beijing.
There are a lot of technical team stories, not enough time to write in, please look forward to.
As we reminisce about the past, we participate in making history and gain growth and understanding. Some of the stuff that builds up slowly seeps into our bloodstream and becomes our genes.
Thanks to those who have left, but have made contributions to Meituan technology partners, often come home to see.
Thanks for ten years of support from numerous technical peers (open source code, technical books and articles…) .
The new decade, continue not to love, indulge forward!
Those precious old photos
Spring blossoms, autumn winds, and winter sunsets. Ten years, we have too many memories. We also collected some old photos full of memories from Meituan students. Some of my classmates told me that many of the photos he collected were for the first time. The students who have worked in meituan technology team, can they still recognize their young selves?
