Rebirth 04: Starting from Taking an Unconventional Approach

Chapter 153 Technical Checkup

Han Fei and Wen Jie entered the conference room occupied by the technical department and immediately stopped upon hearing the voices inside. The headquarters' technical team had been responsible for the system's daily operation and monitoring, as well as continuous in-depth optimization and feature implementation.

Lin Feng spends one to two hours each day reviewing the core code with Wen Jie, essentially providing hands-on guidance as a senior technical advisor. The technical team requires Wen Jie to document the system architecture, interface specifications, and common problem handling, helping him establish standards and lay the foundation for leading a team in the future.

They even conducted two emergency drills, simulating "SP interface suddenly failing" and "database connection pool full", allowing Wen Jie to troubleshoot and resolve them independently.

"Shall we not disturb you?" Han Fei said.

"President Han, you've come at the right time." Zhou Ming looked away from the computer and at Han Fei. "We were reviewing the logs of yesterday's emergency drill and also talked about the A/B testing module that Wen Jie wrote."

Lin Feng sat up straight in his chair and cleared his throat: "When Wen Jie ran out just now, I told Engineer Zhou that he must have gone to find President Han. The idea behind that module is fine, but there are a few pitfalls in its implementation. For example, the randomness algorithm for sample distribution is currently based on timestamp modulo, which will cause serious hash skew when the concurrency increases."

"Uh... really?" Wenjie said.

"Look here," Wang Zhe pulled up a bar chart: "We simulated 10,000 QPS requests, and the largest deviation in the timestamp modulo distribution was 18%. If we use this logic to conduct copywriting comparison tests, the conclusions might be misleading."

Wen Jie leaned closer to the screen: "I thought about this problem when I was writing it, but I was in a hurry to make a sample, so I used the simplest solution first. I originally planned to optimize it after the user base grew."

"It's okay, I've already thought of an optimization plan," Lin Feng said, turning the computer screen around. "We'll change it to consistent hashing plus user ID bucketing, and the deviation can be reduced to within 3%. The demo is ready, and it can be integrated in ten minutes."

Han Fei saw a concise piece of PHP code on the screen, with clear comments. Although he couldn't understand the specific logic, he knew from Wen Jie's expression that this was indeed a better solution.

"Mr. Zhou," Han Fei said with a smile, "I originally thought you were just helping us with system hardening and interface integration, but I didn't expect you to even optimize business-related functions like A/B testing for us. You've worked so hard."

"President Han," Zhou Ming said, "when headquarters sent us here, General Manager Liu only instructed us to solidify the technical foundation of the Qingniao pilot project, ensuring it can run, withstand pressure, and thrive. As for what constitutes 'solid,' that's for us to judge. Although A/B testing is a business-oriented function, it directly relates to the efficiency of your conversion rate optimization. If this module has hidden problems, fixing them after you reach a million users would be too costly. We're just helping you fill in the gaps, which is our way of fulfilling our responsibilities."

Han Fei nodded, thinking that this was probably the engineer's most basic obsession with engineering quality.

"Alright, then I won't stand on ceremony with you."

"President Han, you don't need to stand on ceremony with us," Lin Feng said. "We've pretty much cracked the tough nuts, and the current architecture should be able to support your user growth for the next few months without any problems. Next, we'll help you complete the integration of the Guangdong pilot program, give the newly recruited technical staff a brief training, and then we can leave."

"So fast?" Han Fei and Wen Jie said in unison.

"Yes, and we can see that Wen Jie is getting better and better at troubleshooting, optimizing slow queries, and even rebuilding modules on his own. To be honest, having us here sometimes makes him more dependent on us. We've done everything we can and should do, and now it's time for Wen Jie and his soon-to-be-assembled team to take the lead."

Wen Jie blinked and took a breath: "I didn't expect you guys to leave so soon. You've taught me more during this time than I have to figure it out on my own in the past year."

"You're reluctant to part with it?" Wang Zhe laughed a few times. "Don't worry, Boss Fang has instructed that every two months, our team will send one person over for a technical check-up to see if there are any major hidden dangers."

Consider it... a remote healthcare provider.

"Really?" Wen Jie smiled. "That's great. I thought I'd never see you again."

""

"What are you thinking about?" Han Fei said with a smile. "Qingniao and China Mobile have a long-term partnership, and we'll be in frequent contact in the future. Let's get down to business, the filtering system."

The two sat down in front of Wen Jie's computer and heard Lin Feng and Wang Zhe laughing.

"Brother Fei, let me break it down into sections." Wen Jie pulled up a simple list page with several filter tabs at the top and a dense list of submissions below. "First, there's the database and submission portal. I've created three tables: the main submission table, the tagging log table, and the material database table. The submission portal is already on Qingniao Reading's WAP site; it's just a link at the bottom that says 'Tell Your Story.' Clicking it leads to a very simple form; fill in your story and contact information, and you can submit. The backend automatically records the submission time and IP address. The initial screening uses a PHP-written filtering script that automatically runs through all new submissions every morning. The filtering criteria are: first, by length—submissions shorter than fifteen Chinese characters are immediately placed in the queue for manual review and marked as too short; second, duplicate detection—submissions that are completely identical or have a similarity exceeding 80% are merged; and finally, a keyword blacklist—submissions containing 'GG,' politically sensitive terms, or obviously prohibited words are directly thrown into the trash can, which can be periodically emptied so they won't enter the normal review process."

"How did the test go?"

"I ran it through more than 400 real submissions. So far, it can automatically filter out 80% of the spam submissions, but the false positive rate is a bit high."

How tall is it?

"About 15% of the promising submissions were marked as too short or suspected of being duplicates. Some submissions that were exactly fifteen characters long but semantically complete were blocked by my rules. But there are no performance issues. It takes less than two seconds to process four hundred submissions, so it won't affect the main site's SP interface. Moreover, I left a backdoor. All submissions that are automatically rejected will not be actually deleted. They will be archived for a month, so if they are mistakenly deleted, they can be retrieved."

Han Fei nodded: "How far are we from being able to officially use it?"

Wen Jie thought for a moment: "Give me a few more days. I want to optimize the short text semantic judgment, add a simple suspense word library, such as 'later,' 'result,' 'originally,' and 'but.' If one of these words is matched, it will automatically gain higher weight, without being limited by length. I want to reduce the false positive rate to below 5%. In addition, I want to add a batch export function to the list of submissions to be mined, so that editors can export all the submissions that need to be followed up and make phone calls at once."

"Okay, let's put this on hold for a day. After Lu Hai gets the contract tomorrow morning, he needs to start pushing the product to Guangdong immediately. Get ready."

"Okay, don't worry about that."