A readme of an old open source person - how to do open source well

17 The great sailing age of the th century , European voyagers opened up new routes and discovered new continents all over the world , At the same time , Europe developed a nascent capitalism , This pair of nautical maps 、 The measurement of distance and space has greatly promoted . 

At the same time , Descartes, a famous French mathematician, is studying analytic geometry and coordinate system , Data analysis in two or three dimensions , This has become an important step in the history of data visualization . meanwhile , Early probability theory and demographic research began to emerge . These can be said to have been recorded , The earliest exploration of data visualization . 

The time came to 2022 year , We are already in the era of big data and artificial intelligence , The amount of data in the world increases exponentially every year , So we can see , In recent years, a large number of data visualization vendors have emerged , With existing large factory background DataV, There are also many excellent independent software companies .

The person we are interviewing today , He happens to be the head of a data visualization project . Although I am a colleague of a company , But because the workplace is in different cities , This is our first meeting , The location is about Marvel cafe near tenghe building .

Tiger Wang He said he liked the iron man in Manville best . today , He still remembers Tony Stark A famous saying of , Jarvis , Before we learn to go , Learn to run first ！ This spirit has also been applied to open source projects .

Two developers who like open source

Talk about how to join the cloud wisdom ,Tiger About four years ago , I am still exploring the field of visualization . Also participated in Alibaba's open source project AntV The contribution of .

  Later, the visualization scenarios with large amount of data , And performance 、 Speed up processing is of particular interest , It was very challenging at that time , Also very much hope to be able to do related things . At that time, cloud wisdom was just doing APM（Application Performance Monitor）, For data collection 、 Data reporting 、 Data analysis and performance management , All need visual assistance , And it needs to have high requirements for the performance and speed of visualization .

  In a casual stroll Github The community met the then technical director of cloud intelligence , And now AIOps Community PMC（Neeke ）, When you see Neeke It's also SeasLog The founder of the open source project . After several conversations ,Tiger Just feel , This man can get along with , He really understands open source .

  later , They communicated a lot , Communicate a lot of visual scenarios 、 I also talked about many existing business scenarios of cloud intelligence . Last in 18 Year of 6 Month officially joined cloud wisdom .

broken

After adding cloud wisdom ,Tiger Start to be responsible for the development of visualization modules , Take the small partners of the team to attack the field of data visualization , He said , We are a family to B The company , When helping enterprises with operation and maintenance management , Some large data visualization screens are needed to help the operation and maintenance engineers on the customer side to monitor and manage .

  The requirements for large visual screens are generally very high , Especially for UI、 Animation 、 High performance requirements . In addition, different data visualization screens will be output for different scenarios of customers , This is a great challenge for our research and development . 

2020 Especially in , This year, due to the rapid development of the company , The business volume of data visualization is increasing rapidly , The workload of large screen research and development has also become particularly huge . The members of the R & D team have gradually increased from the initial few to more than 30 , The expansion of personnel brings more than just costs , And for personnel training 、 Quality assurance also brings great challenges . 

Now , Put on Tiger There are two big problems ahead , While reducing costs , And improve the quality , It is what we usually laugh at 、 And 、 still more . In order to meet the above requirements ,Tiger Led the team to try in many directions

• Unified development framework 、Eslint、Prettier、 Underlying engine encapsulation （ Handle multi port adaptation 、 Compatible processing 、 performance optimization ）

• Control dependent versions 、 Strengthen development specifications 、commit Submit specifications 、 Branch specification 、 Code Review

• Build a common component library , Add abstract and complex components 、 Construction tools 、 Reduce the complexity of special scenes

The effect is also quite obvious , The development threshold has been lowered slightly 、 Learning is also convenient 、 Reusability is also available . Talking about it here , He said that although he had done a lot of work , But it is still far from enough , They were overwhelmed by business . Now , A voice in the team sounded , Or we can improve the efficiency of the whole low code platform ？ 

Do as you say , After weeks of closed raids ,Tiger Led the team to refactor the engine of visual products , And the characteristics of large screen visualization scene are integrated into it .

  Within two weeks ,Tiger And everyone in the team has done a lot of work , From the design of the underlying engine , To component definitions 、 Event definition 、 function 、 The definition of data set and other core concepts are abstracted , Implementation and development of logic, etc . This new product is named flying fish （FlyFish） It was named flying fish , It is expected to be as fast and flexible as a flying fish . The concepts of modularity and componentization are also reflected in flying fish

Of this product logo On

It's an artifact

With the flying fish platform , It is faster and easier to develop with low code , No longer need to consider compatibility 、 performance 、 Effects, etc , It can be developed without setting up a basic environment , After the development, it can be quickly shared with other students , Components 、 The large screen also achieves sedimentation and reuse . 

At the same time, it allows people who do not understand the code to make a large visual screen , For example, pre-sales 、 Customer success manager, etc , You can make a large visual screen while drinking coffee with the customer , Reduce the loss of internal requirements transmission . After two months of internal use ,Tiger A survey was conducted and it was found that the internal efficiency was improved 75% about , In a real sense Mention mass efficiency 、 Cost saving and consumption reduction .

Up to now, the flying fish platform has experienced n Second issue 、 polishing , With project management 、 The workbench 、API Pipette 、 Data source query 、 Data model 、 Visual drag , One click deployment and other functions , so to speak ,FlyFish Already have the ability of enterprise level low code . And cloud intelligence has been continuously used internally , Hundreds of projects have been delivered to date , Deposited thousands of large screens and components ！

Open source

When we asked , There are so many visual products on the market , There are also many open source products , There is no lack of among them BAT Some of our heavyweight products , If open source , What are the advantages of your product ,Tiger smiled , He said that he and his classmates in the team have thought about this problem many times . 

First , There is no doubt about the correctness of open source , Over the past ten years, we have clearly found that , Open source is becoming an infrastructure like existence in the field of software development . No matter how powerful an individual or company is, it cannot resist the wisdom of global developers .

  Another question ,FlyFish Open source or not , Facing the open source products of giant companies , What are our strengths , Especially open source is very taboo to build wheels repeatedly . 

But remember FlyFish The birth process of this product ,Tiger say FlyFish The most difference from other products is , We are a user group oriented developer , And actively embrace Open source Data visualization products .

He said , You can take a look at the visual products currently on the market , Although there are many kinds , But they are basically for non-technical people , None of them are for developers . This inevitably makes us have some “ Unpleasant place ” 

at that time , He also investigated many foreign visual open source products , But it is always difficult to conform to the domestic business scenarios , Especially the demand of large screen development .

so to speak , If there was one on the market that could meet their business needs , And open source software for the developer community , Will not be born FlyFish 了 .

  Developers are a group of creative people , You make them stick to the rules , Use only existing components to build visual applications , Instead of developing it yourself , For developers , It's too bad . 

He said , At present, there are many visual component libraries in the front end , such as Echarts. that , Can there be a platform product , You can ignore the front-end technology stack , Compatible with most component libraries on the market , So that developers can maximize the development of their own visual applications , This is the advantage of flying fish .

  He said , In the past, we used to use FlyFish I have done a lot of commercialization projects , Delivered an unknown number of large commercial screens , We did not expect that the domestic demand for visualization is so strong .FlyFish From zero to one , We are on the right track .

future , What else to do

Talking about the future ,Tiger It's a long time ago . There are still many things waiting for him to do . although FlyFish Multiple versions have been iterated internally , But our open source business is just starting , Open source FlyFish It's still at a very early stage , There is still a lot of work waiting for us to do .

 Tiger Point to the architecture diagram in front of the computer screen and say , Only from the code level , We just open source the functions of the application layer , future , Storage layer 、 Data tiering 、 We should gradually open source these data sources . Open source is more than just opening up the code , developer 、 Community is more important than code , Our documents need to be optimized , Our teaching video is not perfect , The incentive policy for developers needs to be improved .

To his delight , At present, many developers have participated in it , Some are contributing components , Some of them put forward many valuable suggestions for the products See these active developers ,Tiger Again remind of the 4 Years ago he participated in AntV Scenarios of open source projects . The difference is , At that time he was a contributor to open source . Now? , He is leading an open source project .

Wang Haihu , Open source project FlyFish project PMC, Cloud intelligence R & D Manager , Full stack engineer , Focus on visualization 、3D engine 、3D gis scene 、 Low code, etc .AlOps Members of the community expert panel . Open source project AntV contributor , Tsinghua University Thulab Of DWF One of the project developers .

More benefits

FlyFish Open source , Click the address link below , Welcome to FlyFish Like to send Star. Participate in component development , There are ten thousand yuan in cash waiting for you to get .

GitHub Address ： https://github.com/CloudWise-OpenSource/FlyFish

Gitee Address ：https://gitee.com/CloudWise/fly-fish

Ten thousand yuan cash activities ：http://bbs.aiops.cloudwise.com/t/Activity