Wix Engineering

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Rich Harris invented Svelte: a new framework for building user interfaces in web applications. It’s blazingly fast, easy to learn and battle-proven in real world application. There’s one problem, though: it’s not React.

React is the 800 lb. gorilla of web frameworks: it has millions of users, huge enterprises, and it’s backed by none other than Facebook. Svelte is faster and slimmer than React, but at every conference and in every Twitter thread, Harris needs to fight an uphill battle against Facebook’s React just to be noticed.

So how do you get developers to give up a popular framework, and switch to *your* new and improved one? In this episode, we will also hear from Eliran Hezkia how Wix Engineering is testing Rich’s framework.

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Yuval Perry is Wix’s Server Infrastructure group manager, what is one of the most complex and challenging infrastructures in the world of software engineering. But to get to this point, he had to step out of his own comfort zone, in a major way.

Back in 2012, Yuval was working for a company who had more than 60 microservices, and managing those microservices was starting to become too difficult. Knowing that Wix is doing the same more than 1,300 microservices, he approached Aviran Mordo – Wix’s Head of Engineering – for advice. Aviran replied – “It’s very simple. You should start by deleting your integration and test environments”. It definitely wasn’t the answer Yuval was expecting…

How did Yuval manage to step out of his comfort zone, and implement an approach he himself describes as ‘either crazy or brilliant’? What can other developers learn from his experience, about learning novel technologies and new paradigms?

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Ittai Zeidman, Wix’s Backend Engineering Lead, was in the hospital with his wife and two-days-old new born baby, when he got an urgent call from the company’s VP of R&D. A crisis was unfolding: the build system was broken, leaving hundreds of developers unable to do their work.

This crisis wasn’t an isolated incident: it was the result of a series of problems resulting from the company’s success and fast growth. Ittai and his peers faced a serious challenge – but they knew they weren't the only ones: Google, Facebook, and Twitter were also serving millions of users. Utilizing and learning from these company's experiences, Ittai helped transform Wix’s build system from the ground up with Bazel, an open-source Continuous Integration system. How can developers face serious scaling issues, and implement company-wide infrastructure successfully?

We will also hear about Exodus, Wix Engineering’s open-source tool that can easily migrate your JVM code from Maven to Bazel, and go deeper on Bazel and Scaling with Natan Slinisky and Or Shahar.

Get the full episode transcript here: https://www.wix.engineering/post/growing-pains-e02-full-transcript

Read more on our blog:

https://www.wix.engineering/post/bazelcon-2019-lessons-learned-from-migrating-our-build-system-to-bazel

https://www.wix.engineering/post/introducing-exodus-easily-migrate-from-maven-to-bazel

Podcast (wix_pod): Download

Hakon Lie is a Norwegian web pioneer, who invented and implemented CSS – one of the most fundamental technologies of the modern web. CSS was hailed by everybody – except one very important company: Microsoft.

During the late 90’s and early 00’, Microsoft insisted on it’s own, non-standard implementation of CSS. This caused major headaches for the dev community, since IE was the leading browser back then – but there was nothing to be done. Microsoft was such a giant in the technology world, that nobody had the power to force it to change its ways.

In 2005, Hakon Lie decided enough is enough. In an open letter to Bill Gates, he challenged Microsoft’s CEO to prove his commitment to the future of web interoperability. This is the story of one developer’s willingness to fight for the principles he believes in, even against the biggest technology company in the world. In this episode we will also hear it from Gilad Segal on how Wix Engineering is taking CSS to the next level.

https://www.wiumlie.no/en

Get the full episode transcript here: https://www.wix.engineering/post/stand-up-and-fight-e01p02-full-transcript

Podcast (wix_pod): Download

Hakon Lie is a Norwegian web pioneer, who invented and implemented CSS – one of the most fundamental technologies of the modern web. CSS was hailed by everybody – except one very important company: Microsoft.

During the late 90’s and early 00’, Microsoft insisted on it’s own, non-standard implementation of CSS. This caused major headaches to the dev community, since IE was the leading browser back then – but there was nothing to be done. Microsoft was such a giant in the technology world, that nobody had the power to force it to change its ways.

In 2005, Hakon Lie decided enough is enough. In an open letter to Bill Gates, he challenged Microsoft’s CEO to prove his commitment to the future of web interoperability. This is the story of one developer’s willingness to fight for the principles he believes in, even against the biggest technology company in the world.

https://www.wiumlie.no/en

Get the full episode transcript here: https://www.wix.engineering/post/stand-up-and-fight-e01p01-full-transcript