Since the development of FastDFS in 2008, the company has been in the open source field for so far. Yu Qing has been in this “river and lake” for ten years. Today, the FastDFS distributed file system is still highly regarded in the industry, and it can maintain its vitality. Yu Qing, the founder, has made a lot of efforts.

The open source spirit of an Internet veteran

Such "effort" not only refers to the tireless continuous improvement of the project, but also his care for the user community. In order to make it easier and smoother for everyone to use FastDFS, Yu Qing pays great attention to communication and communication with users. In 2009, he launched the FastDFS section in conjunction with the ChinaUnix community, and served as moderator, answering questions for users over the years.

Yu Qing is not only deeply connected with ChinaUnix, but also an old friend of the ITPUB community. He has served as a guest speaker and host at the China System Architects Conference (SACC) hosted by ITPUB. On the SACC 2018, which ended more than a month ago, it was invited to be the host of the main venue. He is active online and offline and can explore anywhere in IT technology.

In addition to FastDFS, Yu Qing has also opened up open source projects such as Libfastcommon, Libserverframe, Libshmcache, Fastconfig, Watchd and Fastkengine on GitHub.

Active in the open source community comes from his enthusiasm for IT technology and the philosophy he has been sticking to in his ten years of open source career – the true open source spirit is participation.

“A few years ago, domestic companies used open source as a KPI or a mobile open source. It turns out that such an open source project has no vitality.” Yu Qing, who has experienced almost half of the timeline in China’s open source industry, said: “Besides letting everyone use it. It also needs everyone to be involved. Users and open source project members have a good interaction, based on the core project members, relying on the community to continuously improve and improve the open source project. In addition to contributing code and documentation, feedback questions , bugs and suggestions are also a good way to contribute to open source projects."

An open source project for technical experts

The Fastkengine mentioned above should be able to say that it is an excellent product of Yu Qing’s own open source contribution. Fastkengine is a smart question answering system based on keyword matching. Users can ask questions in natural language and the system gives the most accurate answers. For the user search problem, the more keywords are matched, the corresponding question and answer entries more precisely match the user problem.

In order to answer the user's questions, Yu Qing has opened three technical exchange communities. At present, the three large groups are basically full. Although "people" does not cause "cause", but the problems are more and more inevitable, but many users' questions have already been answered in the forum.

This presents a very real problem: users are always unable to find the results they want quickly and accurately, whether in forums or search engines.

Fastkengine is conceived by Yu Qing to solve this problem. It is a more advanced technical communication method than traditional forums and IM (such as QQ group, WeChat group, etc.). It combines the advantages of search engine and expert system and can greatly enhance Find the efficiency of the problem resolution.

As a question and answer system, Fastkengine has a more advanced positioning, based on expert experience and knowledge, through search engine technology to solve various problems in specific segments, including intractable diseases.

Fastkengine currently needs to manually clean up the knowledge base with questions and answers. For a question and answer entry, in the question part, you need to manually enumerate the common questions of the user, that is, one answer corresponds to one or more questions. A question consists of one or more keywords separated by spaces. For the sake of simplicity and effectiveness, there is currently a need for manual Chinese word segmentation.

When all the keywords in a question match (space-separated keywords, not prioritized), the question is matched. Fastkengine's matching keywords not only support Chinese and English respectively, but also support mixed modes. Fastkengine was simple and flexible when configuring the list of issues.

In addition, Fastkengine adopts a synonym approach, which greatly reduces the knowledge base collation workload and can effectively improve the coverage of user problems.

According to Yu Qing, Fastkengine currently provides C API and PHP extensions, followed by the Java SDK. The technical threshold for implementation is low, and it is completely feasible for enterprises to build an intelligent customer service system based on Fastkengine.

Currently the Fastkengine project is hosted on Github, project address:

https://github.com/happyfish100/fastkengine

In addition, Yu Qing also launched the fastken.com website based on Fastkengine, mainly serving software technicians. Currently, it mainly promotes FastDFS Q&A and Unix intelligent question answering system. The Unix question and answer mainly includes Unix commands, system and environment related questions and answers, and will be extended to other fields, such as Java programming language, Nginx related questions and so on. The fastken.com website encourages everyone to contribute knowledge items or make small contributions to the correction of existing knowledge items.

For the AI ​​technology with unlimited prospects, Yu Qing also made plans in Fastkengine. He said: "At present, Fastkengine needs to manually sort out the problem list by using keywords. After adding AI technology, the knowledge organizer only needs to describe the problem. Yes, the problem list is automatically generated by the system. The knowledge modeling is automatically completed by NLP (Natural Language Processing) and AI understanding problem description."

a suggestion

At the end of the interview, Yu Qing, as a participant, was excited to convey the recognition of the status quo of the domestic open source industry. He said: "Open source software is the cornerstone of the Internet technology industry. More and more companies in China are putting money and manpower. Investing in open source projects. In addition to the increasing number of domestic companies that use patch to give back to the open source community, the number of sponsored open source projects has gradually increased. This is a very good phenomenon. I believe that open source software is promising in China."

But the problem is also there. At present, domestic open source projects are basically of a public welfare nature. It is difficult to have a profit model, which is mainly driven and supported by the core members' open source spirit and sense of accomplishment and honor. Yu Qing said that he hopes that there will be organizations like the Apache Foundation in China, so that contributors can do open source projects full time. With the blessing of the foundation, the open source project is bound to develop better and last longer!