What kind of experience is it after participating in the 4th TiDB Hackathon? | Interview with TiDB Hackathon contestants

TiDB Hackathon 2021 has received registrations from 259 contestants and 64 teams since the start of registration on December 9th. The name of the team alone is a big idea, such as: Dodo Revival Club, LET ETL ROCK, and the captain in charge Bringing meals, Heifer flying by plane, Double Stay, OneLastCode, TiDB ten-year-old fan, etc., the project idea is also full of all kinds of fantastic ideas.

At present, it has been less than two weeks before the 2022.1.8-9 competition day. I think all the contestants have already geared up to prepare for their own projects. While waiting for the final match day, the TiDB community interviewed three Hackathon contestants. Some of them have participated 4 times and are veritable old contestants. Some have changed from judges to contestants, and will compete for the first time. Through interviews, we recorded their understanding and perception of Hackathon, and at the same time discussed the changes that open source has brought to them personally and work, as well as extremely important experience sharing in the competition. Players participating in this year's Hackathon or friends who are interested in Hackathon, it is worth seeing.

The first player you would never think of, he is Huang Dongxu, the co-founder and CTO of PingCAP. As a judge from multiple circles, he finally couldn't help itching his hands and wanted to take part in the competition in person. The friends who participated in this year's TiDB Hackathon can compete with Dongxu on the same arena and have a showdown!

Then why is he quite a player? What idea will it bring? Let us listen to what he said.

The following is the interview record:
Q1

Hackathon you have been a judge in previous years. Why do you want to be a contestant this time? Which direction is the project you brought?

Huang Dongxu: For me, being a judge has a particularly bad experience, that is, you obviously see this idea very well, but you have no way to realize it. And because we have so many projects, the amount of information on the day as a judge is too tiring, I think it's easier to write code.

Regarding the project, this year I want to write something that I have always wanted to do. It is not a project that looks very hardcore, but it can improve the user experience of the entire user. At the same time, it is very grounded. Explain more and you will know what it is, just look forward to it.

Q2

So writing code is your biggest motivation for being a Hackathon player this time?

Huang Dongxu: Yes, writing code to keep fit is a very good entertainment. I think Hackathon is just a big party. This time I won’t be watching it by the side, and I will go off the stage to cheer up with everyone. Everyone regards me as an ordinary TiDB community contributor. Now when I introduce my title, I always put Engineer before PingCAP CTO. In the competition, I am an amateur player. I believe the judges can be very objective and fair. vote.

Q3

It is often said that PingCAP is a Hackathon-driven company. What is the biggest feature of this form of Hackathon?

Huang Dongxu: I think Hackathon may give us a chance because I work in PingCAP every day. The perspective may be an internal perspective. Our own perceptions are all looking at the three-square acre of land on hand, so Hackathon is a very Good opportunity.

First, let you get a lot of ideas, you can feel a lot of whimsical ideas in just a few days; second, these whimsical ideas do not need to write unit tests, do not need code review, can quickly It is realized.

For me, Hackathon allows me to see more possibilities and at the same time take the first step in exploring these possibilities. In the past, we did have many ideas that took root in Hackathon, and finally landed in products. For example, like the first prize two years ago, I made a thread pool and an asynchronous framework, and finally it was integrated into the main line of TiDB. However, it is not accurate to call PingCAP a Hackathon-driven company, nor does it mean that this company must be driven by Hackathon. The main purpose of Hackathon is to provide everyone with a big party. Having fun is the first priority.

Whether it's me, our team, or the developers in the community. I hope that through this activity, first, let us see more possibilities and expand our horizons. Second, it can make us more confident in this community.

Q4

This year Hackathon has set up four major tracks. In addition to the kernel, there are tools, ecology, and unlimited. What is the guide for such a setting?

Huang Dongxu: Every year when Hackathon’s kickoff invites me, they will ask me what my requirements or needs are. In fact, my annual needs are not to set limits, and don’t let everyone be limited to anything. This year is also the same. I will make this request every year to let everyone let go.

At the same time, I think TiDB has reached a point in time. It has gone beyond the technology itself, and countless people are using it, and it has begun to have its own tool ecology. We have observed that many different users and companies have invented many interesting peripheral tools in order to make them use TiDB better, and even some things that seem very grounded and very practical.

Therefore, we hope that everyone can think about projects that can be more grounded and help you use TiDB to experience better projects, instead of confining everyone's eyes to the kernel itself. This also shows that TiDB has reached a new stage, beginning to emphasize productization, applicability, and the entire user experience. I also want to convey such a signal to the community through this Hackathon.

In addition to Dongxu, this year there is also a three-time veteran player-Sun Xiaoguang, the leader of the PingCAP Community Development team, who is hesitant to participate.

The following is the interview record:
Q1

What is the biggest change in the overall experience of open source this year?

Sun Xiaoguang: Many people may only regard themselves as open source users in the past, and did not take the initiative to consider what they have to do with open source besides being a user. But in the past year, it has been clearly felt that this has changed, and more and more people have begun to think: Why is open source and commercialization not in conflict? Why is open source so valuable to users and the commercial companies behind it? Maybe everyone hasn't found the answer yet, but everyone is willing to try and believe in open source. There are also many new faces in the open source field, and they are willing to make some attempts in the direction of open source.

Q2

What are the benefits of open source for enterprise users? What pits will enterprise users step on when using open source?

Sun Xiaoguang: In fact, for Internet companies, it can be said that they have grown up on the basis of open source. Without these very mature open source basic software, there may not be the birth of many Internet companies that you see today. The Internet is actually a particularly inclusive business model. It has greatly reduced many things that were very costly in the past in new ways, and has brought high-quality services to users. In fact, this requires that all aspects of the underlying efficiency must be particularly high. The basic software is naturally part of it. Only when it is mature enough, effective enough, and scalable enough can it quickly support the development of the entire business at a reasonable cost. Will become a roadblock in business development. No matter if your company is in 100,000 DAU, one million DAU, or ten million DAU, the underlying technology can grow with you all the way.

Q3

You were involved in the operation of the TiDB community when you knew it. Now you come to PingCAP to continue to do this. What do you think are the advantages of the TiDB community?

Sun Xiaoguang: In the open source community, people are particularly important. People promote the development of the community. The connection between people expands the scope of the community. Everyone can introduce new forces to the community. The TiDB community is already a large-scale community. After years of continuous hard work, the people who already exist here will bring new strength and new blood. This state can also be represented by the term ecology. Building an ecosystem of production, research and community based on the open source community is our goal in the future.

Q4

TiDB Hackathon 2021 is about to start. How did you feel about participating in Hackathon in the past few years?

Sun Xiaoguang: I have participated in three sessions, and I actually paid special attention to the core at the beginning. In fact, it is very easy for technicians to pay attention to the most core part, the more core, the more able to reflect their technical level. Later, I began to gradually consider the direction of user value. The last time I participated, I actually knew some internal demands. After I joined PingCAP, I also paid more attention to the ecological field. In fact, TiDB has long been able to reach not only kernel developers, not only tool developers, nor only DBAs. It will continue to expand to people who use databases more widely. These people may initially be application architects for Internet companies or professional software development companies. For example, products like Power BI may really be used by data analysts to gain insights into their own data. Therefore, as such a low-level product, the number of people we can continue to spread and reach is very large. How can we better reach them and bridge the gap between them and us is a very worthwhile thing to do.

Q5

Will you be a contestant or a judge this year?

Sun Xiaoguang: I shouldn't be a judge. I haven't thought about the player. To be honest, every year Hackathon actually has a lot of challenges, and in Hackathon, idea is very important. I have participated in three sessions, and I feel a bit bottlenecked in my creativity.

Q6

What are your expectations for Hackathon this year?

Sun Xiaoguang: When we reviewed the 2019 Hackathon some time ago, we discovered that today we have finally developed something of great value by our products. In fact, someone proposed it in Hackathon a few years ago, and even realized it. So I hope that on the one hand, more new people with very ideas will join us, bringing us different perspectives and perspectives. On the other hand, I especially hope that this year's Hackathon, we can better understand the ideas that contestants bring to TiDB, and dig out its value earlier.

Q7

As you have participated in the past three Hackathon veteran players, some suggestions for new players?

Sun Xiaoguang: First of all, you must have a more peaceful mind. Hackathon is a very good stage to satisfy your creativity. Just have fun. This matter is more important than running to win prizes. Only when you are in such a state of mind can you better open up the boundaries of your imagination, otherwise it is easy to get stuck in things that are of interest to the judges or the audience. Those will confine your vision. In fact, there are many very creative ideas. It just appears in the minds of a few people.

The finale was Wang Penghan, a four-dynasty veteran player. He was a geek who had participated in informatics competitions since high school and was exposed to open source during his freshman year. He has a lot of his own understanding of open source and Hackathon.

Personal profile: Wang Penghan, GitHub's commonly used ID is WPH95. He currently works for AppDynamics, a company that manages application performance under Cisco. He is mainly engaged in the research and development of log search engines and some work related to observability.

The following is the interview record:
Q1

When did you first come into contact with open source? What do you think is the core spirit of open source?

Wang Penghan: When I was in high school, I participated in an informatics competition and started a more systematic training and study of computer programming. When I was a freshman, I wanted a code evaluation platform. The evaluation module used Docker technology. Through Docker, I got in touch with the open source community. I think the core spirit of open source is share, everything will be shared on the open platform, and the design, implementation and even thinking process of the project can be seen.

Q2

What open source projects have you participated in?

Wang Penghan: When I was studying, I maintained a well-known domestic project CodeVS, because the development of this project participated in the open source project of the container ecology. The open source project I am currently involved in is a project closely related to my work, called OpenTelemetry, which can now be said to be the most popular "fried chicken" of CNCF.

The TiDB project has also participated in some Easy Issues. On the one hand, the main open source projects involved are Docker-related open source projects. For example, bugs have been fixed for Docker installation scripts, and relatively low-level, storage-related bugs have been fixed for Kubernetes. On the one hand, it is related to observability. For example, it helped Grafana realize the functional support of Elastic Search Alerting, and it also contributed a lot of code to the log collector FileBeat project.

Q3

How did you first contact and participate in TiDB Hackathon?

Wang Penghan: I first became acquainted with TiDB Hackathon through the 0th Hackathon, which is called Go Hackathon in your company, because I used to be in the Docker circle, and I also like to participate in such competitions. I saw Go language related events. Hackathon, signed up decisively.

Q4

How do you feel about participating in TiDB Hackthon? How is it different from other similar activities?

Wang Penghan: TiDB Hackathon is very much in line with my imagination of Hackathon. First of all, Hackathon must be hack to be cool, and secondly, it is to give participants a sufficient environment. As the organizer, PingCAP provides a very comfortable environment, allowing us to release ourselves in a weekend and complete the ideas that we feel are very cool.

In 2016-2018, when I was still in college, Hackathon was still a hot thing. Everyone organized and participated in Hackathon. However, in recent years, the only company that can insist on running Hackathon is PingCAP in my cognition. Now TiDB Hackathon is already the technology Spring Festival Gala in my heart, and I will definitely take part in it every year.

Q5

As a participant in all TiDB Hackathon sessions, how do you feel about the changes in TiDB Hackathon over the years?

Wang Penghan: It is getting more and more rolling, and the waves behind the Yangtze River push the waves forward, and it is almost impossible to roll. When I participated in the first session, I could still fish and go back to sleep. The second and third sessions were basically all night. The level of the participants and the level of the project are gradually improving. With the growing reputation, the database field is more and more subdivided, and the project is becoming more and more exciting. It takes more efforts to have a chance to win the prize. Later, as you get older, you may go to lie flat and focus on how to participate in Hackathon happily. Let young people compete for awards.

Q6

Can you tell us about your project?

Wang Penghan: During the 0th Go Hackathon, I made something called GOsUgar. I added some syntactic sugar to Go. I added the concept of commonly used fixtures or templates to the Go language. I thought it was fun, but at the time The ability is limited, just a very simple replacement. If you do it from the perspective of the language AST, the results should be better and the effect is better.

The first session was done with Du Chuan, Cui Qiu, and a small partner studying in South Korea, which is equivalent to adding some streaming database-related support to TiDB. This was a very new idea three years ago, and it’s now. It is also very valuable. This project can be regarded as a very early feasibility verification for TiDB, including how to integrate TiDB with stream storage and stream computing. Later, he deserved it and won the first prize.

The idea of the second session is to add Remote Engine to TiDB, so that TiDB as a Query Layer can tune third-party libraries, which greatly enhances TiDB's analytical capabilities. But I didn't think enough at the time, and in the third session, I gave this idea to my girlfriend for an enhancement.

In the third and last year, I was participating in the contribution of OpenTelemetry and found that writing documentation was a painful thing. At that time, my first reaction was to look at other good projects, such as how Kubernetes did it, and found that they were also doing very averagely. I almost doubted my life. Are the open source community documents so irregular? Later, I found that PingCAP was the best, because there are enough tech writers to do this, and there are many forward-looking things to do. So at that time, I cooperated with your company’s tech writer Coco on a project to process the ideas in the tech writer’s mind in the form of tools, which not only reduced the workload of the tech writer, but also quickly copied it to others. Project, to ensure that everyone can write a qualified, high-quality document.

Q7

As an experienced TiDB Hackathon player, what advice do you have for this year's contestants? What are your expectations for this year's Hackathon?

Wang Penghan: I have always had a formula to measure whether the Hackathon project is excellent. On the one hand, it comes from a real demand, a real problem in reality, and on the other hand, it needs to pass a very cool, very engineered, and very grounded formula. Method to solve it, the two together, is a good project. I suggest to participate in Hackathon's Mengxin, you can evaluate and design your own projects from these two directions.

It is said that the scale of this session of Hackathon exceeds that of previous years, and the preparation time is more abundant this time. I hope to see more and better ideas appear in Hackathon. For myself, every time I participate in TiDB Hackathon, I will choose a new field and force myself to learn, implement and master a skill quickly in a short period of time. I hope this Hackathon can also learn some new technologies, Skills can bring some value to TiDB at the same time.

Q8

Please tell me your message to this Hackathon in one sentence

Wang Penghan: I hope TiDB Hackathon for the 2021 Technical Spring Festival Gala will be a complete success, and it will be an unforgettable night.

TiDB Hackathon 2021

The theme of this year's Hackathon is "Explore the Sky", which will be developed during the 2022.1.8-9 two competition days, with online and offline linkage. From the Ti planet to the firmament of the universe, we use Hacking to connect to a wider range of ecology, giving the contestants imagination space to fully develop. In this edition of Hackathon, we have fully upgraded the track and opened up four major tracks: kernel, tools, ecology, and "∞". Participants, whether they are database developers, database upstream and downstream ecology, or database users, can find suitable ones. In the field, explore unlimited possibilities around TiDB.

TiDB Hackathon 2021 will officially start registration on December 9. Contestants can form a team of 1-4 participants and complete their work within the competition period. The winning team will receive bonuses, technical and resource support. The competition invited well-known experts in the database field, community technology experts, and top investor representatives to serve as judges to provide comprehensive comments and guidance on the project, eliminate knowledge blind spots, and escort the experience of the event. In addition, there are top investors who sit here all the way, so that your strength can be seen by more people.

For more details: Explore the Sky丨Come to TiDB Hackathon 2021 to explore infinite possibilities