As dear Uncle Ben once said, “With great power comes great responsibility”, and with over 100 million Wix.com users worldwide – Oh boy! what a responsibility we have. Our code makes a tremendous impact and we are extremely proud of it. Wix Engineering represents state of the art engineering and web development. We are on an endless journey to keep expanding our horizons, as well as teaching and sharing our knowledge.
Part of that journey has led us, for two consecutive years, to a massive gathering of our brilliant minds at the annual Wix Engineering Conference. An internal event, with a few lucky outsiders, fully dedicated to enriching our collective engineering proficiency.
Our first conference was held in 2016. More than 350 developers put their daily tasks on hold and came together to learn from each other, share insights and demonstrate some impressive coding skills. And, if you know our style, we take conferences very seriously – so of course we had drinks all around.
Wix Engineering Conference. Vol 1
On May 3rd, 2017, our second Wix Engineering conference took place, and showcased 3 tracks with an overall of 15 cutting-edge lectures (and 30 different types of liquor – again, booze is crucial).
With a growing number of developers, including designers and product experts; this year attendees zigzagged between the different halls, free to choose where they want to go and what they want to hear. Each track offered a variety of different sessions, with topics ranging from Server-Side Rendering and GraphQL to JavaScript riddles, Bots and even the concept of time.
This time we also had ducks!
And what better way to show off our awesomeness than by sharing some of these goodies with you!
So sit back, relax and enjoy some of the finest tech talks Wix Engineering has to offer. And remember, sharing is caring, so if you appreciated our quality content, please spread the word. You’re also welcome to follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or subscribe to our YouTube channel.
Slaying the Dragon - How to rewrite an old project and stay alive / Dalia Simons (@SimonsDalia)
Have you ever been asked to add a feature to an old project and you were too scared to do it? Not sure what you might break? We have all been there. In this talk, Dalia discusses why we should put the effort into rewriting those projects, what differentiates them from legacy projects and use previous projects rewrites as examples, to give some ideas how to approach this issue successfully.
How Shit Works: Time / Tomer Gabel (@tomerg)
This talk, the third in his series, breaks the mold to take a hard look at one of the most commonly used, and at least as commonly misunderstood, elements in software engineering: time. Time is so fundamental to the way humans experience reality that we don't normally give it a second thought, but it's just as fundamental to software systems. Without a correct model for working with time BAD THINGS HAPPEN: data is persisted out of order, exceptions occur where they shouldn't be possible, and production systems blow up. In this talk, Tomer covers the various common representations of time, acknowledges their caveats and deficiencies, and hopefully you’ll a few new tools and practices along the way.
Journey to Functional Programming / Igal Tabachnik (@hmemcpy)
Functional programming sounds great, in principle, but can it actually deliver on its promise of building highly scalable, predictable, composable and testable applications? In this lecture, Igal teaches us how to build just about any kind of software in a purely functional way in Scala, from first principles. Slides and code are available here.
Putting the R in R&D / Avi Marcus (@Avi_Marcus)
We call it R&D, but mostly focus on the D part. Here’s a short guide by Avi to finding better solutions to the technological problems we face.
JavaScript riddles for fun and profit / Dan Shappir (@DanShappir)
You think of yourself as a JavaScript expert. Your colleagues come to you whenever they are unsure about a JavaScript feature. But how good are you really? Dan hopes that during this session you will find out. Dan poses a series of ever more challenging JavaScript riddles and brain-teasers. See how far you are able to go and along the way you'll likely learn some new things about this ever-evolving language.
This post was written by Yaron Shavit
You can find him on LinkedIn