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Wix Engineering Newsletter, Issue 79: Navigating Uncertainty and Building Smarter Systems

Wix Engineering Newsletter

Packed with engineering insights, developer stories, and tools to help you build better, faster, and smarter. Don't miss it, subscribe here. This month, we’re diving into cost-cutting wins, platform resilience, AI-powered coding, and productivity tips. Here’s what’s inside:




1. Leading Through Uncertainty: How Wix Engineering Navigates Growth, AI, and the Unknown


Wix Engineering Leadership and AI

Leadership begins where the playbooks end.


When markets shift, technologies rewrite themselves, or new paradigms like AI redefine what "engineering" means, leaders can’t just follow processes - they have to invent them.


In a rare conversation, Yaniv Even-Haim (Wix CTO) and Aviran Mordo (VP Engineering) discuss how they steer Wix Engineering through ambiguity:

  • Why AI is more than technology - It’s a mindset shift. AI challenges every assumption: about ownership, creativity, and what "productive" means. Embracing it isn’t about tools, but about fostering teams that learn faster than the technology changes.

  • The new developer skillset - Technical depth still matters, but adaptability, context-awareness, and cross-domain curiosity are now critical.

  • Scaling trust, not just systems - When organizations grow, trust doesn’t scale automatically. Wix invests in transparency - so teams can move quickly without losing alignment.




2. How Wix Cut 50% of Its Data Platform Costs - Without Sacrificing Performance (Part 2)


At Wix, scale is massive: 100K+ tables, two Iceberg catalogs, and trillions of CPU milliseconds in Trino and Spark. Yet, the data platform team managed to cut 50% of cloud costs - without throttling performance.

Here’s how - and why it matters:


  • Job-level telemetry and ownership - By tracking every Trino, Spark, and Airflow job through Platyspark, teams saw exactly where inefficiencies hid. Visibility turned into accountability, and accountability turned into action.

  • Simple, meaningful cost models - Pricing compute down to the micro-unit (like $0.000002 per Trino CPU ms) reframed decisions. Engineers could now see cost trade-offs in the same way they evaluate latency or throughput.

  • Dashboards that drive behavior - When every team can see their data usage daily, optimization becomes a shared game. Teams compete to reduce waste, not just deliver results.

  • Engaged, empowered teams - From quick wins (cutting job frequency = 95% storage savings) to deep refactors, cost-saving became part of engineering culture - not just a finance goal.




3. Creating a Smart GitHub Code Search MCP From Scratch with Cursor


Code search has always been essential - but in the age of AI, it’s evolving into code understanding.

In this talk, Guy Bary presents Octocode-MCP, a smart search tool he built to:


  • Query GitHub in natural language - turning vague questions into structured searches.

  • Explore repositories across files, functions, and code layers.

  • Cross-reference PRs, commits, and documentation for context-rich answers.

  • Fuse frontend, backend, and database knowledge into one unified search experience.


Why it matters: Traditional search surfaces results; AI-assisted search surfaces insight. Octocode bridges that gap, helping developers reason across systems instead of toggling between tabs. Watch it here:





4. Insights We Liked: Velocity, AI Agents, and Mind-Blowing Mac Features


From Velocity to Chaos: My Journey With AI-Generated Refactors


AI can refactor 100 files in minutes - but should it? Alexander Golberg’s story shows how "working" code can still fail the test of understandability. The takeaway: AI productivity means nothing without human sustainability. Medium


A 9-Step Guide to Building an AI Agent You Can Trust


Omer Dodi shares a framework that moves beyond "it runs" - defining what makes an AI agent reliable. It’s a shift from experimentation to craftsmanship, helping teams design systems that users can actually depend on. Medium


The Ultimate Guide to Mind-Blowing Mac Features (Part 1)


Saar Shechter dives into the hidden layers of macOS, surfacing small tweaks that compound into big gains. The "why" is simple: mastery isn’t about learning everything - it’s about making your tools disappear, so flow takes over. Medium




More of Wix Engineering's updates and insights: 



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