Updated: May 1, 2024
When our CEO saw how long it was taking to get a small project to the finish line, he knew something had to change. Enter Alex Pinsky and the Platform Engineering group, who created NIie: our very own game-changing backend framework for building microservices
I’m Alex, and I lead the Platform Engineering group, which focuses on making the workday easier for our developers. Currently, our main project is called Nile: our own backend framework for building microservices. It's a game-changer, streamlining the way our developers work.
Nile? What’s Nile?
Imagine a Lego set that our backend engineers at Wix use to build their systems. That’s Nile. In tech terms, Nile provides our engineers everything they need to create a top-notch microservice that includes all Wix requirements. This way, they can concentrate on what matters most - their specific business area and delivering value to our customers.
How it all started
It all started when our CEO, Avishai Abrahami, couldn't wrap his head around why a project, offering no immediate value to users in its initial milestone, was predicted to take a long time due to the long checklist for creating a service at Wix: GDPR compliance, platformization guidelines (making sure our APIs at Wix are uniform), authorization & authentication, sending business events, and the list goes on.
To address this, we set up a special team, which included the Backend guild’s CTO and the Head of Backend at Wix. They got together with the developers to pinpoint all repetitive tasks and boilerplate code that was taking up developers' time. This helped them identify what we call the “paved road” - where developers spend 80% of their time. The goal was to make things flow effortlessly along this road with as little overhead as possible.
Thanks to their hard work, we created the first version of Nile- a new framework for streamlined services at Wix. It turned out to be a game-changer, reducing the time it took to get a new service up and running, with all of Wix's requirements included, from weeks to just a few days.
New framework - and a whole new mindset
Today, we have 6 teams all working on Nile, including an incredible product team. This is because we treat our platform as a product and see our Wix developers as our customers - which has been instrumental in the project's significant impact.
Nile has turned into a big deal for Wix. Today, it's not just the go-to framework for backend services at Wix, but all of our old services are actively moving over to it. This switch is helping us innovate faster by bringing new features into Nile and making it available to all product lines. For example, it's been a big help with our Open Platform initiative, where 3rd party developers and apps can extend our products and offerings while fitting smoothly into the existing business flows.
What’s next?
We’re proud to say the Nile has become a consensus at Wix. Backend developers, product managers, R&D managers, the Legal & Security teams - they all see the benefits of having a central framework that covers all best practices. And we’re even prouder to say that we have some pretty mind-blowing plans for the future!
This commitment to constant innovation aligns directly with Wix's operational ethos. We place significant emphasis on pioneering ideas to maintain our productivity levels and pace of innovation. To quote our CEO: "A product company’s success has a direct correlation with the speed of development - if we don't evolve faster than our competition, we risk falling behind."
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