Rock Open Source CC: Love football music and be an ecological builder of the Industrial Internet!

Guest profile

Fan Weixiao, whose screen name is CC, is currently the CEO of Allegro Xile Technology and Tencent Cloud TVP. He started to make open source BBS products in 1998, joined CSDN in 2006, and was responsible for Fetion SNS business as chief architect. In 2011, it entered the field of mobile Internet, creating social music apps, music copyright trading platforms, etc. Since 2019, he has founded Allegro, built YoMo, an open-source low-latency edge computing framework, and provided the industry with an open-source real-time data computing framework for IoT. Ecological integration.

foreword

After more than 20 years of development, China's Internet has long been different from what it used to be. However, on this road of change, whether it is the transition from the PC era to the mobile Internet era, or the upgrade from the consumer Internet to the industrial Internet, the choice of the track for technicians will always be an eternal topic. With the booming industrial Internet, how should technicians adapt to the tide of the times as soon as possible? How should we adjust ourselves and seek breakthroughs in transformation? And in this change, what should remain the same? In February 2022, the domestic low-latency edge computing company "Allegro Xile Technology" announced that it had received a $3 million angel round of financing and embarked on the fast lane of accelerated development. As the founder of the company, he is also the most valuable expert in Tencent Cloud. (TVP) Mr. Fan Weixiao will start from his own experience and bring you a professional interpretation of the track transformation and the ecology of the Internet of Things .

The transformational road of senior programmers

" I think the emergence of a new technology will definitely make people see innovation. However, we always overestimate the impact of technology in the short term, but underestimate the value that technology brings us in the long term ."

When it comes to Fan Weishaw, many people may be more familiar with his screen name "CC". As one of the earliest participants in the development stage of China's Internet, CC can be said to have grown up with the development of China's Internet.

In 1998, Fan Weishaw, who was still in high school, developed a strong interest in Internet technology. Recalling the experience of that year, his words revealed pride and pride. He mentioned that "I first paid attention to the Internet when I saw something about programming in the magazine of the Computer Newspaper. At that time, I began to think that the Web was very attractive. At the same time, I started to learn ASP technology and create online forums. Around 1999 and 2000, I created many Web forums written in ASP language in China. It was this experience that prompted me to start giving I wrote plug-ins for various forums, and started to be a CSDN developer community after graduating from college in 2006."

But after graduating from college, Fan Weixiao's Internet road is no longer as "set in stone" as before. The adventurous character in his bones has also prompted him to always look for the most promising and challenging technical fields to break through.

I have been doing blog forums until 2008, when social products appeared. At that time, I joined the China Mobile Fetion project and started to build a social network in China. After 2010, with the rise of the mobile Internet, I also jumped into the torrent of the mobile Internet very firmly. At that time, we thought that the future of IM must be in the mobile Internet, and the same is true of music. Music streaming media should have social attributes and should be placed in people's pockets. So I started my own business, and successively made ARM for mobile phones, as well as social music projects, and later made To B's music copyright trading platform, AI platform and other products.

In 2015, I felt that this was a big turning point in my life. I had three entrepreneurial experiences, and the product I wanted to do most at that time was successfully listed on the Growth Enterprise Market. At this time, I realized that I have always focused on technology and products, and I still don’t understand many things, but when technology is to create value for society, it must be a combination of various factors. The entire economy and business structure are required. concerned. So in 2015, I also participated in the establishment of a VC company, hoping to understand technology entrepreneurship from a different perspective, to learn and understand more about the relationship between technology and commercialization.

After 2015, as I became more and more familiar with this industry and saw more and more angles, I also began to notice the fact that China's To B market is growing rapidly. I was thinking at the time that if technology can be turned into a digital way to help the development of this society, I think it will be a more shocking and challenging thing to my life .

So in March 2019, my partner and I founded Xile Technology. What we saw at the time was that cloud computing has connected 7 billion people around the world in the past ten years. At the same time, more and more smart devices are emerging in the field of IoT, which is a connection of tens of billions of devices. The generation of these data needs to be calculated in real time and needs to be stored. Today's cloud computing we believe that there will be overflow in the future, it is currently unable to meet future needs. So we aimed at a market called edge computing, which is what the entire Xile Technology is doing. Today, we use edge computing to serve IoT related industries.

In the process of constantly seeking breakthroughs, Fan Weixiao has also experienced the transformation from architect to CTO, from CTO to investor, and then from investor to CEO. Every change of identity brings him a new review and speculation about the industry he is engaged in and the development of his own career. When he participated in the TVP technology entrepreneurship closed-door meeting, Fan Weixiao once mentioned that "the technician is the hunter, the CTO is the chief, and the CEO is the king". Now, the question of how he weighs the three identities is, Fan Weishaw said frankly:

I think what excites me more is the three states of the day. When you get up in the morning, you have to think about all the problems like a CEO. In the evening, when everyone gets off work, you have to review and review the overall problem like a CTO. When you turn off the lights in the office, on the way home in the middle of the night, look at the street lights at night, and the stars in the sky, you have to jump out of the fact that you are a member of the company, and look at what you are doing and what you are doing from an external perspective. Changes in this industry, to correct themselves, the continuous transfer of three perspectives and three identities every day. Even though I fell asleep in confusion and doubt, when I woke up every morning, this kind of introspection gave me a special conviction to keep moving forward.

In the more than 20 years of Fan Weixiao's Internet career, China's Internet technology has also been continuously upgraded and iterated, and one outlet after another has emerged. Faced with these emerging trends, how to choose? Fan Weixiao, who chose the "comer" for the track, also made very pertinent suggestions. he thinks:

I think one is that the emergence of new technologies will definitely make people see innovation. However, we always overestimate the impact of technology in the short term and underestimate the value it will bring us in the long term. Often in the market environment, everyone is always hot in AI this year, and hot in code next year, one outlet after another. But the real landing of technology requires a rising period. When the popularity reaches a high point, it will start to decline slowly, but its maturity, the people involved and the acceptance of it by the industry will appear slowly at this time . After this period, it will take another three or four years for the industry to truly mature.

Like today's AI, it was very popular in 2015 and 2016, and everyone was asking for it. Today the word AI is not so hot, but AI has entered thousands of households and all walks of life. In the past two years of the epidemic, AI has played a very important role. Whether it is from the manufacture of medical products, or from the health code to the tracking of the epidemic, its value can be seen.

I myself think that new technologies need a longer period of time to accompany him, and in the longer term, new technologies need to be continuously integrated to transform the value of technology into business value and serve the society . At the same time, it is also necessary to connect technology with the upstream and downstream of the entire industry. Make technology invisible and express it in a subtle and silent way. In fact, this is also the digital transformation that the country is talking about. I think the digital transformation is that there are no more numbers, and everyone can't feel digital, because everything will make people It is easy to accept.

In 2019, Fan Weixiao founded Allegro Xile. At the moment when China's industrial Internet is booming, Fan Weixiao has naturally keenly captured the future prospects of the domestic Internet of Things To B market. His vision of "building an industry-wide digital ecological chain" is also driving him to move forward steadily towards the future.

To be the ecological builder of the Industrial Internet

" With the help of digitization today, we can connect all the core links in the industrial process. The connected industrial Internet ecological chain has the greatest value to society ."

As one of the current focus areas, Fan Weixiao can be said to be full of confidence in the future development of China's industrial Internet. As an industrial Internet ecological builder, he is also playing an increasingly important role in the process of linkage with more industrial enterprises. He not only served as a TVP of Tencent Cloud, but also carried out more and more in-depth cooperation with Tencent Cloud. In the past few years, his company and Tencent Cloud have achieved more than 400 million yuan of digital transformation work in large industrial enterprises. . In response to this cooperation, Fan Weixiao also put forward ardent expectations.

In the more than one year that I joined the Tencent Cloud TVP organization, I have felt great power. In the past year, the products that we YoMo cooperated with the five partners of Tencent Cloud TVP have now landed in in industrial service. These cooperations allow us to help many industrial companies reduce costs by 70% when delivering their industrial digitalization , which is very difficult to achieve in the industrial industry, and it is also difficult for any company to complete by itself. This is everyone's share. Layer collaboration in exchange. I especially hope that in the future, together with Tencent Cloud TVP and the small ecosystem of industry, we can integrate more solutions and more digital collaboration, which can bring more help and empowerment to more industrial enterprises. , and jointly build a complete industrial Internet ecosystem.

In the previous TVP technology entrepreneurship closed-door meeting, Fan Wei Xiao also focused on the topic of "ecology" when sharing. He proposed at that time that "in a company, the CEO is the king, and the king should care more about some territories and territories. When it comes to more lenient content, we should pay more attention to how the entire industry ecology should be built. " When landing on the Industrial Internet, Fan Weishaw once again talked about the topic of ecology, facing "Where should the ecological construction of the Industrial Internet go?" This A question, he also gave his own answer.

I think that the development of the Industrial Internet is still very popular in China. However, with the in-depth interaction with industrial enterprises in the past two years, we have increasingly felt that the entire ecological structure is integrated through digitalization. The ingredients are still too few. Today we should connect them all digitally and express them more efficiently. I think this is a great value that digitization has brought to traditional industries. I call this the digital optimization of the stock market. With the help of digitization, there can be new ways of organizing, new ways of management, and new ways of collaboration. This is a measure that can improve the efficiency of the entire industry, which I think is difficult to achieve in other ways other than digitalization .

The second point is that digitalization has brought new means, such as industrial quality inspection, predictive maintenance of equipment, etc., which can express the value of data by means of technical means, which brings a layer to the industrial industry. new opportunities. Things that people in the industry didn't know before can be quantified through big data. Previously, we could only rely on experience and guesswork to predict the future, but it has become the use of machine learning to predict the future. This is a new thing that machine learning can bring.

How does the last layer use digital capabilities to further upgrade our business? Previously, production and sales were two separate links. Today, we are seeing more and more people, with the help of platforms like WeChat, to reach the final consumers very directly. As an industrial enterprise, you can quickly judge what your consumers like, collect feedback quickly, and form a very good positive feedback loop, and then continue to accelerate the research and development process of new products. China has a huge domestic demand market, and we can quickly accelerate the cycle by means of digitalization in the domestic demand market, which is also the value of digitalization we see.

So I think that today we can connect all the core links in the whole industry with the help of digitalization. The connected whole is called the Industrial Internet, and this complete ecological chain has the greatest value to society .

At the same time, at the technical level, Fan Weixiao also put forward his own expectations. He believes that:

Industry in China needs richer PaaS layer services . Because the digitalization process of Chinese industrial enterprises generally started relatively late. Today, there is no rich PaaS ecosystem at the upper level of the industrial field. Each company has a different understanding of its own business. Each company has different positions and pressures in its own industry. Therefore, each company has different opinions on its own digitalization process. unique way. In this scenario, it is difficult for several universal PaaS products to serve the market on a large scale.

Now we see a change. More and more industrial enterprises have their own R&D capabilities. They all have R&D teams of 20 to 50 people. They can do core applications themselves, but they lack more supporting services. On the other hand, our Internet technology industry, like cloud computing, SaaS, and PaaS, has very clear layers. There are points that can be combined on each layer. Virtualization, containers, and even the entire mature SaaS ecosystem can be layered. , everyone does their part professionally, the entire industry is very structured, and everyone can work together.

Today's industrial industries are like vertical chimneys. I call this industry the windmill model. When you go to a beautiful grassland, there are isolated big windmills. How to connect them effectively? It is an urgent problem to be solved now. The cloud provides hardware, and SaaS also accelerates the provision of software and developer services, so that the ecosystem can become more benign and efficient .

As a national key strategy, the development of the Industrial Internet and new infrastructure has also received constant attention at the national level. Since China's 2035 vision plan was put forward, the domestic industrial Internet construction has accelerated to the fast lane. In this context, it is destined that the domestic industrial Internet will show a blowout development in the next few years. Fan Weixiao also has extremely optimistic expectations for the future of the Industrial Internet. he proposes:

In the past few years, under the strong implementation of the state and policies, I have seen that automation is being promoted faster and faster in this industry. This is a good foundation for digitalization. With automation, we can collect data in many places. , making the previously unknown known, a very good foundation.

Since the outbreak of the epidemic, many industrial sectors have further realized the importance of digitalization. In 2020, we see that many industrial enterprises have encountered problems in the upstream and downstream industry chains. When rebuilding the entire industrial chain, everyone is using digital means to complete it. At this time, everyone will find that digital means are so efficient. I think 2020 can be called the first year of digitalization in industry.

In addition, China is now controlling the epidemic very well, and the domestic demand market is booming, which also drives industrial enterprises to continue to make great strides. Moreover, from the perspective of the development of the entire industry, whether domestic or foreign, 2023 and 2025 are considered two important nodes by everyone. By 2025, China's industrial Internet is likely to account for more than 25% of the world's entire industrial Internet. This is a new growth period, and I am very optimistic about this. China also has a very strong advantage in this regard. We are now at the core of production in the world, and the digitalization of industrial manufacturing is also advancing rapidly. In this process, our big data and AI technologies will be applied Leading in the world.

Therefore, I am optimistic about all these. The next five years will be a very high-speed growth period, and more and more Internet technologies will spill over into the industry. I am very optimistic about the future of the Industrial Internet .

The technical persistence of atypical programmers

" In the technology industry, we must not leave the front line. Once we leave the front line, it is like taking our feet out of the water, and it is no longer possible to sense the water temperature. Only by placing our feet in the water can we sense the technology in time. change. "

Among the many technicians in China, Fan Weixiao definitely belongs to the senior group. Whether it is the breadth of the industry involved or the length of time it has been engaged in, it is very representative in the Internet circle. But for many people who met him for the first time, he was surprised by his appearance that did not match the traditional programmer.

As a technical person who loves football and music, Fan Weishaw has an obvious "rock fan" on his body. His long flowing hair and talkative personality make many people mistakenly think that he is engaged in literary and artistic work. Now, with the continuous advancement of open source YoMo in the IoT field, Fan Weixiao also walked out of the office and began to visit and inspect more and more factories. identity. But when we ask him what he likes the most out of the many identities today, he still says without hesitation:

My own favorite role is to be a programmer, especially when it's late at night when I can turn on my computer and write code . The most exciting moment is when I go to the email and see that there are people in the community who have asked you what I want, and I think we should change the code like this. You communicate with everyone in the community, whether we will do this well in the next version, and then you will also comment on other people's products and contribute content. The two or three hours of the day are the happiest moments of the day for me, when I'm completely self-absorbed doing what I love.

Because I have been writing code for 20 years, I think that as a technology entrepreneur, in the technology industry, we must not leave the front line. Once we leave the front line, it is like taking our feet out of the water, and it will never be possible again. Once you sense the water temperature, you can only sense the changes in technology by putting your feet in the water. At the same time, I have always believed that perception comes from feeling, feeling comes from practice, and practice comes from the points you encounter when dealing with problems on the front line.

So this is also the reason why I need to work a long time every day, and I always have more than 10 hours a week watching new technologies, researching new technologies, and testing new technologies. And this period of time is also the happiest time, because no one disturbs you, and you are completely immersed in the things you are very focused on.

As a senior technician who loves the identity of programmers, Fan Weixiao also put forward his own suggestions for today's new young technicians.

I still recommend to look at some low-level things. For example, when we first started programming, there were not many development tools, few development languages, and few related documents. So when you encounter many problems, you can't ask them, you can only research them yourself, which makes us see that many old programmers can build their own solutions to find problems and solve them. For example, when I see that this framework is not good, the core problem I find him is this, and what I will think about is how should I focus on this framework. Today, I saw a not so good phenomenon. When people find a problem, they will ask, and after asking, they will wait. When no one solves the problem, we will bypass the problem. I feel that everyone will be farther and farther away from the core of technology, which is not conducive to establishing a problem-solving idea, and it is not conducive to making us innovate.

Today's cloud computing and open source have brought us very good developer tools and practical experience in the underlying technology of developers. You can learn it for a month, and then you can make a good product. This is the advantage of today's technology world. , but on the other hand, when we go to innovate again, the whole thinking process will be interrupted. If today the industry is slowly becoming more utilitarian, I think this is very scary. We still need to innovate in technology, we still need to look at something deeper, and then build our own technical thinking to solve problems. System, this is a very important thing , and these things are hard to learn in our textbooks. In the course of your daily work, your environment will not bring you this, which requires a strong self-driving force and love for code to go on.

Therefore, I also hope that everyone should never stop innovating first; at the same time, they must be bold, do not pay too much attention to the current trend, and prefer to do long-term challenges; in addition, they must grasp the non-consensus, often in the society's non-consensus For the things in the system, we must pay more attention to it, learn it, and study it. These are three very important points in my opinion.

With the rapid development of the industrial Internet, I also hope that more new technologies will appear in 10 years. There are many outstanding technical people in China, and the technology that such a group of outstanding people get together to do will be able to spread all over the world and serve the world. At the same time, we also want to change the current model of Cloud Centric cloud architecture. We believe that there is only one Region in the world that should be called Earth, so this kind of distributed cloud (geo-distributed cloud) is more efficient and convenient. We also especially welcome friends who like innovation to join Xile Technology.

Message TVP

As a member of Tencent Cloud's Most Valuable Professionals (TVP), Fan Weixiao has always paid attention to the construction of technology ecology and industry digital ecology, and has always practiced his own efforts in this. At the end of the interview, when it comes to Tencent Cloud TVP, he also sent his most sincere wishes.

I feel that the TVP family is very warm and tolerant. I look forward to working with the TVP family to spread TVP activities to more traditional enterprises, and to convey digital concepts, digital solutions, and digital solutions to these traditional enterprises. The digital case . I hope that we can travel all over the country together in the next few years and truly use technology to influence the world.

At the same time, I also particularly expect that we can truly break through the level of technical personnel, integrate and introduce in the industry, and let everyone work together to improve this ecology. It can truly integrate all the core elements of the industry and express it in a digital way . This requires a strong organization to continuously promote and support this matter for a long time. I especially hope that Tencent Cloud TVP can further help in this direction.