Three new dev-centric products we released gave us the perfect reason to gather in NYC with our dev community and celebrate innovation at our first ever DevCon.
Paul Simon sang of 50 ways to leave your lover, and there must be at least that many ways to launch a product. Well, this fall, we launched three new products - all built for developers - and DevCon was the way we did it.
What was Wix DevCon all about?
Imagine hundreds of developers in one (amazingly designed) room in NYC, hearing directly from the developers who built new products for them. As nerdy as it might sound, it was a celebration of web innovation - with workshops, presentations and a lot of love for code.
As a web creation company, it was a super exciting moment in time for us, since it signaled just how far we’ve come.
“When we were sitting on the beach thinking of Wix, the vision that we had included two parts: one was to design websites; and the other was to enable people to develop on top of it”, said Wix’s co-founder and CEO, Avishi Abrahami. “Now, 16 years later, we’re finally at the point where we can start working on the second part of our vision. The reason for the delay is the great success of the first part - but for me, as a developer, this second part is super exciting.”
So, what new products did we release at DevCon?
“Web development is at the core of Wix. We’re evolving from a solely no-code platform supporting self-creators to this day, introducing our next phase to meet the needs of developers as they embark on their web development journeys,” said Yoav Abrahami, Chief Architect and Head of Velo at Wix Code.
Hearing his words, it’s not surprising that the three biggest products we launched were made for the most advanced web users:
Wix Blocks, which enables professionals to create custom web applications and then package them together as full new components.
Ecomm platform, a new open platform that provides developers the freedom to engineer custom eCommerce experiences for any business need at a higher velocity.
Git and Velo tools. We opened a Velo integration with Git and GitHub, which enables developers to create and manage sites as a team, use any integrated development environment (IDE), integrate with CI/CD workflows and incorporate automated testing and verification tools.
Missed it? Watch DevCon on demand (or, if you prefer reading, check out this summary)
What was even more impressive (to us, of course), was that during this 2-day event we held 18 breakout sessions on different subjects, all geared for developers - from development paradigms, eComm, bookings, git, database, scaling, Wix CI/CD, our app market and more. The people leading those sessions were our very own developers, the same people who’ve been working so hard to bring these new products to life.
“I’m so excited to be launching the product I’ve worked on for so long, it’s definitely the biggest thing I’ve worked on since I started at Wix over 4 years ago,” said Tal Bebchuk, a software development team lead at Wix Velo.
“I was really excited to meet our users,” added Dalia Simons, a backend developer at eComm platform. “As a developer, it’s an amazing experience to actually meet the people that will use the thing you’re building, see how they’re using it and get live feedback”.
This conference was an incredible opportunity for our own developers to get on the stage, stand in front of their end users and hear their feedback face-to-face, and in real time.
And it was an exceptional and fun collaboration of so many talented teams at Wix, from R&D and product, to marketing, developer relations, PR, design and more.
As we like to always end: we’re only getting started.
