Interview: Aviva Peisach, head of Server Guild and Wix Identity

Aviva Peisach from the popular all-in-one website builder, Wix has answered our questions about the future of the company and the services the company provides. She also enlightened us about the developer-centric approach that places responsibility and trust in developers as a part of Wix engineering culture. She also shared information about the platform’s one of the latest features, GPT-3 AI Text Creator integration.

How can you summarize Wix? What is the company’s main focus in 2023?

Our mission is to be a platform for any type of user to create, manage, and grow their online presence. Wix can be used by anyone – no matter their level of web design or developer skills. Whether a user is a merchant, fitness instructor, hotel owner, or whatever the need is, we provide users with the solutions they need to create a professional online presence and then manage and grow their business.

Our focus is to cater to the needs of our users and ensure that our platform remains both up-to-date and on the cutting-edge of industry trends. We listen attentively to our users’ feedback, keep a close eye on the latest developments in the industry, and expand our offerings accordingly. Our primary goal is to advance our platform to make it accessible to any user, whether they are creating and managing their online presence or doing so for their clients.

As a company, we are witnessing a trend towards users favoring more flexible and open platforms that offer a wide range of options. This shift is evident through the growing popularity of low-code and no-code applications. At Wix, we have already observed advanced users and our partners utilizing our solutions as a base and building on top of it. We plan to continue this trend by opening up our platform further to offer standalone solutions that are easily integrated into other systems, ensuring that our users’ needs and preferences are met.

How does Wix simplify web development? Which website development steps does Wix take care of for users?

Our business solutions are out-of-the-box solutions that provide users with everything they might need to best optimize their website and ease operational burdens. Wix helps simplify the website creation process by offering a wide range of pre-built templates and built-in solutions for almost every industry including restaurant owners, bookable service providers, bloggers, and eCommerce users. Alongside these solutions, we also provide advanced SEO and marketing tools – enabling anyone to create and grow online, help users ensure their websites are optimized for mobile devices, and more. Additionally, we are always working to build our own solutions and integrate them with relevant third-party solutions to provide users with everything they need in one place.

For users with coding knowledge who want to add custom functionality with code and have advanced CMS capabilities, they can do so with Velo by Wix, a full-stack development platform that empowers users to rapidly build, manage and deploy professional web applications. Advanced users can use the Wix Editor, and with Velo, add custom functionality using standard JavaScript and Velo APIs in the built-in IDE to instantly build more dynamic sites with more control and flexibility.

Furthermore, we understand that business owners don’t always have time for the technical nuances of building and managing a website, and may want to hire a professional designer, developer, and/or agency- which at Wix we call Partners. Partners can help business owners throughout the journey from building a website to handling everything related to running and maintaining their website. Partners are able to utilize our offerings and build solutions on top of them to help business owners seamlessly reach their business goals.

How do you define “Wix Engineering culture”? What makes Wix an engineering-focused company?

Engineering is the core of Wix, and we use a developer-centric approach. This approach places responsibility and trust in each developer on their path to production, enabling them to think end-to-end and completely own their features’ architecture and their performance and reliability in production. The culture can be defined by several key elements, including:

• Collaborative Environment: Collaboration is at the heart of Wix’s engineering culture. Engineers work together on projects, share knowledge, and learn from each other. Teams work closely to ensure that everyone is aligned and working towards a common goal.
• Customer-centric Approach: At Wix, there is an emphasis on putting the customer first. Engineers are encouraged to think about the user experience, listen to user feedback through close contact with our customer care teams and user interviews, and build products and features that meet their needs.
• Learning Culture: Engineers are encouraged to grow and develop their skills, with 20% of each engineer’s time being allocated to training and knowledge sharing. Engineers have access to training, mentorship, and opportunities to work on new projects and technologies. Our engineers are encouraged to share their knowledge with the entire developer community and contribute to Open Source projects.
• Speed and Agility: Engineers work in small, agile teams, which allows them to make decisions faster, enabling the company to respond quickly to market changes and customer needs.
• Continuous Innovation: Engineers are encouraged to come up with new ideas, test them quickly, and learn from the outcomes.
• Engineering Impact: We work in a strong continuous delivery pipeline, and test-driven development (TDD) methodology, allowing us to release code to production hundreds of times a day – allowing a quick feedback loop and immediate impact on production.
• Contribution to Community: Wix engineers are encouraged to share their knowledge with the entire developer community by speaking at events and conferences, writing blog posts, being a part of podcasts, and contributing to open source projects. Wix also hosts meetups and events where engineers from different companies can come together and share their experiences, learnings, and best practices. These events are open to everyone and serve as a platform for fostering collaboration and knowledge sharing.

Wix’s emphasis on continuous innovation, collaboration, customer-centricity, a learning culture, and speed and agility, helps make Wix an engineering-focused company.

Could you please tell us more about the Guilds and Guild days & Guild Weeks?

To understand what Guilds are, it’s best to start with how Wix is structured. Wix is organized around “companies”, and each company represents specific business domains at Wix, such as Restaurants, Bookings, or eCommerce. Companies enable everyone to belong to a small, intimate team while still contributing to the larger organization. This structure enables us to keep developer velocity high and bureaucracy low, and to maximize individual impact.

While Wix engineers primarily work within their companies, they spend a percentage of their time with their  “guild”, which are all Wix employees of the same profession (e.g. Server developers, Fed developers, Product, Data Engineers, etc). Guilds provide engineers with common technological and educational tools, promote best practices, hone professional skills, encourage cross-pollination between companies, and improve developer velocity. All guild activities are created by our engineers, for our engineers.

Every week we have guild days, which is a gathering of the entire guild, where we devote time to knowledge sharing, training, and coding, and design exercises & practices. This time is aimed to sharpen our professional skills, share lessons learned, and strengthen the community.

Every quarter, we have a guild week. During this week, engineers leave their team and pair with other engineers in the company to work on tasks and initiatives outside their regular day-to-day work. There are different tracks an engineer can choose from, including contributing and building the next generation of Wix infrastructure, framework & tools, helping to open source our products and infrastructure to contribute to the entire engineering community, or workshopping a conference talk or blog post and more.

How much of your time do you spend growing Guild members’ professional skills? How is the output?

Starting with their onboarding, developers go through a self-driven course, deploying their first service to production during their first week at Wix, all while building capabilities and introducing them to the different Wix infrastructures.

After, they go through a 3-week crash course where they get a high-level view of the engineering methodology, an in-depth review of our tools and infrastructure, and the focal points in the organization. Onboarding doesn’t stop there. We also offer booster courses to enhance specific skills including production monitoring and troubleshooting, API and system design and more. This is on top of the ongoing training and knowledge sharing we discussed above happening as part of guild days and guild weeks.

Guild days and weeks allow us all to feel like we are a part of something bigger. The result of investing time in our employees is having a lively and vibrant engineering community that gives each and every member an opportunity to grow and have access to the brilliant minds and experience of our hundreds of talented and passionate engineers.

We know that Wix has hundreds of millions of users, which requires high resilience. How do you provide that? Tell us about your MTTR metrics, please.

With hundreds of millions of users, plus a continuous and fast delivery pipeline – with hundreds of releases a day – resilience is key to our success.

Achieving resilience is an ever-long journey and we aim to continually improve it by:

• Production mindset: Production ownership is part of every engineer’s role, everyone participates in an on-call rotation and owns the health of their services in production.
• Resilient design: Practices we mapped and documented and TDD methodology ensures testing coverage prevention and early detection of issues.
• Production training: Onboarding, booster courses, and self-driven courses enable engineers to sharpen production monitoring and troubleshooting skills and be prepared for actual production support.
• Tools and automation: We continually improve our monitoring tools and create automations to ease identification, troubleshooting, and the fixing of issues.
• Post Mortems (continuous resilience improvement): We value and encourage post mortems, and make sure we learn and improve from our mistakes and incidents. Post mortems conclusions are tracked to find common trends.

We’ve also established a “Post mortem angels” community, where we review interesting post mortem conclusions and try to map common issues and resolutions. Whenever we detect a common issue or trend, we look for ways to automate it in order to prevent similar issues from occurring in other areas.

How do you map common troubleshooting paths and automate them?

To improve our troubleshooting paths,  we conducted research tracking for common issues and troubleshooting steps performed by each team. We found commonalities, which accounted for 80% of each team’s practices, and went ahead with automating them in 3 main ways:

1. Training: We created a training kit, which simulates the most common incidents and allows the trainee to troubleshoot and fix them in production.
2. Monitoring: We added advanced monitors that allow developers to spot possible root causes via a quick high-level view.
3. Troubleshooting automation: We’ve built a tool called “Alert Enricher” which identifies common alerts (e.g. error rate increase, or decreased performance), and added troubleshooting data on top of it to automate an otherwise manual exploration. Furthermore, we provide a list of the latest releases and experiment changes in this area, to allow a quick rollback, check if a specific pod is accountable for most errors and allow engineers to easily restart it.

We also provide booster courses to enhance developers’ skills and experience in monitoring and troubleshooting tools. These automations have allowed us to reduce MTTR by 27% YoY!

Can you enlighten us about the capabilities of the OpenAI GPT-3 AI Text Creator integration?

It takes a lot of thought and effort to create content for a website – think multiple pages, headers, footers, about us, and the list goes on. Combining our website-building knowledge with GPT-3, we launched our AI Text Creator within the Wix Editor, offering users a completely personalized AI content creation experience. Users are prompted with questions that are engineered to garner the best results for website content and are instantly provided with high-quality and uniquely-tailored content options, from creative titles to personalized text, that are precisely formulated for their website. The new feature equips Wix users with technology that significantly improves the quality of their site content and streamlines the website-building process.

Are there any other AI-based technologies in the pipeline you are going to introduce to your customers?

We are constantly working to optimize the Wix Editor to ensure users have a seamless and professional experience working on their sites. Over the years, we’ve developed and integrated AI into the Wix Editor to help our users at different steps of their creation process. We want users to have the feeling that a professional web designer or content writer is supporting them during their creation process. By utilizing AI tools, we’re removing barriers that generally complicate website building and enable users to keep their site updated and on brand with the latest technology.

How secure are Wix websites? What kind of security solutions do you provide for your customers?

Wix places security as one of our highest priorities for our users and their customers, and as a company, we strive to implement high standards of security processes and practices. To help ensure we attain this goal of protecting our users’ personal data, we have invested a great deal of effort in making sure our platform is safe and secure.