Bytedance Terminal Technology ×ByteTech

** Guest introduction: ** entertainment industry has artists “song red people are not red”, the literary community also has authors “pen resorts original name”. Mention Wu Liang, we may be more familiar with his net name – moon shadow. Yueying is a worthy technology predecessor in the field of front-end development, and he is also a developer rooted in the community and concerned with the community.

After graduation in 2004, Yueying joined a traditional software company – Kingdee Software as a management trainee. Because of the six-month rotation internship system, he has been exposed to different positions such as pre-sales, after-sales and development. Half a year later, he returned to the headquarters and began his programming career. “When I returned to the information management department at headquarters, I had the opportunity to participate in the development of the MIS system behind the company,” he recalls. While it may sound unremarkable now, it was an advanced concept back then. Because there were so many complex interactions in the system that there was no ‘front end development’ to solve, I was experimenting with JavaScript for the first time and started learning it.”

At that time, there was no domestic front-end development industry. With interest in product interface interaction, Yueying began to systematically learn JavaScript and became an early front-end developer in China.

I got into programming a little bit earlier, but it was a bit messy. I have used C, C++ and C # in school and internship. I have also written PHP, but I have never written JavaScript. After contacting JS for the first time, I found myself interested in the UI of the front end. So from the beginning of 05 years, formally became a relatively early domestic contact front-end programmers. At that time, I also did some sharing and communication in some technical communities.

In 2008, Moon Shadow came to Beijing and began to lead the front end team.

Over the next decade, Moon shadow spent most of her time in front-end development and managing the technical team. In addition to daily team management, I also do some front-end related technologies, R&D projects and open source frameworks.

I consider myself a JavaScript programmer who writes code in my spare time. Some other teams in the company are also using the open source project I did before, so I will occasionally help to change the code.

Technology mid-stage front end team: reduce enterprise cost and empower business team

Yueying is currently in the front end team of Bytedance Technology, and the department is positioned as The Front end team of Bytedance Technology, so it will have business directions such as search, game, user center, international payment, technical community and user growth. Under the background of such a mid-stage team, supporting business departments to improve efficiency and reduce enterprise costs is the focus of the team.

Although the business characteristics are different, the common point is to empower the business; We think a lot more about how we empower, how our tools support the business, that’s a lot more.

As a mid-stage front-end team, the division of labor with the team in the business line will inevitably overlap. How to avoid repeated wheel building and efficiently promote the outcome output is also a problem that the Team in Taiwan must think about.

If some teams and businesses, it is still in the incubation period, then we will be more deeply into the business. But if the business team is at a maturity stage, we’re really more of a process tool and a set of solutions support. More business-oriented things will still be realized in the closed-loop business, so this is actually a state of mutual cooperation.

We will also provide some relatively general and perfect products. These technical products can help businesses achieve business goals better and make trial and error at a lower cost.

In addition, Moon Shadow also has her own ideas on how to make the mid-stage team bring more value into play and enable more business teams to reduce costs.

Our infrastructure is aligned with the business, like search and user growth, and the team that connects the internal infrastructure from the ground up, and uses the existing infrastructure capacity to build the infrastructure that fits the business needs.

But because the team is large, and there are many business directions and scenarios, we need to think about how to get horizontally across the capabilities of the business team, taking the generic capabilities that apply to the business team and polishing them better to support more business.

The building platform for byte internal use includes configuration based building, low code building and no code building. Configuration of the construction is more suitable for r & D team use; Low code build may be suitable for production teams, no code build, will be more suitable for operations students.

Although they are already a complete set of systems, we expect to make them more complete in the context of rich scenarios. Because of internal scenarios and external customer requirements of TO B, the ability of building the underlying code we provide can be more abstract and perfect, which can adapt to different business scenarios and improve the efficiency of each business line.

I want these tools to actually help the business become more efficient and improve quality. At the same time, it is sophisticated enough to develop state-of-the-art technology on behalf of the entire industry. In the future, we might generalize these capabilities and even consider open source or to B.

Thoughts for front-end developers: Always be sharp and curious

Byte culture has a team philosophy called “diverse compatibility”. Every organization must be diverse, and there is no standard to measure every candidate. If everyone can play to his strengths, the team will develop faster and better.

With this concept, Moon Shadow will think about the management and construction of the team from the aspects of business planning ability, technical planning ability and management maturity.

The so-called business planning is to pay attention to the development of the business, clarify the future development direction and overall outlook of the business, as well as the current urgent problems and challenges it faces. To understand the logic behind it, think about how to improve the business from the technical side. In this way, when dealing with problems, will be more forward-looking.

The second is technical planning. Once the business plan is clear, the challenges of the business in the future will also be known. Therefore, it is necessary to think about what can be solved through technology or technology reserve, and at the same time, the business plan will be transformed into the technical plan and technical challenge corresponding to the team.

For example, if a business plans to expand to multiple platforms in the future, then technology needs to be invested in studying these aspects of cross-platform and cross-terminal in the early stage. Instead of finding that the team has no experience in small program development when they want to make a small program version of App, which is definitely not possible.

Therefore, we need to do some technical planning based on the business, and identify technical challenges in the process of technical planning. What are the limitations of the tools and frameworks currently in use on this cross-end capability, and what are the good solutions? Therefore, it is not necessary to say how good and deep the technical ability should be, but it is necessary to have the acuity and foresight in this aspect, to be able to see some technical challenges brought to the team in the development of the business in advance, and then layout in advance.

The third is management maturity, thinking about the development direction of team diversification and future growth space. To the team as a team manager, you need to every classmate in planning his future one year to two years of growth path, and know what is the overall appeal of team members, how to put their personal demands and companies for their demands and development together, to make them more long-term with the team, with the company go further. Questions like this need to be considered by members of the upper management.

As an expert, he not only has a certain depth in technology, but also plays a core role in technical planning. He can keenly see the trend of business development and then make technical reserves.

One of the problems I’ve seen with IC characters is that they’re too wrapped up in technology to collaborate. The power of an individual is limited. In fact, one person needs to be able to influence the whole team and drive others in the team. He should be able to guide members at different levels and in different directions to better grow, which will be much more valuable than simply doing things.

You will find that these senior members perform well in both technical and managerial aspects as well as soft qualities. For example, being able to communicate, coach, and recognize the importance of doing these things.

Yueying also gave his thoughts and methodology in the interview on the common problem that “the industry is developing at a fast pace and there are more and more new technologies, so it is difficult to learn”.

First of all, we should be more optimistic about this problem. The rapid development of the industry means that there is more room for growth or technology to play, so we do not have to worry too blindly.

At the same time, we need to look at these issues more intelligently and ask, what do I need to learn? Some knowledge is basic and does not change so fast. For example, many algorithms are stable over a long period of time. These can be very helpful on the front end or in other areas, so we need to lay a solid foundation and make it more solid.

The other part belongs to domain knowledge, which is divided into general domain knowledge and special domain knowledge. General domain knowledge is best learned in advance. Today, many of our projects are written in TS, so it is generic domain knowledge that requires members to learn TypeScript well.

There is also a piece of specialized domain knowledge or tools, for example, if you want to do engineering, engineering packaging, you go to learn Webpack or Vite, this is specialized domain knowledge, do not need to invest a lot of energy in advance, because they are tools in fact. So, when you use Webpack packaging in your project, you can learn it, even if you forget it later. Don’t worry, the industry is using Webpack today and Vite tomorrow. These knowledge does not need to learn in advance, until the use of time to learn and use it.

A lot of knowledge on the front end belongs to this kind of knowledge, so don’t panic too much, too anxious. In fact, their appearance will have a lot of positive effect on the industry, can promote the front-end of the whole industry better development. So, I’m actually happy to see these new tools come out.

Root in the community and be a front-end developer who understands the community

As the first group of front-end practitioners, Moon shadow has completely experienced the changes of the Internet technology community. From the earliest 51JS community and front-end predecessors to discuss technology, collision of ideas, to later deeply involved in CSDN, blog park, Kaiyuan China and other community ecological construction, and now he personally plans the future development of rare earth mining community, Yueying is like a front-end developer with in-depth insights into the community. He hopes the tech community can become a social circle with a sense of belonging and warmth, in which every tech person can grow up happily.

51JS is actually a traditional BBS website, and people regard the forum as a platform for daily communication and discussion. There were also a lot of very advanced front-end ideas, very advanced ideas, that were probably five or ten years in the future in the form of more mature technologies. We had a very intense ideological clash with some of our predecessors, such as Hax and Zhou Aimin, and even had some quarrels. At that time, the technology forum was very active, and everyone had a strong sense of belonging to 51JS. Later, with the expansion of the scale of programmers, 51JS such a traditional community, feel the distance between people is not so close, also did not have the feeling of the year, we gradually not too to use it, so it slowly declined.

Since then, more technical communities of different types and tonalities have sprung up. The core of CSDN is content. It takes a long time to precipitate, so there are a lot of content and a lot of technology-oriented content, so many people regard CSDN as the source of content consumption. If a white developer has a problem in his work, search on Baidu or Google, and the first thing is CSDN’s content. It doesn’t have to be in-depth, but if you follow the steps, you may be able to solve a problem at work. But this is also the bottleneck for CSDN, which has a lot of content but is relatively rudimentary and relies on search engines. To put it more bluntly, its traffic is driven by search engines, a wave of users who consume content and then move on, with no sense of loyalty or belonging to the community, and no valuable social contribution to the community.

Open source China is to do open source direction. In my opinion, open source is a very important direction. From the perspective of policy, China also attaches great importance to open source. It is the first time that open source has been included in the five-year plan. Because it is now an open industry, the open source ecosystem is almost the same as the entire developer ecosystem.

In 2015, I started looking at rare-earth nuggets, a community that was more focused on content and social depth. The community that can do this piece well is still relatively few at present. If you are a core user, nuggets should be able to feel the value of the user, one is the quality of the content, the other is the depth of social. As an experienced user of the technical community, I hope to establish a social circle where everyone has a sense of belonging and meet the demands of daily career growth and learning. I also hope that people who do or love technology can grow up happily through social interaction.

“Not all engineers are good enough early on,” he says. “We want to grow with them.”

Although many of the communities mentioned above are considering doing to B, Rare-earth Nuggets will still insist on doing C end users in the future, and do a good job in user value, rather than focusing on user scale. I think a community should be able to help the industry, and the best way to do that is to help people grow. As practitioners grow, they in turn help communities grow into better communities. So, in the coming year, we will work on the membership equity system to make Rare-Earth Nuggets a good developer platform. Not all engineers are good enough in the early stage and have a big enough platform to realize self-growth. Many of them may not have good schools or strong technical strength at the current stage. They may go to some small platforms, but they also have a desire to grow. Rare-earth mining can be a platform for their career development and can really help their career growth in the same way that some good teams, some good companies can. It is like leading a technical team and finding those high potential members in the team to better coach and help them grow. The same is true for the community. Find high-potential users in the community who are willing to learn and want to grow professionally, and tailor the growth path for them.

As for the technical salon, Yueyin thinks it is more about seeking advice from experienced people to solve the confusion of career development. Attending technical conferences once or twice a year will also be of great help to broaden her horizon.

If you have a particularly specific question on a project, it might be better to read a book, ask a colleague, or search the Internet for answers. In the salon, it is more about solving the confusion of career development. For example, is it better to develop technology in depth or in breadth? For example, in the next six months to a year, want to improve their own strength, but do not know which direction they should strive for? What should I learn? How to strike a balance between project and study?

As for the technical conference, one is comprehensive. Each special session in the conference can be considered as a vertical salon. Those contents can solve some of your puzzles and problems. Other conferences tend to be more commercial, with lots of ads, and things like that can be a little less distracting. Because there are so many conferences nowadays, it’s hard to know which one is good and which one is bad, so you can distinguish it carefully. If you find that the conference is too boring, you can make a blacklist and don’t go to the next time.

In fact, I still encourage you to go to these kind of high quality conferences, not too much, two or three a year is ok, it will still be helpful to yourself. We are also preparing the “Rare Earth Developer Conference” recently. This year is the first one, which is more inclined to share dry goods and more inclined to the traditional comprehensive technology summit. We will invite the best lecturers in the industry to share dry goods. In the future, we still want to hold conferences with distinctive features and differences. In addition to focusing on the dry content of technical communication, rare earth Mining community will also add more social content, such as some offline games, carnivals and other comprehensive conferences.

Thinking about the impact of technology

Before coming to Byte, moon Shadow was not only managing the technical team, but also doing the influence work of the technical team. “Even Internet companies like Qihoo 360 need to invest in technology influence,” said Yue ying. Therefore, how to attract more excellent candidates is what technology brands need to invest in for a long time. We saw that it was something that had long-term benefits and long-term value, so we slowly learned some lessons.”

For himself, Yuying considers “technology influence building” a challenging job. With the improvement of technical recruitment standards and the increase of recruitment demands, the influence construction of the whole technical team is particularly important.

Because Byte’s business is growing so fast, hiring candidates is more influenced by the business itself. Some candidates will give priority to the business team with better development, but the technology center also has the unique advantage of supporting more business products, technology accumulation and development space. Therefore, the business team should, on the one hand, see the core advantages of its own development, and on the other hand, sort them out and promote them as competitiveness.

In addition, I hope that I can also start from the perspective of training and do some pre-training work, so as to relieve the pressure of recruitment and supplement the personnel gap. This argument has already been proven, so I want to transfer some of these good lessons. Take the front end. For those who want to work on the front end, ByteTech offers a “youth camp” that takes part in the recruiting process.

Regardless of the youth camp project or the new media operation, our goal is not to make the front end influence of the technology center in a closed way, but to consider the overall byte front end in a more open and global way. Only by building such a brand as byte front end can more excellent people join us. In my opinion, at present, all business teams are actively striving for the existing talents in the market. It is better for us to make the cake bigger together, attract more people and train more people.

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