Rebirth 10: I'm a Promoter at Tencent

"Is this Lin Shen?" The voice on the other end of the phone was urgent, a mixture of excitement and inquiry, with background noise of traffic and faint city noise, as if the person was outdoors.

"It's me!" Lin Shen was taken aback and answered subconsciously.

"Lin Shen! It's me, Li Feng! I followed the trail from the Shenzhen University email address you used to email me last time, eventually finding a teacher in your college and getting your phone number... Thank goodness you haven't changed your number!"

Li Feng.

Lin Shen remembered the senior from Shenzhen University who was starting a business at Meituan, for whom he had done outsourcing work, and immediately smiled and said, "Brother Feng? It's you. What's wrong? Did that data cleaning script from last time run into problems again?"

"The script is great! I'm here for something else." Li Feng lowered his voice, but sounded even more excited. "Junior, have you been making a big splash in Shenzhen lately?"

These past two days, Beijing's internet circles have been going crazy, with everyone asking about Lin Shen from Shenzhen and Tencent. And these past two days, while I was in Shenzhen meeting with investors with Mr. Wang, at dinners and in coffee shops, I heard people subtly inquiring about a new Tencent project called "Pioneer Lab," and some even said the person in charge is a particularly young and formidable character named Lin Shen!

He paused, his tone becoming subtle: "Just now, even an investment manager from Sequoia Capital asked me privately if I knew someone called 'Lin Shen,' who works in instant messaging at Tencent and has a very wild mindset."

At first, I thought it was just a coincidence of names, but the more I thought about it, the more something seemed off. The technical skills and problem-solving approaches you demonstrated when you did outsourcing for me before made me realize you shouldn't be unknown at Tencent. Lin Shen, tell me honestly, did you create WeChat? Is that "Pioneer Lab" your territory?

Lin Shen held his phone, looking out the window at the outline of the Tencent building in the darkening sky, his mind racing through the message Li Feng had conveyed.

BJ?

Xiaomi?

It seems the rumors circulating on the internet are spreading faster than he anticipated. Xiaomi's investigation may be quite extensive, but it has alarmed the sensitive capital market...

Lin Shen pondered for a moment, then neither confirmed nor denied it, saying, "Brother Feng, I'm just an employee, doing some specific tasks within the team. There are many projects within Tencent, so some activity is quite normal."

"Tsk tsk..."

Li Feng's tsk-tsk sound was quite meaningful...

"Brother Feng, it seems you guys have made contact with Sequoia Capital. Is there good news from Meituan?"

Li Feng's attention was drawn back, and his tone carried a slightly relaxed sigh: "Yes, after half a year of hard work, we've finally made some progress. The specifics are the same as yours, so I can't say. But the basic framework is set. This trip to Shenzhen is to go through some final procedures, meet with law firms, and also visit potential partners and talents here."

He deliberately emphasized the word "talent," half-jokingly and half-seriously saying, "That's why, the moment I heard those rumors about you, you were the first person I thought of. You've been keeping it well hidden!"

To be honest, Li Feng had mixed feelings when he heard Lin Shen's vague confirmation.

They met by chance at the forum. He valued Lin Shen's solid technical skills, reliable delivery, and reasonable price. Subconsciously, he regarded Lin Shen more as an external technical resource that could be cooperated with long-term, and even thought about whether he could poach him when the company grew bigger.

But now, he vaguely hears that Lin Shen may be leading a high-profile new project at Tencent, which makes him realize that his junior's growth rate and the level of the platform he is on may far exceed his previous estimates.

The relationship between the two seems to need to be reassessed.

Lin Shen noticed the subtle change in Li Feng's tone and followed up, saying, "Brother Feng, you flatter me. We were just lucky. By the way, how long are you staying in Shenzhen this time?"

"I'll be here all weekend, but I'm going back to Beijing on Monday," Li Feng said. "Tomorrow's Saturday, are you busy? We haven't seen each other in ages, how about we grab a bite? Just the two of us, let's chat."

Lin Shen glanced at the team's schedule; tomorrow was his day off.

The group chat function in WeChat version 1.1 is progressing smoothly. The core architecture and privacy solution have been finalized, and it is now entering the stage of simultaneous development across multiple platforms.

"Sure, I'm off tomorrow," Lin Shen readily agreed. "I'll pick the place. How about the barbecue stalls around my house? Want some beer?"

"Then it's settled!" Li Feng immediately agreed, and then added, "By the way, let's have a school reunion, so dress casually and whatever makes you comfortable."

-----------------

On Saturday evening, near the Kexing Science Park, there was a barbecue stall with an old sign but a lot of customers.

Plastic tables and chairs were placed along the sidewalk, and the air was filled with the smoky aroma of burning charcoal and the spicy scent of cumin and chili powder.

Lin Shen arrived first and found a relatively quiet corner to sit down. He had just finished replying to today's progress report in the group when he saw a man wearing a gray polo shirt and carrying a black backpack walk towards the area with some hesitation, looking around and holding a mobile phone in his hand.

A moment later, Lin Shen's phone rang, and he raised his hand and waved it.

"Hey, Feng, I see you. You're wearing gray, right? I'm at the table by the wall inside."

Li Feng looked up at the sound, a smile spreading across his face. He quickly walked across several tables and came over. "Lin Shen? Finally, I recognize him!" He put his backpack on an empty plastic stool next to him and sat down. "This place is nice, lively, much more comfortable than those pretentious coffee shops."

"Thinking that senior might want something with a more down-to-earth feel," Lin Shen said with a smile, pushing the menu over while glancing at Li Feng. He noticed Li Feng's prominent eye bags and that he looked somewhat different from the successful alumnus he remembered. In other words, he lacked a bit of the elite air.

"Want some beer? It'll be cold," Lin Shen asked.

"Absolutely!" Li Feng took the menu and, without any hesitation, ordered a bunch of meat skewers, eggplant, chives, and some ice-cold beer. Then he looked at Lin Shen and said, "So, this is... our first offline meeting as online friends?"

"This is the first in-person meeting between the outsourcing parties!" Lin Shen said, trying to lighten the mood.

As the cold glass bottles clinked together, the two started talking non-stop.

"Speaking of which, I was able to find your phone number thanks to Professor Chen Jianguo." Li Feng took a big gulp of beer and exhaled a satisfying breath. "I happened to be going to the school and wanted to ask the professors to recommend some talented people. You know, we're short-staffed right now, and we need to spend the money we get quickly."

"It's quite a coincidence that you were on the list he gave me. He said you were still working at a small company, but who would have thought you would go to Tencent..." Li Feng put down the wine bottle, tapped his fingers on the cold glass, and looked at it with a probing gaze.

"However, judging from Mr. Chen's tone, you didn't leave a very deep impression on him. He just objectively said that you have a good technical foundation, are serious about your work, and can complete the tasks assigned to you in a closed loop, but you are quiet and not the kind of student who likes to speak in class or participate in club activities. At the time, I thought that this kind of down-to-earth technical person is perfect for our startup company. I never expected that you would be making waves at Tencent in the blink of an eye."

Lin Shen smiled and refilled their glasses. There were some things he didn't need to explain, so he simply echoed, "Professor Chen is right. I'm definitely not the kind of student who stands out. I spend most of my time at school in the lab and library, working on code much more than people. Going to Tencent was just a coincidence; they were expanding their mobile development team, and I was interested in that area."

"Your interest is more than just simple..." Li Feng hesitated, his words trailing off.

"Brother Feng, starting a business must be tough." Lin Shen changed the subject again, but this question seemed to open up a floodgate of conversation for Li Feng.

"Disaster!"

"That's too difficult!"

"Two weeks ago, I had almost forgotten what it felt like to sleep. The Series A funding round was stuck. They wanted us to fix the system stability first before we could talk, but every time we launched an event, the server would crash, and when it crashed, merchants would complain, and when they complained, the data would look bad... It was a vicious cycle."

"The most critical issue is team morale." Li Feng's voice lowered, as if recalling something from the past: "The technical lead worked three consecutive all-nighters and collapsed in the conference room one morning. He was taken to the hospital, where the doctor said it was due to overwork and low blood sugar. General Manager Wang Xin and I went to see him, and he grabbed General Manager Wang's hand and said, 'I'm sorry to the company'... A grown man, crying like a child."

"I later took on the role of technical lead, but the entire technical team consisted of only a dozen or so people. We had to maintain systems in eight cities across the country and develop new features... Lin Shen, tell me, is starting a business difficult?"

"But we made it through..." Lin Shen added.

"We made it through. Do you know what our tech team fears most right now? 'Feng, the marketing department has planned another big event, with expected traffic five times higher than usual, launching next Monday.'"

He put down his chopsticks, his expression turning somewhat bitter: "Every time I hear news like this, my scalp tingles. It's not that we don't want to cooperate with the business, it's just that our system really can't handle it."

It's like forcing a malnourished person to carry a 200-pound sack; the result is that they collapse from exhaustion, and the sack breaks. Last time we tested a "lunch flash sale" in Beijing, when order volume surged, the number of MySQL connections skyrocketed, the payment callback queue piled up, and while users saw successful payments, our backend order status was still "pending payment."

Just checking the data and manually fixing the issues took two all-nighters. The tech team barely slept for those two days; I stayed with them, watching the monitors while mentally cursing the system architecture over and over again.

Lin Shen listened silently, and he could feel the specific, suffocating pressure of operation and maintenance from Li Feng's description.

This is a challenge that all startups must face, and an accident that could happen every minute.

"Besides putting out fires, the bigger headache is construction." Li Feng took a sip of his drink and continued, "The money is coming soon, and we need to recruit more people, expand into new cities, and launch new features."

During interviews, candidates with even a little experience either hesitate or ask for ridiculously high salaries when they hear that we need to maintain a system with heavy technical debt and rapid iteration requirements. New hires would take one or two months just to familiarize themselves with our inherited coding style and "customs," which the business simply cannot afford to wait for.

He looked at Lin Shen: "Junior, I'm not here to complain to you. It's just that you happened to ask, so I'm taking this opportunity to vent. I can't tell the team, because that would undermine morale. I definitely can't tell my family, because that would only make them worry."

Mr. Wang said that a large portion of the Series A funding should be used to address our technological shortcomings, but how? I still have no clue. You and I are both tech people, so we both understand that starting from scratch is impossible; neither time nor business allows it. Continuing to patch things up? But I'm afraid that one day we'll create an even bigger hole. Junior, it's tough!"

Upon hearing this, Lin Shen looked at Li Feng, who was already somewhat drunk after drinking two bottles, and a bold idea popped into his mind.

Perhaps, this meal even brought him some opportunities.

He never expected that Li Feng, who was standing in front of him, would actually be the technical head of Meituan.

Then we can talk to each other...

As the charcoal fire flickered in the stove, he put down the slices of toasted bread in his hand, his expression becoming serious and focused: "Brother Feng, the problem you're facing is the 'growing pains' that many successful companies have experienced in their early stages."

The business is growing too fast, and the technical debt we've accumulated has snowballed into high-interest loans. Paying it all off at once is unrealistic, but we can start with installments, focusing on resolving the high-interest debt that threatens the business's survival and the team's morale.

"Oh? How exactly?" Li Feng cracked open a soybean and asked casually.

"The first step is not to try to achieve a perfect distributed system in one go. Immediately, right now, use the most mature and simple solution, such as Redis, to make the two most critical processes—user order placement and payment callback—asynchronous and queued."

Don't expect to immediately return a success message after a user clicks to pay. Instead, queue up the subsequent heavy operations like inventory locking and order status updates to process them gradually. Even if the queue occasionally gets congested, at least the front-end experience won't crash, and users won't churn. This is the most effective way to prevent being "killed" by traffic in the short term; it's technically inexpensive and yields quick results.

Li Feng put down the food in his hand, and he sensed something different from Lin Shen's words.

"The second step is to immediately set up a very simple monitoring system. It doesn't need to be fancy, but it must be able to monitor several key metrics in real time: database connection count, core interface response time, and whether keywords like 'Timeout' or 'Connection failed' appear in the error logs. Once an anomaly is detected, it should automatically send a text message to the on-duty mobile phone."

The goal is to ensure that "someone is called to the scene within five minutes of a problem occurring," transforming firefighting from "blindly searching for the source of the fire" to "pressing the alarm to extinguish the fire."

Li Feng seemed to have sobered up a bit, and he even took out paper and pen from his bag and started taking notes.

The third step is to acknowledge that the old code cannot be modified for the time being, but all new feature development and old code modifications must adhere to the simplest modular conventions. This may be as simple as placing code from different business domains in different subdirectories and defining clear API call methods.

This isn't for now; it's so that six months from now, when your team expands to 50 or 100 people, you can still manage to develop collaboratively, rather than falling into even greater chaos.