We have launched a new annual special issue of Taobao Technology "Long-termism, often starts with some small things - the summary of engineers' growth". The special topic includes the sincere mental journey and experience thinking of many engineers, covering 7 major technical fields including terminals, servers, data algorithms, and technical quality. Welcome to communicate and exchange.
This article is the seventh in this series.
The first article: Responsible for the front-end development of Taobao business for 9 years, talk about my experience
The second article: "What should be the most important technology development?", talk about my understanding and gains in server development for 5 years
The third article: Talk about my experience in performance analysis in Taobao
Part Four: Talk about my experience in NeRF-3D reconstruction performance optimization
Part 5: Talk about my experience in performance optimization in the open domain of the store
Part Six: Talk about my growth formula and business thinking in Taobao
The author Xiaocen is from Anhui. He graduated from Southeast University majoring in automation. He studied in the Department of Automation of University of Science and Technology of China with a master's degree. His doctoral topic is the research of video dejittering algorithm.
Personal experience
As we all know, automation is a hodgepodge major, so I have also been exposed to hardware work such as single-chip microcomputers, embedded systems, and electronic circuits during my school days. After graduating from my Ph.D., I went to Huawei South Research Institute, where I was exposed to video codec and image segmentation related work. In 2018, I joined Ali, and my job content was still low-level visual algorithm work, including video denoising, decompression distortion, video enhancement, object tracking, etc. After November 21, I took the initiative to transfer to Taobao Technology, and then began to transform. Pure algorithm work is no longer the focus of work, but biased towards Taobao live broadcast and short video business. I still need to do a lot of work to improve the quality and experience of Taobao live broadcast and short video.
Work and feelings during this time
Speaking of the past year, since I transferred to the present, I have done a lot of things, including pure algorithm development and tuning, algorithm access, business technology and other technical work, and I have also worked as a pure business demand side, raising needs for colleagues within the team to achieve business goals. Most of the time, I am actually the interface person for the department’s image quality experience business.
In the past year, with the efforts of my colleagues and me, the image quality of Taobao live broadcast has been significantly improved, and the complaints received have become less and less. More and more anchors have realized the demand for high-quality broadcasting. Whenever I see positive emoticons from them, I will smile like an old mother on the screen. This sense of accomplishment is something I couldn’t get from doing pure algorithm work before, at least not so direct, fast, huge, and frequent. I feel more and more that my transfer is correct and I am on the right path. Thinking back on how many setbacks and detours I have experienced along the way, what I am looking for is actually a manifestation of business value, the feeling of helping people in need, seeking affirmation, instead of endlessly polishing the same algorithm repeatedly, and obtaining a lot of patching and tuning skills, but there is no way to implement it.
Impressive few things
Looking back on the past year, I have lived a very fulfilling life, and I have a lot of feelings. Among them, these few things are the most impressive.
The first thing is actually a story of hitting a wall, which also touched me a lot:
I thought that as a second grader in image quality, my work would be over after locating the anchor with poor image quality experience, and the rest would be handed over to the product and operation, who would help me contact the anchor and improve the image quality. However, I was completely wrong. First of all, the operation personnel are very scattered. Each person is only responsible for a few head anchors. There are too few head anchors with poor image quality, and there are a large number of mid-waist anchors left. So, I was forced to write a program to automatically attribute the reasons for low image quality, generate the reasons for the low image quality of thousands of anchors, and then push them to the anchors through the message box. I remember that on that winter morning, when I received the first DingTalk message from the anchor who gave feedback, I jumped out of bed. This proves that the road is clear, and we don't have to rely entirely on products and operations that don't focus on live broadcast quality at all.
This incident also made me realize that what it means to go all out to get the result is none other than me at this moment, because this job is only done by me, and I can only do it if I do my best. Everything is difficult at the beginning. At critical moments, you can't pin your hopes on others. The key is that the pace is too slow, and you can't point out where to hit, let alone hit thousands of anchors at once.
The second thing is a technical work that serves the business - the real-time detection function of the low-quality live broadcast room is online:
This matter is purely using technology to serve the business. There is nothing to say about the process. The key point is that this is the first time that I have completed a complete online process, including demand discussion, scheduling, deployment, testing, and final release. I have also seen the actual operation effect.
The online process of doing pure algorithms in the pre-research department before is actually relatively simple. The first-line algorithm students do not participate in the demand discussion and the final launch, but only get the task, then develop the algorithm, make a test report, and leave the rest to the engineering team.
This incident made me feel that Taobao Technology is different from the previous departments. There is a sense of owner in doing things here, and no one is doing the same thing. There is no such thing as stepping on others because I have done a little more. Because I have a lot of things in this matter, and I can’t participate in other people’s things, so the cooperation between the teams is smoother.
The third thing is to talk about the contact with the anchor, which is what I continue to do and give me the most feelings:
So far, in the multiple anchor groups I am in charge of, the members include anchors, merchants, and institutions. Half of them have had 1-on-1 contact. There are top anchors, KA merchants, and waist and small and medium anchors. Some are found through low-quality reminder messages, some are pushed by operations, and the rest are found through promoted documents and group QR codes. For the anchors who have really had in-depth contact, I have served them seriously, including recommending equipment, debugging suggestions, etc. In return, they have also contributed a lot to my work results, and we have achieved each other.
During the contact, I can deeply feel that these people behind the screen often correspond to small and medium-sized enterprises. Like me, they are also working hard for their work, life, and family. Although many people have no culture, they are able to get to the current position, which is also the joy after experiencing many setbacks and successes. So, I generally have a lot of respect for them, and they have a lot of respect for me. We have never met each other. In their minds, I may be an experienced teacher, but in fact, I am only more enthusiastic about serving them. I have learned many things slowly through contact with them.
Here, I truly understand what it means to put customers first, especially in the middle of the night. I have already been busy all day and am about to go to bed. I have to answer DingTalk and phone calls from the anchors, because they are often very anxious. And after the problem is solved, the anchor is often not stingy in sending us emoticons to give us likes.
In addition, being in contact with so many anchors has also become an irreplaceable advantage in my team. Only I can get first-hand feedback from the anchors, and I am the only one who knows the business of Taobao live broadcasting best. And if there is any problem in the complete link of Taobao Live, I can also receive feedback as soon as possible.
The anchor sent a congratulatory message
The fourth thing is that I, as the demand side, provide requirements to the relevant teams. Since I have contacted a lot of anchors, I have seen a lot of problems with the anchors, including some complaints and feedback, and I have also summarized some suggestions, which will be given to relevant teams, such as enhancement, beauty, green screen algorithm improvement, mosaic, and frame drop related processing.
Summarize
The past year has been a very meaningful year for me, and I have completed the long-awaited transformation. For anyone, transformation is not an easy task, it requires strong determination and external motivation, and I did undergo a job transfer before I completed this transformation.
My work is no longer limited to a few small points, I have more time to think about my value and work direction, I have found a way to get business results, and I have learned to communicate with people in different fields. These are the changes I have been pursuing in the past.
In the coming year, I will rely more on the work results and insights of the past year to guide my direction, because I know which points most need to be focused on, such as making the picture better and more real, making the close-up smoother and clearer, and making the evaluation more accurate to find and locate problems in time. I may participate in different roles in these.
team introduction
Taobao's audio and video technology team is responsible for Taobao's audio and video algorithms and related basic technologies, especially to ensure high video quality and fluency. Through the access of video encoder S265, video enhancement solution STaoVideo, no-reference video quality evaluation model MD-VQA, media processing system TMPS and low-latency transmission network GRTN, the industry-leading audio and video experience is created. Through continuous technical polishing and algorithm innovation, we strive to empower Taobao's content business with high quality and low cost, and help Taobao's content strategy. The accumulated platform technology and product capabilities can also be reused by other businesses of the group. These technical capabilities accumulated over the years have also won multiple international authoritative competitions in audio and video core technologies.
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