I am Xuan Zhao from Ali Cloud – Cloud communication technology team. I joined Ali at the end of 2015. I have just spent three years and am on my way to five years. I have a wide range of hobbies, including quiet and dynamic music, games, movies and sports.
Xuan Zhao, Ali Cloud senior technical expert
Program career set sail
First contact programming is “very important” in high school period of Basic computer courses, in retrospect, still clearly remember the first day of computer classes run when writing good code of the mysterious, curious, excited mood, I think it should be started with the time determined to today’s career as a programmer. Due to serious partial subjects, I failed to enter the major related to computer as I wished. However, because I was still interested in it, I paid special attention to the software programming courses in college, and sometimes I would audit and study some courses by myself in the school of Computer.
May be because the heart there is always a “obsession”, so good luck, the graduate to find a software company in the web design related work, began a transformation, from web design, to the test, to cut over the script, to the front-end development, to the backend development, because the heart’s desire, so no matter where there is a vacancy I would fill up, In three years, I have moved from the periphery of the team to the core development.
At that stage, personal growth and progress were still very rapid, which I think was mainly due to three aspects: At that time, I was very clear about my shortcomings, so I made full use of my spare time to read a series of books related to JavaScript, Struts, Hibernate, SQL, programming ideas, JVM virtual machine, programming ideas, design patterns and other technical foundations to make up for my shortcomings. Let their own technical system gradually become comprehensive; Secondly, I read codes and practices. I can take the initiative to find opportunities to undertake requirements and apply for the corresponding code permissions. I can read colleagues’ codes to know exactly what they are and learn from them, and I can reasonably introduce some technical points learned from books to implement requirements in the process of changing codes. Finally, I have an open mind to ask for advice. Whenever THERE is an opportunity, I will ask for advice and discuss with others. Engineers are warm-hearted and patient, and they can get answers to tangled problems quickly, thus improving my efficiency.
Step out of your comfort zone by entering Aliyun
So far, I have experienced three companies. There are two main reasons for me to come to Ali. One is from my sense of crisis. I was in a comfortable zone of my career at that time, and it was difficult to break through the challenges of work and personal growth in the current technological environment. I hoped to make a breakthrough in personal technology on a larger platform and in an environment with more excellent technicians. Followed by curiosity and yearning for ali, before all of the project technology selection, regardless of the service framework, service management, message middleware, database, reading and writing separation, cache, transaction and release process involves the technical points and the process will be different dimensions of comparing with internal or open-source middleware ali, always feel yourself standing outside, understanding is “points”, Can not have a systematic, in-depth understanding, really into the internal understanding of ali’s entire technology ecology and system.
Actually had a tangle, after receiving offers from the comfort zone to a company so challenging to still need some courage, before so I decided to give himself and his family did a lot of psychological construction, back then, psychological preparation and I can pass probation and quickly adapt to ali atmosphere and rhythm of one of the key factors.
In my first year at Alibaba, I have many feelings, but the most impressive words are: embrace change and performance. Ali culture more mentioned in one of the word is to embrace change, is also attending the training must be o, the meaning of this culture, I think only after experiences can also the meaning behind the real experience, including the change of rhythm, the change of personnel, the change of work content, the change of the team, and so on May occur at any moment, so it is very important to embrace, Embracing not only represents acceptance of change, but also requires quick adjustment and learning to adapt to it.
It was my first time to learn about cloud communication business in Ali, and I gradually learned Freeswitch open source tool, soft switch, carrier networking and other knowledge. Subsequent is a series of change, the probation period of core members transfers, then head also changed, alone to undertake the whole platform, platform also at the incubation stage, many problems, from the demand for design and development, customer support, resource access, billing, and so on all need human intervention, pressure particularly big, process is very painful. But very glad when his own insist, that year and carried all the things down, and think very satisfied, gave himself a 3.75 self-evaluation of performance, but in the end head of evaluation is 3.5, the first special think impassability, also began to review, reflection and summary, later want to see, 3.75 focuses on results, not how hard you, Whether you can support the business depends on whether you can make the platform better and the business better, and whether you can exert the strength of the surrounding students to fight with you. In fact, I did not do very well in these points this year.
Grow with cloud communications
In the second year, I experienced one of the most important projects in Ali. As the project PM, I completed the transformation of the platform I was in charge of from the incubation stage to the transition to product, and laid a solid foundation for cloud commercialization in cloud communication business. The project has set clear business goals and technical goals. After last year’s precipitation and problem sorting, the platform has been comprehensively improved from multiple dimensions. Firstly, product transformation and standardization are promoted to solve the problems of diversified customer access channels and protocols. Establish the standard process of resource introduction, testing, online and offline; Solve the efficiency problem of manual billing, settlement and reconciliation.
Secondly, a unified intelligent decision-making platform and a secondary routing scheduling platform based on static and dynamic rules are constructed to realize the convergence of scheduling rules and multi-dimensional resource scheduling automation based on cost and quality.
Third, the platform architecture and stability are improved, and the single point problems of core links are comprehensively sorted out. Application and machine room disaster recovery capacity construction, heartbeat detection mechanism of gateway link, realizing minute-level automatic isolation and recovery; The construction of multi-dedicated lines and disaster recovery systems on supplier links removes dependencies, simplifies links and reduces system complexity. Fourthly, the construction of operation and maintenance guarantee system, removing overly technical expression configuration, structuring and online configuration; Online problem locating and troubleshooting tools; And the construction of monitoring and alarm system.
After the completion of the project, the product capability and stability of the entire platform have been greatly improved. Meanwhile, students from other teams can also get involved in the capacity construction, operation and maintenance of the entire platform. On this basis, the product quickly realized commercialization and became an important part of Ali Cloud communication business.
Based on this, I also got the opportunity to be nominated for supervisor promotion this year and successfully passed it. As for promotion, I didn’t have any psychological preparation before, and what I said was based on my usual thinking and summary in the past two years. Therefore, I strongly agree that promotion is a natural thing in the workplace. The most important thing is whether your work can make the business or platform change for the better and create greater value for the business.
Technology companies need you
Based on my own experience, I believe that learning ability is the most important culture in the team of technology-based companies. Only through continuous learning can the competitiveness and innovation ability of the whole team be improved and the combat effectiveness become stronger and stronger. As for learning, MY method is to read classic books first, so that I can obtain the knowledge points needed for the problems to be solved and new technologies in a comprehensive and systematic way through reading. Secondly, I will learn from excellent people. I will deliberately observe the methods and ideas of high-level excellent students to solve problems and think about problems. At the same time, I will consult them and communicate with them to get answers when ENCOUNTERING problems.
The above are my views based on my own experience, hoping to give some help to students who are coming or want to come to Ali.
Finally, as the basic technical team of cloud communication business, technical students are mainly responsible for the construction of technology platform, capability optimization and technological innovation of each product line. With the development of business, the overall technology challenges are still relatively large, but also very hope in the distributed environment of system architecture optimization, stability, high concurrency, performance optimization experience and ideas of Java technology ox people to join us, together to do the world’s best cloud communication technology platform!
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