"If you don't dare to take a risk, it's not a Silicon Valley Enterprise"

On Monday evening, I had dinner with CTO Jonathan Palley of idapted through my friend Alex. Idapted is an Internet innovation company that just entered China a month ago. Several major partners are graduates of Stanford. Its main business direction is to provide language training services to users through a new generation of web technology, the business model is clear and the core team is very powerful. Jonathan is the CTO of the company. He named his Chinese name Pang Jun ". He is a graduate of Stanford's physics department. He is not very tall and has a long beard from foreigners. But he is very young. At a glance, he seems to be the top smart talented scientists in American science fiction movies.

Alex talked to Jonathan about entrepreneurship, while I talked to him about technology. Although he is very modest and constantly says that he is not a good programmer, he just glances at the Technology and gives me some technical details. I usually think that I am concerned about new technologies. When I talk with friends in China, I usually know each other about technical terms or products. But in front of this Silicon Valley dude, I was actually explicit. Many of the things he mentioned are unknown to me, and I learned from his introduction that these are currently hot technologies in Silicon Valley. I don't want to admit it, but in front of a foreigner from the IT Holy Land, I am really ignorant.

Jonathan chose Ruby on Rails as the web development framework for idapted. As my familiar friends know, I have recently become a fan of a dynamic language. Python, Ruby, and PHP have become very popular in my eyes. For a few months I have been using python to do anything I want to do. These practices have greatly changed my views on programming, there is a revolutionary mood of "I am here to worship me burned down. But even so, when I hear that an ambitious Internet company that is likely to expand on a large scale is betting on its core business on a young, scary technical architecture like Ruby on Rails, I still have to admit that Jonathan is much more revolutionary than me.

I asked him the same question several times: "Do you really have to worry about using Ruby on Rails ?" His answer is "no ." He told me that there are three reasons for choosing ror. First, he liked this lightweight, concise, and bright web development framework. Second, one or two Internet companies in Silicon Valley have used ror well. Third, they are innovative enterprises in Silicon Valley, and they must take risks. Is it a Silicon Valley enterprise that cannot take risks technically? Ror is too young. Of course there are still such problems. But as long as there is a problem, we can solve it. Isn't technology progress and development like this?

To be honest, I was deeply touched by his third reason. It seems that I have not heard such a "rhetoric" for many years. Many technical experts, especially experienced experts, are so experienced and knowledgeable that we can always stand at the global height and talk about the company's business, operation, and strategy, in this case, I would like to list the unquestionable reasons for my technical conservative attitude. I know this is because our environment is too different from those of Jonathan, and our experience is too different from those of Jonathan. Jonathan was not afraid of failure, so he dared to pursue success. In Silicon Valley, failure is the mother of success. Here, once we fail, it may mean a series of crashes. Therefore, we can also understand why Silicon Valley is always at the center of innovation and technological revolution. Many of us have discovered that after many years of technological development, in fact, Beijing's Sichuan hot pot store is much better than what it is about.

Jonathan does not know python. Although I have learned Ruby, I forgot about it. So I spoke to each other about the characteristics of the two. I told him that I don't think there is anything in ruby that python cannot do. Even the most amazing thing can be done with Python's descriptor, decorator, and metaclass. But David Hansson chose Ruby as the rails development language, which is a pity for python. I also told Jonathan that in China, many programmers dislike Ruby only because its creator, Song benhong, is a Japanese. He said they certainly don't mind this, but Ruby doesn't have a clear evolutionary model like python, which makes them a little uncertain. He said he hoped to see Ruby become an international language and have a clear evolutionary model as soon as possible. I am joking that perhaps the solution that can solve both of our problems at the same time is that everyone is working together to seize Ruby's dominance.

I took him back by subway. On the subway, he said to Beijing, which has just lived for a month, that the people here are young and energetic. However, it is complicated to look at the tired young faces sitting in the subway seats in the region. I think the technical enthusiasm and energy on him envy me. Through him, I seem to have seen the spirit of Silicon Valley.

By the way, Jonathan made a recruitment advertisement :-) idapted is recruiting people now, hoping to find some experienced web developers who have a series of W3C Web-related standards (HTTP, HTML, CSS, XML) and JavaScript has real work experience. It is best to have real development experience in dynamic languages (Python, PHP, Ruby, Perl). If you have some knowledge about VoIP, it would be even better. According to Jonathan, the treatment they give is still very competitive, especially in the option aspect. They hope to find some truly competent web developers and join their technical teams. I think this may be a good opportunity for many developers who are passionate about technology. Specific recruitment information can see this link: http://jobs.idapted.com /? Programmers, this webpage also has Jonathan's own contact information. If you are interested, you can contact him directly.