Abstract: 1, an Ali IT man, become a maternal and child expert? Rapp, an algorithm engineer at Alibaba, recently became a father. He started working on it two months ago. Since his wife had a baby, seven aunts and eight aunts all came to him for reference. Friends and colleagues who had given birth told him what to buy. The supervisor also cared about him from time to time: “Buy a pacifier, is milk powder ready?” As an algorithm engineer at Alibaba, Rapp has never faced a problem more difficult than code.
1, an ALI IT guy, become a maternal and child expert?
Rapp, an algorithm engineer at Alibaba, recently became a father.
He started working on it two months ago. Since his wife had a baby, seven aunts and eight aunts all came to him for reference. Friends and colleagues who had given birth told him what to buy. The supervisor also cared about him from time to time: “Buy a pacifier, is milk powder ready?”
As an algorithm engineer at Alibaba, Rapp has never faced a problem more difficult than code.
A 28-year-old computer science graduate from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, he joined Alibaba in 2015. Previous work might seem a bit abstract: “Extract common business models to serve as platform algorithms for products”.
Don’t understand? “Doing the underlying technology, providing services for the product, some users will not feel our presence.”
This time, it was his turn to do things for himself.
Search Baidu, zhihu, find purchasing agent, ask relatives, can use all the means, two weeks of trouble.
He had to learn from scratch what brand of milk powder to buy, how much calibre of pacifier to use, what material of diaper, what clothes to wear next to his skin and which store to trust. The wife is the same write, full of a A3 paper. On March eighth, he bought 72 items on Taobao for more than 6,000 yuan.
“Why can’t we be a one-stop shop to solve this problem?” Rapp said.
“For the most part, you just search for things like bottles, milk powder, diapers. You may not know how good it is, how it’s evaluated, it’s a waste of time, and it’s unprofessional.” Rapp talks about the scene using more nouns than his technical terms.
In October, his team began building a one-stop shop for life scenarios, using data and algorithms to recommend products to users, including “having a baby.”
Their team’s business is, as long as you search “give birth to a child” on Tmall, a mother and baby gift package will appear immediately, “what I am doing now is to provide services for this scene, these algorithms, the underlying technology, let us deal with”.
2. Hungry, Foolish and Crazy. Intern alone completed Dingding’s iPad version
At the end of November 2015, Ding Tian, who was in charge of iOS in Dingding R&D Center, assigned a task to Ke Mo, an intern who had just arrived for less than two months, saying, “Dingding doesn’t have an iPad adaptation yet, you can make one.”
That’s the way it is. Everything was calm. A month and a half later, Mo rushed to the internship before the end of the assignment.
At that time, Dingding had just moved to Longzhang Building, which still had only two floors. “Two people sit in one desk, and the balcony was transformed into a desk”, which did not look like the magnificent office building of Alibaba Group in imagination. The office is located in the west side of the West Lake, next to the Xixi wetland, the park is not big, but lush, beautiful scenery, downstairs is an ancient tree.
This was the beginning of Dingding’s rapid expansion, and the team was always hungry and motivated. The team did a product called Laiwang that didn’t take off. Later, from the ruins of failure, the team started again and made the product Of Dingding, which can be described as a rebirth.
Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish,but be crazy.
The first two sentences are The legacy of Steve Jobs, and the last one is crazy. Those three words formed the nail culture that rose from the ashes three years ago, and became the label of Mo, a wireless developer born in the 1990s.
“I understand hungry is the desire to explore and learn, try to do the best.” Mo said.
Alibaba’s internship experience has never been a formality to get an internship certificate stamped. As He recalled the scene later, “I was really new at that time. I was brave enough to do it. Some things have to be more Foolish.” In fact, this is not an accident in Dingding, in Ali, you need to think of something yourself, and then fix it.
“I was a little crazy during my internship. I thought it would be difficult, but I wanted to do it. Personally, I don’t think you should limit yourself to just doing side projects for people.”
His task: change the iPhone version to Universal, adapt iOS7, 8 and 9 ipads and the new iPad Pro, support vertical rotation, support iOS9 MultiTasking.
The whole App page should be changed, and every step should be checked by himself and constantly debugged, otherwise the effect of launching will not be good. Fortunately, he has some iOS development experience before.
In January 2016, he posted the entire development process on his Intranet. When this string of sharing code was finished, it was just three months before his internship. It took him a month and a half to achieve his goal, impressing a group of Ali engineers.
There are now more than five million business organizations using nailing software. “I always emphasized theoretical research in school,” Said Mo. “After I came here, I felt the most sense of achievement is that I can use what I have learned and have a place to play. When I thought of so many people who want to use what you have made, I felt very responsible.”
3, “the man with the ability of the world, how can empty old under the spring”
Jia Sheng is the second domestic employee of Alibaba’s machine intelligence lab.
It was the winter of 2014 when iDST was founded, and he was still an intern from Hit.
IDST began shortly after Alibaba’s ipo in New York and was announced in Silicon Valley, starting ali’s journey from a commercial company to a combination of business and technology
IDST’s initial work was to provide recommendation, search and ranking services for Juhuasuan.com and Taobao.
A friend told Jiasheng that he now shopping Taobao often do not want to type, lying in bed directly to taobao said he wanted to buy what; Some time ago, when his girlfriend was following dramas on Youku, she found that the first screen of Youku app showed her preference for the programs that she was often interested in.
After his official entry, he participated in the algorithm development of these tasks successively, which also made him enjoy the pleasure of improving others’ satisfaction.
All of these have become the reasons to support his decision at the beginning, that fork in the road decision: give up the idea of pursuing a doctoral degree for a long time, and directly join Alibaba after graduation.
“Even if I study abroad or do academic work, I still have to put my achievements into practice. “At Alibaba, with data, with computing power, with rich scenarios, with the best technology, there are enough opportunities for us to see user value, business value, and realize that what we do can impact so many people.”
Many Ali engineers are attracted to this pragmatic reason. Xuande Gong said, “How can a great man with a worldly talent be empty and old under the Lin Spring?” He immediately asked Kongming to give up the idea of protecting his study.
At Ali, Jia Sheng still had the opportunity to satisfy his original passion for academia. In the past six months, he completed a NIPS Workshop paper and a CVPR Spotlight paper by summarizing and settling his business experience.
“Some of my classmates went to other companies, but there are not too many opportunities to test theories in practice without being confined to academics. “The best part about an opportunity like this is that it makes your passion for research feel real and tangible.” Jia said.
Jin Rong said something similar when he joined Alibaba from a tenured professorship at the University of Michigan: “For me, it was the first time I felt that theory could change my life.”
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