Wix Server Guild was established ten years ago and became the golden standard of how an “operational guild” should be. It was the first guild we created at Wix, and we keep scaling and running it full steam ahead while reinventing ourselves all the time as we go along.
From Velocity to Onboarding, Internal Mobility, Hiring and more - watch Aviran Mordo, Aviva Peisach, Dana Avital, Yuval Perry, Avi Perez, Nicol Marcus and Borys Bulyha share the behind the scene of our Server Guild’s 2022 highlights, focus and achievements:
Guild Days
In 2022 we had 35 guild days. What are guild days? Every Thursday all our server developers breakaway for 3 hours of talks, knowledge sharing, training, and hands-on workshops. Yes every week, 3 hours for sharpening our skills and extending our knowledge.
These 35 guild days we had in 2022 included 24 inspiring talks and 9 hands-on workshops, along with dozens of group coding sessions and design practices.
Velocity
In 2022, we released Nile - our in-house microservices suite for open platforms.
It paves the road for a great development experience by enabling quick creation and deployment of microservices to production in just a matter of hours. Nile addresses different aspects, such as: database access, messaging support, GDPR and PII encryption, and uniformity of APIs. We also expanded Nile’s capabilities into new domains like users custom data support, easy SPI integrations and async flows.
This allows Wix’s server developers to focus on doing what they do best - delivering business value fast.
Cost Savings
One of our guild focus areas in 2022 was on cost savings. We provided more visibility to costs, used guild days to learn and have hands-on practice on resource tuning ,auto-scaling optimizations, and learned and applied cost oriented design tradeoffs and decisions. As a result, we achieved millions of dollars in annual savings and improved incorporating cost considerations into our engineering excellence mindset.
Guild Weeks
Let’s not forget guild weeks - that’s a week every quarter where you step away from your team and pair with another team to work on projects outside of your regular day-to-day role. We use guild weeks to provide opportunities for collaboration, building relationships with other teams, and contributing to our infrastructure and open source projects.
Hiring and Internal Moves
Despite the challenging economic climate in 2022, we continued our recruitment efforts and welcomed 36 new server developers to the team. And since we encourage and favor internal mobility, allowing people to grow and diversify their skill sets within Wix, we’re also proud to share that out of the 53 internal moves this year, 21 were moves from other guilds and professions such as data devs and Feds into the Server guild.
Onboarding
All new members of the guild go through a two-week self-service onboarding process. They learn about the different frameworks and infra we have to offer, and get to create, deploy, and monitor their first service in production, to get a deeper understanding and a clearer mental map of the Wix server ecosystem.
It’s been an exciting year with new challenges that adjusted our focus, allowing us to reinvent ourselves once again, focusing even more on velocity and cost, all while expanding our knowledge and community.
Want to hear and learn more about guilds?
Book a mentorship session with one of our Guild managers
Join our vibrant Guilds WhatsApp group (Hebrew)
Join our meetups
You can also watch Wix Engineering's Stats Behind the Scenes, 2022