At the end of January, a junior appeared on Zhihu’s hot list, with millions of people reading Chi’s Versailles quote: “Even though I interned three days a week, I still got the highest GPA in the School of Computer science at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.” Mr. Chi is a computer science major at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He is also a Committer developer for the fastest CNCF TiKV project ever. He spoke to us on a sunny afternoon. — Exclusive interview with TiKV Committer Chi (Alex Chi)
The path to programming learning
“You can’t be really good at something if you don’t love it.”
— Paul Graham, Hackers and Painters
He started to write code in grade three of primary school and won the first prize in the National Youth Informatics Olympiad’s Improvement Group in grade three. After entering high school, Mr. Chi began to practice engineering, learning a lot of knowledge about front-end and back-end, and writing many interesting small programs with Python and JavaScript. When asked why he didn’t continue playing computer games in high school, he laughed and said, “Because ALGORITHM games aren’t interesting to me. I wanted to do something more interesting.” So he went on to study computer science at Shanghai Jiao Tong University while writing code in high school. When he got to college, Chi began to learn system programming. I finished the core courses of MIT 6.828, 6.824 and CMU 15-445 within one and A half years, and got A+ in the core specialized courses of data structure, operating system, computer system structure, computer composition and computer network. Later, in the second semester of his sophomore year, he joined THE TiKV community of CNCF to make open source contributions and joined PingCAP as an intern in his junior year.
Get into the open source world
“The people who are at the forefront of open source software are the ones who start projects with their own vision and talent, and then carry them forward through effective community collaboration.”
— Eric Raymond, The Bazaar and the Cathedral
In the second semester of his sophomore year, Mr. Chi participated in the Community Bridge program sponsored by CNCF Foundation (Community Bridge is a paid internship and mentoring program for developers interested in participating in open source projects). Then he met Breeswish, PingCAP’s mentor, and participated in the development of the TiKV project under the guidance of mentors and community members. Mr. Chi developed the CoProcessor module, which is mainly responsible for TiDB push-down calculation. It can effectively improve the efficiency of database operation by pushing part of TiDB operators down to the TiDB distributed storage layer. This module involves modifying the entire computing framework of TiDB and is a task labeled “hard”. However, With his solid computer skills and excellent code strength, Mr. Chi successfully completed the set goal and set the record of becoming a Committer at TiKV in the history. TiKV’s official website still has the summary blog he wrote upon graduation. (tikv.org/blog/commun…). At the end of the project, Mr. Chi successfully passed the interview of PingCAP and became an intern of TiKV project team.
(Mr Chi’s GitHub)
Brilliant internship experience
“Creation, whether physical or mental, is always out of the cage of the body, caught up in the whirlwind of life, and lived with the gods.”
— Romain Rolland, John Christopher
During his internship, Mr. Chi chose a storage engine that was closer to the underlying principles of the computer for research. Referring to BadgerDB, he used Rust to realize the conception of the famous paper WiscKey and develop a high-performance storage engine, AgateDB. AgateDB is currently in continuous development as an experimental engine for TiKV, fully open source (project address is github.com/tikv/agated… , welcome interested students to participate in the contribution! .
Mr. Chi said, “I am quite satisfied with my internship experience in PingCAP. First of all, I got in touch with a few domestic open source software companies and was able to participate in some product development processes in the industry, which deepened my understanding of TiKV and stimulated my interest in further research in storage and database.”
When asked what impressed Mr. Chi the most when he came to PingCAP as an intern, he answered without hesitation: “Shanghai Office once organized us to go to Disneyland together, which made me feel very happy.”
The answer was so unexpected that we all burst out laughing.
Not a quiet college life
“If you are part of the tide, how can you see where it is going?”
— Paul Graham, Hackers and Painters
Mr. Chi got full grades (GPA 4.3/4.3) almost every year in the Computer Department of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. We asked him how he got such good grades while practicing. “I’m not so interested in how I got on the final exam,” Chi said with a smile. “It’s more about what I learned in the process.” Mr. Chi told us how he classifies the courses: they can be divided into practical courses and theoretical courses. The score of the practical class is basically based on the completion degree of the after-class project. However, because he has rich engineering experience, he can get started quickly. Therefore, the score of these practical classes is basically relatively high. Other courses are theoretical, such as computing theory and artificial intelligence. The grade composition for these classes is mostly exams. For these classes, Mr. Chi said that he thought his research efficiency was much higher after class than listening to lectures, so he would spend a little time to read books every week, and then do several sets of papers at the end of the semester. Basically, his grades were not too bad. When asked about his time arrangement, Mr. Chi replied, “In my class last year, I could have two days free every week, so I worked as an intern in Office. On another day, there was no difference between listening and not listening to the class, so I was at the Remote school that day.” ** “So my view has always been that grades are difficult to reflect a person’s true level,” he said. “Just as I get high grades in many courses, it’s hard to define how much I have learned.” When it comes to his weekend schedule, Chi’s answer makes us feel friendly: “I will play video games, watch movies and go to the mall to have dinner on the weekend. And then, because weekends are a lot of time, I might work on some class projects, because these projects usually take a long time, so I usually work on them for the whole period, which is more efficient.” It turns out that the leisure life of the gifted youth is no different from that of the normal people, which makes us feel relaxed.
Inroll and escape inroll
“Quantity is justice.”
— Gustave Le Bon, The Mob
Introversion, the original meaning refers to the phenomenon that human society stagnates or cannot be transformed into another advanced mode after reaching a certain form in one stage of development. When social resources cannot meet the needs of all people, people compete to obtain more resources. Chi also mentioned some cases of inscribing in his life. For example, some students send emails to their teachers to deduct others’ scores, hoping to improve their own ranking by lowering others’ scores. “Another way,” Mr. Chi continued, “is to make a presentation in the last project of our artificial intelligence class. However, some people’s model achieved 99.9% accuracy, which is very bullshit. What they all have in common is that you get a good grade, or you get recognition from the teacher, but it doesn’t actually improve your own performance. It’s pure peer rivalry.” We asked, “How do you deal with that?” Chi replied: “I don’t get involved in that sort of thing at all.” He mentioned that in one course last year, some students wrote an experiment report of 30 or 40 pages, but he handed in two pages the first time and five pages the second time, and the teacher gave him full marks in the end. Including training AI models, his team built new models that produced good results with only a small amount of data. He felt that he should focus more on improving the quality of his work, rather than doing some superficial efforts. ** It’s very interesting that the person who wins in the inwrapping environment is the one who stands out against inwrapping.
Failure on the lips
“To be unmasked by others is a defeat, to unmask yourself is a victory.”
— Victor Hugo, Laborers of the Sea
Jay, Chi’s mentor at PingCAP, comments on Chi: “His output shows an age maturity that is quite shocking. There’s a lovely contrast between success and verbal ‘failure’.” B: Yes, Mr. Chi is well known, and he sells vegetables day after day.
When asked why he often describes himself as a failure, Chi explained that there are many dimensions to measuring success, and he was a complete failure in many of them.
He mentioned that there were many students in Shanghai Jiao Tong University who entered the laboratory in their freshman year and successfully published many top papers, but they did not make any academic achievements. At the same time, there are other students who participate in many student activities and become the president of the student union. Some people do a lot of public service, on TV… He also envied such classmates.
“But you also got something that a lot of people dream about, like a scholarship, reputation in the community,” we asked.
Chi replied, “I just think my learning ability is ok, and I have found some points I like in fields like database and storage. For me, scholarships and honors and all that stuff, I don’t think it’s that important. What’s more important is what level OF ability I have and what I can do or what I have done.”
We asked, “Are you hurting other people by saying things that you don’t think are important to you when they might be?”
Chi replied: “I think it’s inevitable. My Chinese score in high school has always been on the edge of the pass line, and then I recite classical Chinese words and do a lot of questions every day, but my Chinese score has been unable to improve. But some of my classmates, they don’t have to work as hard as I do, they can get a high Chinese score. So in this case, they did have some effect on me, making me feel that I was a special failure, I could not reach their level no matter how hard I tried.
However, when I got to college, I felt that my original ideas were childish, so there was no need to struggle in this aspect, because after this stage of the college entrance examination, the previous scores were useless, right? Feeling that other people are high achievers or whatever, if you care about those things, can hurt you a little bit, but as time goes on, those feelings don’t get that deep because they’re not the most important things in life.”
There is no single criterion for success. Each of us has to find our own track.
The fire source
“Open source software is the computer industry’s most valuable asset.”
— Tim O ‘Reilly
Mr. Chi believes that the most important thing to contribute to the open source community is motivation.
He cited his own example. TiKV Motivation was his initial motivation because he thought the open-source project was very interesting. Then he learned a lot of knowledge and made a lot of friends in the process of participating in the construction, so he kept going.
To get involved in the open source community, he said, the first thing to do is to find a direction that interests him, and then choose a level of open source community that he can reach with a little bit of effort. Once a community is chosen, we can get involved.
When you get involved, it’s important to communicate with people in the community, like what ideas there are in the community, or what other developers think. In this way, we can gradually find out where we can work and make some major features or improvements. In this way, we can improve our ability.
Mr. Chi believes that TiKV CoProcessor is probably the easiest group in the whole community to participate in, because this project basically does not need a lot of prior knowledge, just need to know what SQL functions are to implement some functions in CoProcessor. So he suggested that beginners might consider participating in TiDB’s open source activities from this perspective.
Meanwhile, we also recommend TiDB’s official 10-minute Contributor blog to become Contributor series. Do you want to become Contributor for well-known open source projects like Mr. Chi? Start by sending out your first PR!
What is a dream
“Once dreams are put into action, they become sacred.”
— A.Ann Proctor
When talking about Mr. Chi’s life dream, Mr. Chi said that he hoped to become an excellent engineer in the future, able to solve some problems in complex systems. We asked him what he would like to do if his wealth were free one day. He answered without hesitation that he wanted to write some code that he really wanted to write. “For myself, I want to solve some problems that others have not solved,” he said. “Some problems feel difficult to solve even in the academic world, and it really requires experienced engineers to find a solution that can truly apply to a workload system. I wanted to write something elegant and pain-solving that would make me really happy.” We asked Jay Lee, Chi’s mentor at PingCAP, if he had anything to say to his students. After a long silence, he typed out this:
May he remain curious and driven, and always love open source and technology.
Yes, and may we all have a bright future.
Finally, before we close the mic, we ask Mr. Chi to recommend something to our readers.
Chi thought for a moment and said, “I recommend a game — The Legend of Zelda. I think it’s a great game to play. You can kill time with it and refresh your mind. I hope everyone can play the game and get some happiness from the game when they are bored or feel that their life has reached a bottleneck.”
Mike ready to pass to our next guest! As for who the next guest will be, those who are familiar with the community will certainly know, so let’s keep it in suspense