What's wrong with me being a rich man?

Chapter 222 I Want More
As soon as we entered February, the atmosphere of the New Year seemed to suddenly become stronger.

Bai Xiaosheng not only decorated the company with lights and colors, but also made the website interface look festive, which seemed very appropriate for the occasion.

As a user who is accustomed to hanging out on this forum to criticize current affairs, Ge Zhijie is very satisfied with Bai Xiaosheng's timely adjustments, and is also very impressed by its vitality.

Otherwise, how could they build a successful career platform? Otherwise, how could their number of users exceed two million?

Ge Zhijie had a favorable impression of the Bai Xiaosheng website and even the management behind it, which was a rare feeling he had since he started surfing the Internet, so he had to praise the "doctor" for his skills.

So, when he received a private message from "Doctor" that day, he responded very familiarly.

Yu Xing: Hello, Mr. Ge. I heard from someone that you have a lot of insights into the development of Symbian programs?

Ge Zhijie is a programmer at Baidu. In his spare time, he often shares his views on technology in forums. After receiving a private message from the founder of Bai Xiaosheng, he felt like a "strange old acquaintance" and replied directly: What's the matter, do you have any private work?
Not humble at all, nor polite at all.

After this conversation, Ge Zhijie exchanged contact information with the "doctor" and made two consecutive phone calls to discuss the development of Symbian software.

As a technician, Ge Zhijie could clearly feel that the "doctor" did not know much about the technology in this area. When he was talking incessantly, the other party was just being polite and trying to listen.

However, as a programmer with rich experience, Ge Zhijie also has the correct way to handle product requirements.

Hearing the "doctor"'s struggling expression on the third call, he couldn't help but interrupt and said, "Dr. Yu, don't talk about these requirements. Just tell me which software you want to copy."

There was silence on the phone for a moment.

Ge Zhijie felt that this statement might be a bit abrupt, so he laughed dryly and said, "It's like this, um, um, Dr. Yu, just tell me which software you want to benchmark against, so that it will be easier for me to understand."

According to the product manager's description, it is benchmarking, not copying.

"Teacher Ge..." Yu Xing murmured on the phone, "Fetion, simple Fetion, Fetion that can be used across carriers."

Currently, Fetion can only be used between China Mobile users, so cross-border is a key feature.

Ge Zhijie understood instantly, and recovered from the emotion of meeting a "strange old acquaintance". He started thinking seriously: "Well, Mr. Yu, a communication tool that can connect China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom, right? This seems to be able to compete with Fetion."

“Yes,” Yu Xing confirmed, and added, “Or, we can target QQ, a simple QQ without all the fancy features.”

When Ge Zhijie heard the name QQ, he was startled. Instinctively, he thought of the properties of the two competing products: a mobile IM tool?

He couldn't help but ask, "Mr. Yu, this may be difficult to expand, right? It looks like it will overlap with Penguin's market. There are no very successful products on the market, and all the previous competitors have died."

Yu Xing asked, "How about the technical aspect? Mr. Ge, what I need to know now is this: if you form a small team, how long will it take to develop this kind of product? How many people will be needed?"

Ge Zhijie did not answer immediately, but silently pondered this need.

There was no urging from the other end of the phone.

After a long time, Ge Zhijie first answered a question: "The difficulty of development is not that great. Two or three people can slowly make it. Of course, they cannot be novices. I estimate it will take two or three months. But this is not just a matter of making it. It is actually quite complicated, because when you really put it into operation, you need to adapt to different versions of Symbian. These have differences in API support and system characteristics, and you need to make targeted code adjustments and function optimizations."

"For example, some UI components may display abnormally in certain versions or network API calls may fail, etc."

"Also, the screen resolutions of Symbian devices vary from the relatively small QVGA, which is 240×320, to very high resolutions, which requires the use of appropriate layout strategies and image resource management, ensuring the use of scalable vector graphics resources, etc."

Ge Zhijie talked nonstop, and after taking a sip of water, he decided to mention one more thing: "In addition, the memory resources of the Symbian system are relatively limited. The code must promptly release unused memory objects. For example, for dynamically allocated arrays, memory must be strictly recycled after use."

Just as he was about to finish, another key question flashed through his mind: "Since it is instant messaging, considering the situation of running in the background for a long time to maintain network connection, this requires optimizing the code logic to reduce power consumption, for example, setting a reasonable polling time interval."

"In short, from development to actual combat, problems are likely to be encountered in all aspects." Ge Zhijie answered the question seriously. After a moment, he heard the question from Mr. Yu.

"Why not just use Symbian's native UI framework, the Akn (Application User Interface Skin), and Qt for Symbian, to ensure system consistency, performance optimization, and cross-platform development?" Yu Xing asked awkwardly.

Ge Zhijie could almost imagine Mr. Yu reading the materials or the words on the screen. He suppressed his laughter and replied, "Sure, but this is the general direction, this is the technical level of implementation. I'm afraid you don't understand, so I'll talk about what you can understand. Specifically, for example, what protocol should be used for network communication? The new WebSocket that came out in the past two years has actually performed well, but it is still in the draft stage, and is mainly experimentally supported in the emerging mobile operating systems iOS and Android."

"Most Symbian phones use a browser engine based on WebKit, which cannot implement the latest HTML5 features that appear on other platforms."

“Well, the WebSocket protocol has great potential…”

Ge Zhijie muttered to himself, and after thinking for a while, he said, "For Symbian, you can use custom HTTP long polling. Although it is not so efficient, it is not a problem to use it."

He stopped talking. After a while, seeing that the line was still silent, he had no choice but to ask, "Mr. Yu, are you thinking?"

"Oh, oh, you're done, right? I thought there was something else going on." Yu Xing said honestly, "I didn't quite understand it, but I feel like there's something to it."

Ge Zhijie smiled and said, "Is that so? Mr. Yu, do you want to let me have a try on your private work?"

Yu Xing asked directly: "Teacher Ge, I think you are quite reliable, but you still need to interview me. After all, I don't understand technical issues. Are you willing to leave Baidu?"

Ge Zhijie said with a bit of amusement: "It turns out that it's not a private job, but you want to poach people. But, Mr. Yu, your software has no future. I will go there to work for a few months, and then there will be no news after the interview. If you lay me off again, I will ask for a few months of premium salary. What do I want?"

He felt the familiar stupidity of a product manager.

"Teacher Ge, you just said that there are many problems in development and actual combat, and private work cannot be guaranteed continuously." Yu Xing said directly, "If you have no problem with the subsequent interview, you can assemble a Saipan team to do development. This year in 2010, the total salary package I will give this team is million, and we can negotiate more reasonably. Apart from this, our year-end bonus will be calculated separately."

Ge Zhijie's breathing paused slightly. If you say so... I have to say that Mr. Yu has a good idea...

Seeing no sound on the phone, Yu Xing continued, "Of course, it also depends on whether Teacher Ge is qualified for this position. To be honest, there will be some competition."

Ge Zhijie didn't care much about the competition. After a brief thought, he asked, "Boss Yu, it's easy to draw a pie in the sky, but what if you deliberately find fault with me, cause trouble, and cut my money at will? Also, is your negotiation, no matter how reasonable it is, really reasonable?"

"If you ask me that, how can I answer? Who can say that they would cheat?" Yu Xing smiled. "Teacher Ge, I see that you are a senior user of Bai Xiaosheng. I can only say that from the establishment of the website to now, do you think I am that kind of person?"

Ge Zhijie's mind quickly flashed back to Dr. Yu's achievements, including his criticism of Internet love and marriage, his forced removal of the working emperor, his arrest of the real attacker, his reluctance to go on stage to help, and his 72-hour pursuit...

He let out a long breath, word of mouth!!

Ge Zhijie was silent for a long time, and then said: "Mr. Yu, since you want to make such a benchmark product, do you only develop Symbian software? What about iOS and Android? These two emerging mobile operating systems actually have great potential."

Yu Xing was surprised and asked, "Teacher Ge, what do you mean?"

"I mainly work on C++ at Baidu, but I don't only know C++. I also have a good understanding of Objective-C and Java." Ge Zhijie added a concise self-introduction and emphasized the key points, "I want more!"

The development language of Symbian is mainly C++, that of iOS is Objective-C, which is a superset of C, and that of Android is Java.

Ge Zhijie has always maintained a strong curiosity and research on emerging knowledge in the industry, which also gives him strong self-confidence.

Yu Xing felt this confidence and replied with two words with a smile: "Okay."

As long as you can do it, that's fine.

Don't be afraid that you ask for more. The better you are, the more likely it is that a big company will pay for your salary today.

(End of this chapter)