Abstract: Ni Chao, the protagonist of this paper, is the product manager of Ali Cloud. Recently, his enterprise distributed application service, EDAS, won the company’s Product of the Year award for fiscal year 2018. On the occasion of May 4th Youth Day, we had the honor to visit this young product manager up close.
Ni Chao joined Alibaba Group at the age of 21. He changed from an intern to a PM leading platform products. He has been working in alibaba’s core technology team for 8 years.
He was the most practical of his college classmates
According to ni’s classmates, when he was in college, he was the one who liked to fiddle with technology the most. Instead of playing games, he always sat in front of the computer and wrote code. He used to pull us to use the website he had developed, which now seemed to be a very simple system, to post a comment on our computer and see it on his own computer – just the sort of thing that made him so happy.
Shortly after the military training in his freshman year, Ni Chao posted a recruitment notice for “Java development engineer” from a company in his class QQ group, calling on everyone to follow the above requirements. The company was Taobao. In 2007, Taobao was relatively unknown, and apart from himself, he doesn’t remember anyone else responding to his call.
Like most college students, Ni chao is a habitual truant and has rarely been seen in the classroom since his sophomore year. However, he was not playing games, but busy with other things: he signed a 200 yuan contract with a real estate agency near the school to do a house entry and retrieval system, which took four months, and was laughed at by his classmates for a long time. In the summer vacation of my sophomore year, I worked as an intern in a logistics company in Ningbo together with several seniors. I spent the whole summer in a small room of less than 10 square meters with my seniors.
For a long time, his classmates had always thought that Ni Chao was just a web developer. During the same period, other technology lovers in the class were busy in the ACM OJ platform of the school, proud of being in the school training team. Ni Chao, who does not fit in, seems to have become a class alternative, and he is determined to prove to them that what he learns is not worthless.
My internship life was unforgettable, and I received an Offer from Taobao
“2010 was a lucky year.” In this year, with good writing skills, Ni Chao successfully passed the system analyst exam, which he had prepared for two years. This year, he was still in his junior year. It was very difficult for students to take the exam, because it consisted of a 120-minute essay writing and required a lot of practical work experience to summarize. “I wrote down the process of listening to seniors discuss the project in the graduate laboratory of my school, and I passed it.” When recalling that exam, Ni Chao said excitedly.
In the same year, Ni chao passed the interview of taobao.com as an intern, and was lucky enough to enter the place he had always dreamed of. Of course, he also started a long journey across Hangzhou every day. At that time, There was no subway in Hangzhou, so you could only take a bus from Xiasha University Town in the easternmost part of Hangzhou to Chuangye Building on Huaxing Road in the west of the city. Every morning at 6 a.m., he takes the first B1 bus and gets to work almost two hours later during the morning rush hour.
Although it was a little difficult, Ni Chao repeatedly emphasized in the communication process that that time was very interesting and energetic. In particular, after passing the internship interview and receiving the Offer from Taobao.com, the company arranged the Jinhuayuan hotel on Baoshu Road around the company, so it was no longer necessary to go back to school in the dark every day.
Almost every young person, when receiving a long-awaited notice, always behave surprisingly similar. Ni and his fellow interns work late every night, learning all the skills they can’t learn at school. Looking at product code written by others; Seeing colleagues in the department arguing red-faced in front of the whiteboard, and laughing… Make an appointment at 11 o ‘clock in the evening together from the company back to the hotel on the way, always accompanied by laughter — always boast, a few years later, he will become a god like Duolong, Huang Sang and Bi Xuan; They would also joke that there were not only stories and wine but also pits in the code written by their brothers. Every time when I am hungry, I will go to yonghe King, which is open 24 hours a day, and order a preserved egg and lean meat porridge…
All this seems to be vividly remembered now. “Many years later, every time the King Yonghe passed by the gong-gong Road of Wansan Road, he always wanted to go back in and order a porridge with preserved eggs and lean meat to recall the cattle blown by those years.”
Now just want to let the majority of programmers a little bit more happiness
When talking about his current job, Ni Chao’s eyes lit up, as if he had entered a certain mode, and he talked endlessly to us to promote his products. “I’m still an engineer at heart, but I’ve become a product manager, but I know that programmers suffer a lot of grievances that are hard to understand, and I want to give them a little bit of happiness.” In Ni Chao’s introduction, we learned that his team has two series of products: Cloud Effect and Aliware. “We want programmers to record every requirement they make and every bug they fix, so they don’t have to do black work anymore,” Ni said. The work item management in cloud effect can help programmers arrange their tasks reasonably, and complete each system launch more finely and efficiently through a series of CI/CD functions.
Ni Chao has experienced many system failures during his years in Ali, and many engineers around him have suffered too much physical and mental pressure because they are in the front line of technological exploration. At present, Ali has a lot of precipitation in micro-services, messaging, configuration management, APM, performance testing and distributed transactions, and has completed several generations of large-scale system evolution, but many external enterprises are experiencing. “We hope to share the Aliware base of Alibaba’s distributed technology precipitation for more than ten years with these rapidly growing enterprises, so that they will no longer take the detours we explored in those years”.
Every day, we walk on eggshells
In many people’s eyes, Ni Chao is already an old Ali, but in his own mind, he is facing new challenges every day. “In today’s cloud computing market, there are vast opportunities, but also great challenges and responsibilities. We are treading on thin ice every day.” Near the end of the interview, ni Chao suddenly changed his relaxed and cheerful state when talking about the challenges of his current job. “Whenever I was surprised to hear that famous domestic and foreign friends suffered huge losses due to technical failures of their own products, I always felt very sad”. He believes he and his colleagues have a responsibility to do more for their customers in the cloud computing revolution, which is being led by new Internet companies.
“Nowadays, there are more and more enterprise customers on the platform, almost covering all walks of life, a large part of which is also related to the major system of national livelihood. What we need to do every day is to seriously take care of every trust from customers to us.”
Afterword.
Engineer is one of the greatest professions, it is the silent dedication of these people, so that more people enjoy the great convenience brought by information technology
Choose something you believe in, stick to it, and the world will make way for you
Serious people bring their own light
Come on, young man
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