Qunar Development Best Practices: Lessons from “Old He’s 1001 Nights”

These guidelines, originally posted on Qunar’s internal wiki “Old He’s 1001 Nights”, outline practical development and operational best practices for engineers.

When testing, verify URLs both with and without a trailing slash.

When writing HTML, question any unexpected tags or whitespace with the front‑end team.

When modifying your own programs or APIs, consider other users and check whether anyone is already using them.

When implementing features, review others’ code as well, and notify teammates in chat or group when you change their code.

Validate all external input parameters for any data interface.

For uploaded images, apply appropriate format conversion and cropping.

Treat every input with security‑aware handling.

When writing code, refactor old code to prevent accumulation of technical debt.

Write meaningful logs to simplify later troubleshooting and consider operational impact while coding.

When outputting data, convert UTF‑8 to GBK for Windows‑based colleagues if needed.

Proactively cover for absent teammates by handling their tasks.

When changes affect others (new API, architecture, version upgrade), aim for transparency; avoid frequent, disruptive modifications.

Author: He Weiping, senior search technology researcher at Qunar’s Vacation Business Unit, former Yahoo China search engineer, and translator of the first Chinese PostgreSQL manual and Programming Perl third edition.