It was the first time FOR me to come to Ali. As I had been working in a small start-up company since graduation, I was a little confused when I first came to this large enterprise with tall buildings and full of high-tech.

As soon as I got off the bus, he called me and asked me where I was. Then he told me to wait for him.

When I first saw him, I felt that he was just like those foreign bigwigs I usually see on Github, typical Mediterranean hairstyle, a pair of thick black frame glasses, a thick black beard under the corner of the mouth, a checked shirt from Uniqlo, a quarter of big pants, a black belt borrowed like grandpa, and the standard flip-flops.

This is a very senior Ali architect, and he puts me in the car, which is a red ferrari with the top down.

I got in the car and didn’t know where to put my hands. With the sound of the engine, I got lost in the small castle.

In the car, he took the wheel with ease, and he was stoning me.

I can see that he is a very deep technical skills, I quickly looked at him with adoring eyes.

Suddenly he came to one: “How to appear so down and out, often work overtime?”

I temporarily dumb, think for a while embarrassed to say: “new company, the company uses too many new technologies, many do not understand, temporarily at a loss, very confused.”

He: “I forgot how many technical frameworks I’ve worked on and how many open source projects I’ve been involved in, like Dubbo, SpringCloud, SpringBoot, some of them personally.”

After hearing this, I admired him even more and said, “So now the number of stars of your project on Github should be soaring?”

He: “Yeah, but the open source projects that have skyrocketed in star numbers are basically stable now, and I don’t maintain them as much. I recently heard about ServiceComb, a new microservices framework, and I’m going to get involved.”

Me: “I really envy you. Now I have difficulty in using a new framework and learning a new technology. How can I participate in open source projects?

He patted me on the shoulder and said, “Brother, learning a new frame and even using it can make you so difficult. It seems that either your learning method is wrong or your technical foundation is too weak.”

I: “ah, also be, although study data on the net much, but too disorderly have no unified arrangement. It was so hard to improve my skills that I couldn’t stick to it. I wanted to give up for a while.”

He: If we always stay in the use of old technology, never accept the emergence of new technology, then we can not get the precipitation of technological soul.

He continued, “And studying can be lonely and boring, and many times you may think of giving up and going into something else, but I’m telling you, as long as you get through it each time, you will get something. You have to understand that there are still a lot of things to learn, do not adhere to, do not work hard, technology can not keep up with the society will be eliminated. For me, if there’s a trick to getting ahead at work, it’s probably staying on top of new projects and constantly learning new skills.”

I nodded and said: “Listen to your words, ten years.”

He: “Study this thing, not for the present, but for the future.”

Me: “Why are you able to become a senior architect at Alibaba and work on so many open source projects?”

He: “When I was your age, I also thought about giving up due to the constant impact of new technologies. Later I got to know a public account called Low. It is called: Eight quit program ape, it is said that a ali flower named eight quit will continue to sponsor video learning materials to this small program, know this small program, that there are a lot of learning materials, I began the crazy learning road.”

Me: “And then?”

He said, “After learning the video course provided by the mini program, I was not satisfied with the salary and treatment offered by the company, so I began to interview several large Internet companies including Ali, netease and Tencent, and finally received offers from them, but I chose Ali after taking all considerations into consideration.”

He pulled over to the side of the road and looked up at the sky with an adoring look, the same way I looked at him.

My eyes lit up and I exclaimed, “There’s such a thing!”

He: “of course, before I contact this small program, I also completely do not believe that the original access to learning materials is so convenient, which is like before the Internet search everywhere, accidentally will fall into the xx piece of the website, resulting in your machine downtime blue screen.”

Me: “That’s awesome! What is the name card of small program, share to me!”

He: “At the bottom of the article.”

Me: “Ok.”

He: “that I take you stroll ali stroll to this, I still have to learn the evening just learned half of the micro service framework ServiceComb.”

I immediately felt reluctant and hurriedly said, “Can we meet Ali in the future?”

He: “brother, have the opportunity, follow the WX public number” eight quit program ape “to provide the video tutorial to learn well, stick to it. Remember: in the ox X dream, also can not resist what X like persistence. Ali will wave to you. Here is my card. We can have dinner together sometime.”

I took the card, this time he has started the Ferrari engine, with the sound of refueling, off ~ ~

I turned over the name card, carefully observed, printed on the big four words “flower eight quit”.

At this time suddenly heard a lifetime bang, the ground followed shaking, I was the sudden wind blow to shake, still feel from time to time someone shaking my head.

Frightened extremely I opened my eyes, the original is my side of the big breast sister a hand in shaking my chair, a hand in shaking my head. She also said: death eight quit! Smelly pig! Even after 2:00 PM, you still go to bed and stay awake for half a day. The simple framework for dealing with distributed transactions that you wrote before appeared serious bugs on the line and numerous data inconsistencies resulted in serious economic losses of the company. The leaders are ready to talk to you.

I patted my face with my hand. Is this reality or a dream? I can’t tell the difference anymore.

How about you?