CTO Training Camp: A practical open class that won’t say goodbye

[51CTO.com original article] On December 3, 2016, the last open class of the CTO training camp this year was held at Hongtai Space. Before the event started, the participants entered the exclusive WeChat group, creating a hot atmosphere for the event. The random grouping mode on site broke the unfamiliarity between the participants. In addition, this event abandoned the single salon sharing mode, and the academic atmosphere on site was warm and indescribable. Two practical instructors were invited to this event, namely Mr. Zuo Wenjian, the former CTO of Auntie Gang, and Mr. Huang Quanneng, the CTO of Leapp Education Technology Co., Ltd.

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Students exchange before class

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Students invite each other to join the exchange group

In the first half, Mr. Zuo Wenjian gave a practical sharing on the theme of "IT Engineering Capability Practice".

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Teacher Zuo Wenjian

Zuo Wenjian has worked in Ayibang, 360, and Yahoo China, serving as CTO, technical director, and technical manager. During his time at Ayibang, he helped the product surpass other competing products within a year and became the industry's leading family service platform; during his time at 360, he built an 80-person game platform technical team from scratch, supporting a 30-fold increase in game revenue in four years. As a member of 360TC, he led the formulation of WEB server capability standards; he has profound insights into team management and engineering capabilities, and advocates the establishment of technical values ​​and technical culture that are in line with the development of the times.

In a relaxed and humorous way, Mr. Zuo Wenjian shared the practical experience of individuals and teams in practice, and shared that scientific and effective methods, mechanisms, and systems should be found to ensure the production of high-quality products, thereby improving the engineering capabilities of the technical team. Proper use of tools can solve the problems of low team efficiency and repeated mistakes. Through the topic that methods require tools, he shared a multi-environment resource management tool rigger-ng and a one-click publishing tool ansible with the students present, and also demonstrated how to efficiently use these two tools on site.

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Teacher Zuo Wenjian demonstrated on site

In terms of collaboration, Zuo Wenjian shared a set of guidelines: Documents should be written for readers, not for producers; a unified and standard environment should be established; discipline should be observed; and collaboration should be accomplished with tools.

Collaboration Tools

Teacher Zuo Wenjian believes that the technical capability model has three steps: learning from the advanced, taking the right path, and hanging out with the rich. Learning from the advanced means learning the best practices in the industry and making continuous progress; taking the right path means that both individuals and teams should take the path of sustainable development, rather than working for the sake of work. The higher the quality of the work, the lower the maintenance cost. The lower the quality, the more indebted, and the maintenance cost will be very high. Hanging out with the rich is by no means a derogatory term, but when choosing a partner, you should choose the most capable one and not settle for anything less.

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Students communicate with teachers

After the first half of the sharing session, the students were reluctant to leave Teacher Zuo and asked him to answer their confusions and problems.

In the second half, Mr. Huang Quanneng gave a presentation on the topic of "Model selection and pitfalls experienced in the early stages of entrepreneurship".

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Mr. Huang Quanneng

Huang Quanneng , CTO of Leapp Education Technology Co., Ltd., joined Ericsson after graduating from Tsinghua University in 2005. Five years later, he joined a Silicon Valley cloud computing company in the United States as the head of the business intelligence group. In 2012, he joined Changba and was responsible for the online R&D department. In the process of Changba's technical team from 0 to 1, he used the small but fine team management concept and the management method of elite and unexpected bonuses to make the technical team famous for its strong cohesion. In 2016, he joined Leapp Education Technology as CTO and currently leads the technical team to help the business grow rapidly.

"Starting a business requires caution" is a sentence that Mr. Huang has been emphasizing at the beginning. Starting a business requires going from zero to one, but when you are at "zero", you will often be suspected. What to do, how to do it, what the result will be, what if the expected result is not achieved, will you go bankrupt, etc. are all problems that entrepreneurs need to go through. However, once the direction is decided, how should the company choose the architecture? Mr. Huang has his own four principles. The principle of following the crowd means choosing a popular architecture. There must be a reason for choosing it by many people; the principle of familiarity means that start-ups should not spend too much time learning the architecture. A familiar architecture method is much cheaper than an unfamiliar one; the principle of simplicity means that there are fewer people at the beginning of the business, so try to choose a good maintenance method; the principle of casualness means that you should not spend too much time arguing about the architecture. When choosing third-party resources, you should consider three aspects: stability, service and price. Cloud platform/IDC, CDN, SDK, and SMS have their own advantages in these three aspects, and the entrepreneurial team needs to carefully choose according to their needs.

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Teacher Huang explains

In the early stage, a company may not be able to recruit suitable employees due to various problems such as no products, no high salaries, long working hours, poor environment, no budget, etc. At this time, it is necessary to identify the selling points of the company, such as the number of users, brand effect, well-known investment, ideas, products, members and feelings. The company must draw a clear route for talents, and it is sometimes necessary to set up positions according to people. When you can't recruit talents, don't give up your principles, and you must also have a positioning for recruiting people. Don't force the other party or yourself to make do with it. For the selection of teams, you can use gradient teams and elite teams. The gradient team focuses on core talents, and the elite team focuses on the handling of team members. Of course, you must first recruit elite team members.

Regarding the technical management of the early team, Mr. Huang approached it from two dimensions: time allocation and data analysis. Regarding time allocation, we need to consider how to hold regular meetings, employee attendance, how to pay or not pay for the 996 model during special periods, and even think about "Is the launch date unshakable?" Mr. Huang analyzed his own time distribution on the spot, 50% market research and product planning, 15% recruitment, 10% technical planning and technical discussion, and 25% other.

Finally, after the students had a free exchange with Mr. Huang, the CTO training camp open class came to an end. Although this was the last open class of the year, the venue was still full until the end of the event, which showed the enthusiasm of the students.

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We look forward to seeing you in the third season of the CTO Training Camp.

Hosted by 51CTO, it is a learning sharing and social platform for mid- to high-end technical managers. It brings together senior technical executives and investors in the industry. With the core of "building an MBA for technical managers", it wholeheartedly helps China's most promising technical managers grow into leaders and role models in the future technology field. The third season of the CTO training camp extends the four major elective activities based on the original high-quality content system to meet the personalized needs of different technical managers.

[51CTO original article, please indicate the original author and source as 51CTO.com when reprinting on partner sites]