Huang Yi, CTO of All Things Digital: It is interesting that others criticize my code | Dialogue MVP

"Blockchain" and "open source" are two important keywords in Huang Yi's career.

"Blockchain" helped Huang Yi complete the jump from "manual laborer" reverse engineer to blockchain technology management.

As the CTO of All Things Digital, Huang has a more comprehensive perspective on the problem. In addition to the underlying technical issues, he began to focus on macro coordination and business issues. The blockchain also tempered Huang Yi's product thinking. Now, he has successfully led the team to implement a number of blockchain projects based on FISCO BCOS, such as Chainlink Community and Xinhuafang Smart Park System.

And "open source" brought a lot of fun to Huang Yi.

"Actually, I started open source since elementary school." Huang Yi said with a smile. He is optimistic by nature and likes to share. When he was a primary school student, Huang Yi was happy to "open source" his homework for others to "reference"; after he became a college student, Huang Yi joined the subtitle group and "open sourced" the time axis to two-dimensional enthusiasts; As a blockchain practitioner, Huang Yi chose to join the FISCO BCOS open source community. Through active open source code and sharing his experience, he has grown into a community MVP.

In the process of open source, Huang gave feedback to others, and he even looked forward to criticism. He honed his code iteratively by taking input and feedback. "It's interesting that others criticize my code," Huang Yi said.

The following is the transcript of Huang Yi's interview:

Older developers have an advantage in the blockchain field

1. Talk about your experience with the blockchain and the reasons for choosing FISCO BCOS. Why do you love blockchain technology?

I was influenced by my family. I first learned about blockchain from an academic perspective, and then used it from an application perspective.

My father used to be a high school physics teacher and liked to focus on cutting-edge things. As early as 2014, under his repeated Amway, I read some related papers one after another, and found that the blockchain does have meaning and reason.

The opportunity to get in touch with blockchain at work was when the company was doing "distributed rendering using idle computing power equipment". I naturally began to understand blockchain and found that blockchain technology can be used to solve practical problems. question.

When selecting the blockchain technology for this project, we did a lot of research and found that FISCO BCOS is the best one to use. It is mainly reflected in several aspects: first, the documentation is complete and the community is active; second, the source code of FISCO BCOS is written in C++, just as I used to write a lot of C++ code, and the reading is relatively smooth; third, because I joined the community, I can share with everyone Write code and read code together, and gradually integrate into this atmosphere. I can feel that this is a vigorous product, so the projects behind the company basically use or learn from FISCO BCOS.

2. You have many years of experience as a reverse engineer, and later turned to the blockchain field. Please talk about the reasons for your change of career direction. What changes has the blockchain brought to you?

In the past, I mainly did Windows client reverse engineering, and the object was basically C++ or .Net code. At the same time, I also had quite a lot of experience in C++ forward development and back-end development. However, for older developers, the physical work of reverse development is more difficult, and before the transformation, I was more and more incompetent. It was precisely because the job opportunity came into contact with the blockchain that the transformation took place. Now, the blockchain needs a lot of low-level developers, and reverse programmers have a very sharp thinking, and they must also play well in the forward direction. They are proficient in languages such as C++, which has the innate advantage of transformation.

After I transformed the blockchain, the biggest change is that the architectural thinking is more comprehensive. Reverse development only requires a certain point in the pipeline to be very specific and deep, but the global vision is not enough. After doing the blockchain, I have a better understanding of the entire architecture and products, which pushed me to change from a mere programmer to a technical management team. Therefore, older developers have an advantage in the blockchain field when they have a certain foundation, and they can also develop a global vision and product thinking. But you must also keep learning, because the blockchain industry is changing with each passing day, and you will fall behind if you don’t learn.

In my country, blockchain is very suitable for ESG governance

3. Based on FISCO BCOS, you have implemented the chain action community and Xinhuafang smart park system. Please talk about your experience and feelings?

The biggest feeling is that when the blockchain is applied to practical scenarios, we are often not faced with technical problems, but economic problems or business problems. The blockchain is not a panacea, it needs to be matched with some solutions, and even sometimes requires the intervention of administrative forces to better achieve credible effects.

The chain action community project is our first time to test the waters of "blockchain + social governance". When we first came into contact with it, the logic should be very simple, but in fact it is not the same thing at all.

For example, each community has its own time supermarket. Residents earn points by participating in community volunteer activities to exchange for items in the supermarket. However, the value of the items in the time supermarket in different communities is different. If the points are connected, will all the residents of Community A go to Community B to exchange items? If the points are not connected, then if the user has multiple houses and points in multiple communities, how to store the points, and how to define the exchange rate for the points in different communities? None of these problems can be solved by the blockchain itself. In the end, we solved this problem by coordinating merchants and community street offices with administrative power.

Xinhuafang Smart Park gave me another feeling. This project involves multi-party collaborative development, and it is also the first time we have deeply participated in the digital twin + blockchain project. We have tortured our souls: how to really confirm the rights of IoT device terminals?

We are now all based on the Internet of Things HUB, and it is not really end-to-end. The core reason is not a technical problem, but a business one. There are so many IoT terminal manufacturers, how to coordinate these enterprises to do the transformation? Why let it do the makeover for you? If it is a government project, we can use administrative power to ask the IoT manufacturer to carry out transformation, put a very tiny program on the end, and it will send back the fingerprint and key, so that we will know whether the IoT data has been tampered with. But in ordinary commercial projects, you can only choose to trust the IoT device side, and there is no way to transform it.

4. These projects are also typical practices of blockchain technology in the ESG field. How do you understand ESG? Can you talk about the application prospects of blockchain technology in the ESG field?

Blockchain needs to solve three core problems in ESG scenarios: how to define the investment of enterprises? How to ensure data quality? How to prove the innocence of the enterprise? These three issues are closely related to the reliability of data in distributed systems, and the characteristics of blockchain are very suitable for doing this.

A very important issue in the application of blockchain in the field of ESG is boundary division. You should try to keep your logic as small as possible, separate it from business logic, and don't mix business logic. I think the most important thing is to gradually cultivate customers' understanding of blockchain. The blockchain is not for business, but for data security, otherwise it will become a company that receives SaaS services.

As for the application prospects, I think that in my country, blockchain is very suitable for ESG governance. The core underlying value of the blockchain is credibility, which can improve the credibility of the government. Therefore, the best entry point for blockchain application is to take the lead in the government. The government attaches great importance to the definition of responsibilities between different departments and the authenticity of data. Blockchain engineering and implementation are important.

I've been "open source" since elementary school

5. Talk about your understanding of open source?

In fact, I have been "open source" since elementary school, and I will "open source" my homework for others to "reference". (laugh)

Now, there are two motivations for me to do open source in FISCO BCOS. First, based on the actual work and business needs, I just open source and share it without any additional responsibilities and burdens. Another point of support is that I have enough interest.

My open source incentive comes from other people's feedback. When others say my code is well written, I am motivated to keep doing it. Except for the repo that needs to be kept secret for commercial or other reasons, I will basically open source the others, and let others criticize my own code, which I think is a very interesting thing. One time, my code was criticized by someone else's private message for being poorly written. I thought what the other party said was very reasonable, so I wrote a new code and sent it to him, and finally got the other party's approval. Now he still keeps emailing with me. connect.

Writing code is creative work, not a science of truth, and it's hard to see "truth in the hands of a few". Reflecting on why it is not well written, I can repeatedly temper my ability to write code. I have always maintained a mentality of learning from each other and learning from each other.

6. After joining the community, are there any people and things that impress you?

The most impressive thing is to do an experimental project to move the blockchain to edge gateway equipment. This project involves two issues: one is to cut the size of FISCO BCOS; the other is to compile the source code of FISCO BCOS with ultra-low configuration and an earlier operating system on an ARM machine. I encountered a lot of difficulties in the process. Fortunately, I had joined the technical group of FISCO BCOS at that time, and I received enthusiastic help from everyone. It happened to be seen by Mr. Bai Xingqiang, the core developer of FISCO BCOS, who gave me a long time of help, and finally Successfully made FISCO BCOS run on the 5G edge gateway.

The friends in the community have left a deep impression on me. For example, Mr. Lin Xuanming, CTO of Hash Technology, is also the author of FISCO .Net SDK. We communicate more. I've been using his SDK now, and a big thank you to him here, it works great. I also often watch Mr. Lin Xuanming's video at station B, and I keep giving him compliments. There is also Mr. Bai Xingqiang, who gave me a lot of help at the beginning. Now he is working hard to improve FISCO BCOS v3.0, and he often shares the latest progress with me.

7. How do you understand MVP? Are there any further plans for participating in community building in the future, and what are your expectations for the community?

I feel that since I'm already an MVP, I have to take responsibility for myself. In my opinion, it is divided into two parts, one is to continue to promote the use and implementation of FISCO BCOS in my own work, and truly contribute valuable and excellent cases to the community; the other is to share myself in these cases in the community on this basis. Encountered pits and valuable ideas, write articles or open source repo directly for your reference and reference.

My biggest expectation for the community is the improvement of the official version of v3.0, because now the projects in my hands are still in the v2.8.0 version, and I can't wait to go directly to v3.0 on the next project to see how the overall effect is. .

For more dry goods, please pay attention to the FISCO BCOS open source community public account, visit the FISCO BCOS code repository to download all the source code of the project: https://github.com/FISCO-BCOS/FISCO-BCOS , please click the star collection in the upper right corner of the page , to get the latest version.