"Community People" is a series of columns launched by the Apache Doris community. We pay attention to every Contributor who has contributed to Doris, and will regularly select a "Community Star" from the small partners who have made outstanding contributions to Doris. We will also conduct an exclusive interview with "Community Star". I hope that the stories of TA and Doris can be heard by everyone, and I hope that more friends will participate in the community building.
The sixth issue is on the occasion of the Goddess Festival. We specially interviewed Miao Ling, the only female PPMC in the Apache Doris community and an OLAP core R&D engineer from Baidu, to listen to her story with Doris and her thoughts on participating in the construction of the open source community. . In the future, we look forward to more women participating in community building and giving full play to their Girl's Power in the open source world.
Q: Please briefly introduce yourself and your past technical experience.
Hello everyone, I'm Miao Ling (miao four tones and two tones), a female programmer who is curious about the world, and now a member of the Apache Doris community PPMC. After graduating from graduate school in 2017, he joined Baidu and has been engaged in the research and development of OLAP engines. Now he is also the technical director of the query engine direction. In addition to OLAP, I am also interested in cloud computing technologies such as OpenStack, Docker, and Kubernates.
Q: What made you choose your current job?
At first, it was because I just joined the Doris team. At that time, Doris had just entered the Apache Foundation for incubation. I always remember that we held the first Meetup after joining the Apache Foundation. There were only a handful of audience members, and the audience was not even as large as that of R&D students. Despite this , I have always thought it was interesting, worth doing, and willing to invest time and energy in it.
Later, I gradually felt that it was suitable for me and could bring me a sense of accomplishment, because the code I wrote could be used by so many users and could generate more value. I persisted year after year and established a deep relationship. It can be said that he has been growing up with the Doris community. Two days ago, I saw that the number of Stars on GitHub exceeded 4,000, and the number of Contributors exceeded 270. I suddenly realized that my lost youth was actually quite worth it. (Although I feel sad every time I see my aging face, I hope the hairline can be preserved, hahaha)
Q: Did you encounter any problems or challenges during your work, and how did you solve them?
Compiling Doris at the beginning gave me a slap in the face, and of course there was no Docker image at the time. Later, I made one, and I can't cure you yet~ The other aspect is that this field requires a particularly large breadth of knowledge, distributed system design , compilation principles, optimizers, storage systems, OS, CPU, etc., which all require Learn and master. And at the beginning, there were really not many people in the team, and everything needed to be understood. Therefore, the mental and learning costs paid in the initial stage were relatively large. Of course, this is actually the most interesting part. It is necessary to continue to learn more technical knowledge, so I have also gained more than expected growth.
Q: In addition to the problems encountered, are there any interesting cases or stories to share?
Yes, our team has a particularly interesting culture, which is to discuss technology after dinner. I was very uncomfortable at first, and thought it would be bad to give my brain a break? It turned out that this was simply the golden time for communication. Because everyone needs to focus on their own affairs during non-meal time, there will always be someone interrupting you, and work efficiency will be particularly low, and after a meal is a particularly good time for everyone to relax and be free. But fellow male colleagues, can we eat a little slower, and eat slowly, so that we won't get fat easily~
Q: What happened to the "highlights" in your career, how did you do it, and what was the most fulfilling thing you've ever done?
Step by step, the Apache Doris community has grown from dozens of people at the beginning to thousands of people today. This is what I am most proud of. Every line of code I write has poured my heart into it . I am full of expectations for Apache Doris, and because Very proud to own it .
Q: What do you think Doris has done better? What aspects still need to be optimized?
I think Doris has its own tonality in product design. We have always believed that ease of use is the starting point of all Doris designs. For example, almost all operations you want to use, including operation and maintenance, and documentation help, can be solved by sending commands to FE, including using MySQL protocol, Online Schema Change, etc., which are the embodiment of ease of use. But for me, it still has a lot of room for improvement. I hope it can be optimized in various ways to achieve the ultimate query speed, and it can be as stable as SQL Server with 5 9s. At the same time, such as memory management, storage and computing separation There is still a lot of work that is being done or needs to be done. While Doris is making progress little by little, I also hope that everyone will show more love and tolerance to Doris.
Q: What was the opportunity for you to start participating in the construction of open source communities? What kind of gain?
I actually participated passively at first, because of the needs of the team and work, and later it was more of a personal passion. In the process of participating, I gained a lot of like-minded people, and I also learned a lot of new ideas in the community, including Doris' application exploration in many new demand scenarios.
Another point I think is a very big gain is to truly understand Community Over Code, the community is greater than the code. Open source does not mean that you refer to the code you think is good on GitHub. Everyone can see that this is called open source. It is just a piece of code. Open source is more about community building. You need to continuously promote your project to attract more users to use it. While serving users, it also attracts the power of the community to transform and improve it together. It is the community that keeps improving and growing. Community is crucial, and that's what the Apache Way wants to convey to us.
Q: As the PPMC of Apache Doris, what experience do you want to share with community users and developers?
Many students may say that I have no experience in developing data warehouse products, so I cannot participate in the open source project Doris. What I'm trying to say is that you can actually start from what you're good at. For example, if you are familiar with Docker, you can see if there is room for optimization in Doris' dockerfile. Or if you are a front-end engineer, you can also start with Doris' web interface. Even if you don't know how to write code, you can start with documentation and help improve documentation. From submitting code to reviewing code, you can gradually gain a deep understanding of a module of Doris. At this point, congratulations, you are already a community person.
The community is a fair place, you get what you pay for. If you're interested in technology, get involved in open source. You will find the purest happiness as a developer~ Maybe many people initially contacted for work reasons, but I hope everyone can find their own value in the community, which has nothing to do with work, but the purest happiness in technology.
Q: What advice do you have for community building?
The foundation of community construction is excellent technical products, but the prosperity of the community depends on the contributions made by everyone in the community. This contribution is not limited to submitting code, as small as a sentence of Doris's usage experience, which is what the community needs. I hope everyone can find their own value in participating in the community, so that we can prosper the community together.
Q: If you had the opportunity to talk to yourself N years ago, what would you say to her?
N years ago, I was lucky when I chose the profession of programmer, because I have always been good at scientific thinking, so myself and my family supported me in this job, and I have no regrets in my career choice.
But it was really too busy and tiring at the time, and as a woman, you need to spend more energy than men to prove yourself, so you gave up a lot of your hobbies, especially in the culture of programmers, there is always a kind of " smart " Extreme , the more soil the stronger" atmosphere , so I don't pay much attention to image management.
If I had a chance to see me N years ago again, I would like to say to her, "You need to work hard , and you need to have a life. Youth is short, life is long. Believe in yourself, you will definitely become a programmer "
Q: As a woman, what do you think are the strengths or weaknesses of women in IT or open source? Have you experienced unfair treatment at work because of your gender?
The advantage may be that women are more friendly, especially in technical publicity, they are more willing to listen to the opinions of others, and they are less likely to go bald (naughty). In the case of a disadvantage, it is true that the physical strength is not as strong as that of the male, but if a job is to exert physical strength, it can only mean that it has not yet broken away from the animal competition. There may still be a lot of physical competition in the entire industry at present. In the future, I hope to slowly develop in a more benign direction, and I also hope to bring more friendliness to female participation.
I have heard the phrase "girls are not suitable", but I always thought it had nothing to do with gender. Everyone may be good at different things, boys may also be very literary, and girls may also be very rational, if it is purely based on gender, it is stereotyped prejudice. Judging from my limited personal experience, as long as you enter the industry with excellent skills, there is no difference, and I even think girls will have more advantages.
Q: As women, what can we contribute to the open source world?
In addition to technological breakthroughs, we also hope to bring about some cultural changes, break the stereotyped prejudice against women in the past, and tell everyone that no matter male or female, everyone can participate in the community.
Finally, I also really feel that open source is not an easy thing. In any case , as a developer, you benefit from open source to a greater or lesser extent, and I hope everyone can be grateful, participate more and give back to the community.
Related Links:
Apache Doris official website:
http://doris.incubator.apache.org
Apache Doris Github：
https://github.com/apache/incubator-doris
Apache Doris developer mailing group: