Hi, long time no see. Since I married into Alibaba, the pace of life has really changed. I have been exporting any articles for a long time, and I still retained one when I entered the company a month to show that I started my life in Alibaba.

Now, the day always flies fast, in an instant the first anniversary of the entry. In the past year, MOST of the time I was busy adapting to ali’s work, and then at the end of the year, I became more and more anxious. It has been one year since I joined Ali, and what progress have I made? What did you learn? So, I need to stop and take stock of what I’ve done this year.

A few days ago, I just finished writing my annual performance, and I completely reviewed the projects I participated in in the past year. If these projects are strung together, they can be represented by the following graph:

I started on April 2, just in time to avoid April Fool’s Day and the end of Alibaba’s fiscal year. The “good day” started on this day.

1. Stage I: Adapting to confusion stage (April-July)

Because after a induction is Nodejs direction, at the time of the interview also explicitly said that after the induction will do the work of the construction of system architecture and the horizontal, I before entry is also fully YY, do what in the future, but often surprising result, in the first project is to is still doing a project – the construction of the city to build the retail system. Dude, what the hell is a build system? I seldom heard it in the community before (later I learned that the build system is a factory for the production of many H5 and small program pages in Ali, which can produce pages quickly based on the form of module development). After I came in, the basic functions of the system had been completed, that is, the package and the front desk page display had been built based on the bottom layer of the group. There were three people involved in the development, including one Nodejs (the child left two months later after I arrived) and two front desks. When I came in, I must have familiarized myself with the system. Thankfully, it was all JS, but the framework became Midway. Thankfully, midway was very similar in style to my last company, or Nest.js, so it was easy to get started. Kuang bursts kuang bursts of the whole system, a context principle clear, program is worked out, technically adapted so quickly. But I define this stage as the stage of adaptation to confusion, why in this stage will still be confused?

The answer is: technology is easy to understand, but business is hard to understand. Whenever someone says a term I don’t understand, I feel confused and don’t know how to answer. For a new employee, entering a large factory, the most difficult thing to deal with is all kinds of business terminology or technical terminology. What O2O, B2C, what consignment, consignment, distribution, what promotion, shopping guide column, Icon, beans, what investment, inventory, selection? Lots and lots of business jargon can grind you down. In fact, in addition to business terms, technical terms or systems are also to make you feel confused, involving internal projects not to say the name of these systems, no wonder that internal technology website someone also deliberately arranged a very complete technical terms abbreviation list, 20 years of technology precipitation, come and go how many systems.

Therefore, while adapting to this system, I began to understand a form of cat ultra business and a workflow of big promotion marketing, including operation, product and test. I had more contact with the big promotion marketing team, which would just catch up with their preparations for the 618 Promotion. So I understand what is the emperor, crown prince, sea view room and so on, some concepts of layout on the page. I also know what is the ultimate single product, what is the exclusive product, new products and other marketing concepts.

The whole experience gives you a basic idea of how big a cat is. We also see the frequent intensification of operations on the build system. Then experience the first big promotion on duty, everyone that night excitement, finally experience a, the only ridicule is on duty night snack seems to have no outside blowing so good.

The one thing that bothered me the most at this stage was docking various third-party systems on Nodejs. This is the one I’m most joking about, because when I came in, the building system was the team’s first decent Nodejs system background, so the previous docking experience does not exist. So I really connected with other people’s systems one by one, read documents, answered questions in groups, and found people. Finally, I gradually mastered many basic abilities of building the system, and I was able to make fun of myself in the defense during the probation period.

After 618, it was soon time for my defense in the probation period. I carefully prepared the PPT for the defense and put some superficial knowledge into the PPT. In such three months, I had an overall understanding from the construction link to the C-end page rendering, and I was able to draw technical architecture diagrams like X. It’s all about learning and adapting. There is no other front-end input, there is not much time to follow the community’s front-end news, and there is not a technical article or two output.

2. Stage 2: In-depth understanding stage (July-November)

With the early learning and my own initiative to do some C-terminal modules and participate in the development of some business requirements projects, it is quite interesting to develop modules with Rax. Build system innovation in addition to can quickly build up a page with modules, more important is the module of data, this is really interesting to do. Before the traditional data may need to have a background of the page to configure the data, but build system doesn’t need such a background, it is directly according to the data configuration module you define generated form, and then combining with the scheduling, cast surely, horse racing, filter, such as concept, a module of the complete data to get it back from the background. Then the gateway and the C side closely cooperate, the page rendering and data acquisition integration, so that a complete page is so fast output, and the performance is good.

So I started to find it interesting to build systems, and you can do a lot of things on them. I also from the beginning of the shallow dabbling mentioned small requirements development, to the later slowly put forward a large feature development. I’m constantly thinking about what do we need to do to build a system? At this point, you might ask, why do we think for ourselves? No product?

Yes, no products, no tests, just us!

Think of your own requirements, design your own functions, develop your own codes, and test your own products. Well, to borrow a phrase from the current TL: “Can’t we make a good product without a product manager?” (Not to take issue with the product manager)

Therefore, we continue to explore what needs to be done in terms of operating experience, SOP, interaction, business requirements and stability of the system, and gradually improve the system. During this period, we designed no less than 10 product technical solutions, and the output code is no less than 30,000 lines.

3. Stage III: Proficient stage (November-March)

Well, the evolution of a background system is more and more complex, I did not expect to build the system faster than I expected. Oneself in peacetime development also slowly found this kind of sign, so as a serious front-end ER, is not able to watch their system become a “bloated” big fat. So I started moving knife on the build system, this time I did not say with community micro front of these concepts, my way is to use the plug-in model and the expansion of the component, the core of the scaffolding system survived, all build custom and other business related to precipitate into plug-ins and extensions component, combining serverless, thin body, also the code Nodejs The code and build speed of the whole system went up all at once.

In addition, a lot of redundant and repetitive front-end code will be optimized later. In short, there are thousands of ways to simplify a middle and background system, and I only chose the one that suits me.

Another thing that happened at this stage was that TL felt that we were too slow in developing the build system and did not bring more core capabilities to the build system, so they arranged a separate TL top man to act as the PM of the system. I have to say, the old Ali people really have a way of doing things. In addition to project management and some innovations in ideas, I finally saw what an expert is in doing things and cooperating. PM is good at communicating with the product and operation, and has active ideas, unlike us who always do things in silence. Under the leadership of PM, the strategy and future development direction of the whole product began to incorporate many of PM’s insightful ideas, and the building of the system became very meaningful. A good product also needs to be supported by a good architecture. Fortunately, the upgrade of the entire architecture mentioned above can perfectly support a future trend of the whole product.

Ok, the above three stages are my one year in Ali a little summary, thank you to see here. Let me move on from that work and tell you what I’m thinking about Ali now.

4. My thoughts on Ali

You know, recently a lot of people bad-mouthing ali, especially after the ant time on, I can’t come up from the direction of the big talk, after all, knowledge is not enough, can only say simply, 20 years of ups and downs, ali before actually experienced many hardships, but can be coming, so now the situation is not what. After a year, there are a few things I want to say about the team and about recruitment.

From the beginning to the end, the most appeared during the “Ali people” these three words, Ma teacher also said, did not stay for three years of children’s shoes can not be called Ali people, so I entered the office for a year, in fact, has been observing, what is ali people? What are the characteristics of the Ali people?

As for PM, she has been working in Ali for 8 years, so she is an old Ali employee. From her, I can clearly see the style of Ali employee: from the overall view of products and business, combined with the perspective of technology, we can take a thing from scratch and get the corresponding results.

That’s what I saw from this PM.

  • Must have the team organization ability, can clearly know the team each children’s shoes advantage where, can organize a group of advantages of children’s shoes together to complete one thing
  • The ability to collaborate and integrate resources to help product, operations, vision, and testing make things better, forming complementary closed loops
  • To have practical action and planning ability, be able to break down a complex thing into small achievable goals one by one, and find the corresponding people to complete them
  • Have the ability of comparison and overall situation, be able to define what you do according to Smart principles, and be able to compare things horizontally, compare other teams in the group, compare community solutions, not just because you have to do it, but to know why you do it? What problem did it solve? Is there a better solution?

At my age, I may need to develop more ability to do things besides code, so I benefited a lot from the cooperation in the last few months.

As a TL in Ali, the pressure is indeed great. In addition to managing the team, I also need to break down the work of the superior boss, and make vision, mission and OKR for the team. I also have to experience and focus on the team’s products all the time, and have strict control over the product and visual interaction. You have to have a deep understanding of your team and who needs to do it when it comes. These abilities are gradually cultivated. In Ali, it is not a little effort to cultivate a P7 into a P8 and lead the team.

Finally, I would like to talk about recruitment. In ali’s recruitment, each team has its own ideas. TL will clearly know the shortcomings of its team and what kind of people it needs. In the resume evaluation, we will pay attention to those who have their own ideas and innovations in work and can push things to reality. They can also clearly see the pain points of the business, change the status quo and be proactive. Therefore, in addition to solid technical ability, good performance in this area of children’s shoes, will be given priority into the scope of consideration. Induction, so, I have been in the job, the resume screening estimate is no less than a few hundred, are often those who were not simply list the candidate of project, through a better chance of the interview, that is to say, in your resume, choose one of two important projects, says said to represent the project of your own power, to describe your role in the project and are doing important things, In particular, things that show cooperation and initiative are better.

My future

To be honest, after a year, I seldom contact with or learn new knowledge, and pay much less attention to the community. There are few new trends and no articles on Github. After a year at Ali, the results were disappointing. So back to the beginning, why did I come to Ali? As a coder, the improvement of technology is definitely a direction that everyone will think of, but after coming here, my mind seems to have changed a little. At my age, maybe continuing to improve the technology is no longer about improving in one direction, but being able to have a higher perspective, open your mind and see the various solutions on the front-end and Nodejs side, and then understand, learn, understand, and at some point integrate all of these. And used to guide the design of products and the implementation of the scheme.

Another area to learn is how to look for scenarios and ideas in a team and stick to them. In this way, I need to improve my planning ability and collaboration ability, and have a deep understanding of the business and product direction.

Finally, I’d like to share some thoughts on front-end, recruiting, Nodejs, and career development, although I’m not very good at it myself