What Meituan‑Dianping’s Top 10 Tech Articles Reveal About 2016 Trends

Background

Inspired by an Einstein quote about the illusion of past, present, and future, the Meituan‑Dianping technology team reflects on its two‑year‑plus journey since the "Meituan‑Dianping Tech" public account launched in September 2014 and the earlier tech blog started in December 2013.

The blog has consistently published practical engineering experiences, reaching a milestone of 55 articles in 2016 and achieving the original goal of one article per week.

Top 10 Articles of 2016

10. "The Practice Path of Meituan‑Dianping Payment Channel Gateway" – by Li Li, a deep dive into a high‑availability payment system and its fail‑fast mechanism for fault channels.

9. "Deep Analysis of Open‑Source Distributed Monitoring CAT" – by You Yong, an extensive design review of CAT, the most widely used open‑source monitoring system inside the company.

8. "Spark in Meituan: Real‑World Practices" – by Zeng Linxi, Li Xuerui, Qin Siyuan, Bi Yan, Huang Zhong, showcasing Spark’s role in the massive data platform supporting Meituan’s e‑commerce operations.

7. "Evolution of Meituan‑Waimai Order Center" – by He Shi, a chronological summary of how the order core system scaled to 9 million daily orders.

6. "New Thinking on CRM Systems" – by Liu Ding, discussing digital transformation levels (standardization, automation, intelligence) and the challenges of building strong R&D teams.

5. "Android Hot‑Update Solution Robust" – by Wu Kun, Ding Xu, Zhang Meng, describing a robust instant‑run‑based hot‑update framework for Android apps.

4. "Common Performance Optimization Strategies" – by Xiao Ming, a systematic collection of performance‑tuning techniques gathered from many frontline engineers.

3. "Java 8 Series: Rethinking HashMap" – by Qian Li, an in‑depth look at HashMap internals and related Java 8 enhancements.

2. "Message Queue Design Essentials" – by Wang Ye, a comprehensive overview of message‑queue design principles and practical implementations.

1. "Testing Automation and Tools" – a collection of five articles covering iOS UI automation with KIF, Android UI automation with Appium, template‑driven test case generation, and the in‑house load‑testing platform.

Emerging Directions

The team highlights three strategic focus areas for 2017:

Testing : expanding automated UI testing, continuous integration, and performance testing tools.

Cloud Computing : sharing experiences on distributed block storage (Ursa) and upcoming projects such as Docker platforms, object storage, and DPDK‑based load balancers.

Algorithms & AI : publishing more deep‑learning (CNN, RNN, GAN) and feature‑engineering articles, building on recent Hackathon successes.

Looking ahead, Meituan‑Dianping plans to maintain a rhythm of at least two technical practice articles per week, host monthly offline tech salons, and regularly broadcast online technical live streams, converting them into written articles for broader readership.