Write it at the very beginning

Writing it out doesn’t mean I’m doing a good job, telling you how to do it. Mainly for the record. On the other hand, this year is really playing strange upgrade, a little feeling, laugh. This article draws on the series of articles “Technological Life” from Alibaba middleware, which is also the main inspiration that arouses my record.

“Technology life” topic 1: What is Technology Number one?

“Techlife” project 2: Learn to analyze the nature of things?

Part 3 of the “Techno Life” project: Summary of the rules of problem solving

Part 4: General rules and strategies for technical organization business

preface

We often hear a complaint: we are doing business every day, how can we have time for technology?

When doing business, most of us are constantly dealing with business needs, and product managers and operators will not specially set aside time for research and development to think about technology. It is normal for us to launch products immediately when we need something urgently. However, the launch of the business without technical consideration often brings additional burden, falling into a vicious circle, where the demand is more and more, the more urgent, and the effect is getting worse and worse.

When we have time to do technology, we tend to have a full ideal and a skinny reality. I want to use all kinds of lofty things to satisfy my desire for technological growth and eliminate my anxiety of slow accumulation in technology. The self-soothing effect is achieved, but the business value is unclear and unexplained.

Are business development and technology development opposites? Are we going to be able to make technological advances as we land the business? I would like to talk about the practical experience in products this year.

Maintain a technical number one mentality

The answer is to have a mindset. Let’s call him Tech One. It means we can’t think of ourselves as just a code guy, a technology guy. This business is arranged for me to do, so I am the technical person in charge, and it is my responsibility to think from the whole perspective of the business. I wrote this line of code, the future business development is possible to change; What business value is being generated by the requirement I’m implementing, and which solution is more appropriate. Defining your role and positioning is the ultimate responsibility of the technical sequence.

When I was a soldier writing code, I didn’t think these things had anything to do with me. I took it for granted that it was the job of the leader to arrange things and think about the business. I just did what I was told. However, I later found that, contrary to expectations, the leader just thinks that since I have arranged you to do business, it is your responsibility to think well and do business well. So don’t think that the senior or the leading person is the technical number one. Technical students doing business development, no matter what level, with or without people, as long as you are the direct participants of this business, do not have too much entanglements, you can in line with the mentality of “as they are” to put themselves in the no.1 position of the mentality of work practice and thinking.

Try to develop your own methodology at work

After confirming our role, we will start the specific work of technical position one. Instead of writing code, how do we actually implement this extra responsibility? Began to search for or summarize some methodology, from the top down to the business have a clear cognition, know oneself more than in the past which dimensions should be concerned about, I know what will face next challenge, to know what role they should be in the challenge, use what means to solve business at different stages will appear all sorts of problems.

Know the business

  • Know the process. To draw a picture, figure out the specific processes responsible for the business, the upstream and downstream of the business. Without this global awareness. If you do business in this way, you will find that there will be various things that are not properly done in the business process, and you will “pay a lot of tuition” in the process of doing business, and even slow down the business development because of your lack of ability.

  • Understand business value. Once you understand the value of the business, the code you write makes sense. It will bring a clear sense of achievement and the ability to resist setbacks. Especially leading a technical team, the leader’s understanding of business value can greatly enhance the team’s ability to cooperate.

  • Current phase of the business. There are two advantages: 1. The overall technical requirements of each business stage can be known in advance, and the layout can be completed in advance. Strong initiative in technical architecture. In the start-up stage, when meeting the requirement of “whether or not”, the code is no longer piled mindlessly in the past, but based on the requirements of the architecture in the next stage of business development cycle, the long-term architecture design is implemented in the shortest path: That is, after I have designed the complete architecture, I will only implement the functions needed in the start-up stage according to the architecture design. For other parts that are not used by business requirements, I will only retain the code framework without specific logical implementation. 2: Can balance business and technology. Businesses usually evolve along the lines of usability, productization, commercialization, and commercialization. If it’s the beginning stage of a business, it’s more important to have and use these. The technology can be compromised. If the business already has many users, then the business scenario must be considered, and there is no escape from the technical cost.

Technology consciousness

  • Design consciously. Business composition is not finished with code, can pass the test case for the end. Do systematic thinking consciously. Back-end examples, starting from database design, ER diagram, data flow. To the interface document definition. To log location, monitoring and tracking. Once out of the bug how to quickly locate and solve. Technical selection, difficulties and risks need to be considered. The technology involved in business r&d process evolves from single dimension to multi-dimension; From a simple “run the business”, gradually form a full range of technical solutions to support business development. Technology itself has evolved from a crude model of “whether there is a problem” to a refined model of “reducing cost and improving efficiency”. This is a process from primary to secondary, and also a process of productivity improvement. This is the general rule of business development.

  • Consciously think about stability and risk. Don’t show remorse, determination, stability thinking and execution at the accident review meeting. You need to be aware of the risks before you go online, and you need to train yourself consciously to think about the risks, such as whether you need caching or whether you need heterogeneous data read and write characteristics. Such as high concurrency environment performance. Whether useless objects are created. For example, some middleware use, message queue will not lose messages or repeated consumption. Also think about rollback scenarios, whether there are risk points and hedge scenarios. Subject to experience, I don’t think anyone can do well at first. But this is a good opportunity to build and refine your mental model of technology.

Teams are required, not optional

When I started to fight monsters from a soldier writing code to lead a few classmates, I gradually came into contact with the concept of team. When I just began to adapt to this role, I once struggled, because I had to deal with many things every day, and I didn’t have a clear understanding of my role. I didn’t do what I should do. Too much work on things you shouldn’t do, getting bogged down in code. Especially in the cooperation with team members showed a relatively large shortcomings, indirectly led to the resignation of a partner. One of the subjects of intense debate at the time was how downtime worked with online bugs, especially in the wee hours and on weekends. If I did not develop the bug do I need to deal with. It seems like a very small thing, but after personal experience, I gradually realized that team building is stacked from small things.

Mature research and development team can complete the development process of management, to avoid personal ability is not enough and too much negative impact on the business, but essentially the compulsory provisions and requirements of “superior” just rely on administrative means in forcing a person to do these things, and no wake up his creativity and sense of responsibility, is considered “trivial” instead. Doing this “chore” for a long time can make partners very resistant to doing things that seem “unrelated to writing code but necessary.” When such resistance occurs, no matter how much the leader emphasizes Ownership, it does not have much effect, because he is not irresponsible, but he does not realize that it is something he should be responsible for. So explain the value of trivia to your partner, pass on as much context as possible, and give everyone plenty of options. Became my main line of inquiry.

The infinite progress

To sum up, I want to have a breakthrough in the process of doing business. The first thing to do is to establish a perception that technology can be improved in doing business, and to refine your methodology in practice. The second thing is to focus on cognitive escalation. One thing we can do consistently in our life, no matter what industry we are in, is to constantly improve ourselves.

There are great books on the relationship between practice and cognition, and I’m a devout apprentice. A passage from MAO’s chosen theory of practice.

Any knowledge comes from practice, in the process of practice, people only see the phenomenon of each thing in the process, see each thing one-sided and external relations between things. These things arouse our feelings and create some impression in our mind. But what he feels, we don’t immediately understand him. The perceptual stage of knowledge is the stage of feeling and impression. In the process of practice, the things that make people feel and impression in practice are repeated many times, and there will be a sudden change of knowledge in the brain, a leap, and then the feeling becomes the concept. At this point, cognition senses the level of thinking and focuses on the internal regularity and essence of things. The deepening of knowledge enables us to understand the laws of the objective world and therefore to explain the world.

Finally, I want to end with my favorite four words. Unlimited progress.