Last week Wix hosted its first ever developer conference. Taking place in NYC over 2 days packed full of groundbreaking product announcements, deep dive technical sessions, networking opportunities, and plenty of fun in an immersive and visually stunning space designed all in house.
Day 1
Excitement was in the air as folks lined up half an hour before doors opened to be the first to enter the transformed Lavan 541 space. With plates full and coffee flowing, attendees connected with each other and buzzed with anticipation for the upcoming announcements.
Keynotes
Opening Keynote
Avishai Abrahami, CEO
The keynotes kicked off with CEO Avishai Abrahami exploring the future of the internet and SaaS CMS growth. He took the audience on a journey through the evolution of Wix as a professional platform from the initial vision to the present day where 1 in 4 new websites are built on Wix. From there he introduced the future of Wix including git integration and opening the platform one component at a time.
The main takeaway was ultimately “The future of the Internet is in the hands of developers” and Wix is committed to a professional development platform.
Introducing Wix eCommerce
Dror Zalika, VP Engineering
Next up was Dror Zalika, head of the eCommerce Platform to unveil exactly how the platform will open up and what that means for agencies and developers building on Wix. To illustrate the inspiration for the new eCommerce platform, Dror begins with an example business that sells a service in addition to various products. In this example, the initial flow is complicated, and the user experience is poor, requiring a potential customer to do an increased amount of work to be able to purchase their desired goods and services. This example clearly highlights the power of a system that does not tie a business owner to any particular commerce flow.
The main takeaway here is that the era of siloed verticals such as a separate Bookings, Stores, or Music experience is over. The future is being able to sell anything you want, however you want and the way to accomplish this is through new SPI’s such as custom catalog integrations.
Introducing Wix Blocks
Naama Aharoni, R&D Manager | Guy Poraz, Product Manager
The final keynote of Day 1 introduced the audience to the much anticipated announcement of Wix Blocks. The energy was palpable as the audience could barely contain themselves, cheering and clapping throughout the presentation of this incredible paradigm shift that will solve the problem of reusability for developers building on Wix.
Wix Blocks is a new standalone editor for creating reusable and responsive applications that can be used and customized across any Wix site for a faster and scalable workflow. Blocks will also allow for concurrent developer and designer editing, increasing velocity and collaboration within teams.
Build With Us
Dalia Simons, Backend Tech Lead | Karen Chin, Developer Advocate
In this keynote, Dalia and Karen review a custom site they created using all the new product announcements, highlighting how and why each feature made their site possible. Ultimately they built an avatar generator for attendees with a prize wheel offering toasts with keynote speakers! They even connected the new ecommerce platform to show how avatars could be generated and sold.
Day 1 Breakouts
Breakout sessions for Day 1 focused mainly on deep diving into all the product announcements to really give attendees a taste of the potential and inspire developers and agency owners alike to dream big. Attendees were able to move freely throughout the space, using multichannel headphones to tune into the session of their choice.
Explore the new GitHub Integration
Tal Bebchuk, R&D Team Lead Velo | Tom Enden, Tech Lead Velo | Paulina Tsirlin, Product Manager Wix Code
A full room of excited developers crowded around to witness perhaps one of Wix’s most requested features, the GitHub integration session did not disappoint. Tal, Tom, and Paulina demonstrated how to clone and bring velo code right into your own local IDE even with local code completion. They also showed the ease of collaboration within a multi-developer team and common git workflows now available in beta.
Unveiling Blocks: A new workspace
Or Ben Ari, Tech Lead Blocks
Diving deeper into all the features of blocks, Or Ben gave attendees an under the hood view of how the countdown widget seen in the keynotes was developed. Attendees were also given the opportunity to sign up for early access to Wix Blocks.
Extend and customize your eCommerce checkout logic
Dor Duchovni, Engineering Manager | Dor Mizrachi, Product Manager
An audience favorite, this session presented by “the Dors” showed how you can bring your own logic to your checkout process through an example of a custom tea shop. They deep dive into the newly released SPI’s; Shipping and Additional Fees.
Testing, Troubleshooting, and Monitoring in the Developer Lifecycle
Tal Bebchuk, R&D Team Lead Velo | Paulina Tsirlin, Product Manager Wix Code
In this session Tal and Paulina offered a paradigm for how to approach testing and monitoring your site throughout the typical development lifecycle in Velo. While the tools used in this session have been available for developers, seeing the best practices for how to approach usage during common developer workflows left the audience with practical knowledge that can be applied to any site. Attendees of this session had thoughtful questions and many commented there were even a few tools they had not been aware of previously, such as Google Operations.
Unlock the full functionality of eCommerce
Dor Mizrachi, Product Manager & Dalia Simons, Backend Tech Lead
Another exciting look into the power of the new eCommerce platform, Dor and Dalia created a site to highlight integrating your own custom catalog of products into your Wix site. The session starts from an interesting angle by showing the whole process from wireframing all the way through modeling the logic and final implementation of the UI.
Inside Wix Backend
Guy Rotem, Backend Engineer
Guy Rotem took attendees on a deep dive journey into the Velo runtime. This session was one of many “behind the scenes” looks into how Velo works. An interesting session that sparked much conversation and thoughtful questions from the audience.
How Wix builds on Wix Bookings
Koby Maman, Head of R&D @ Bookings
In this session, Koby offers a behind the scenes look at a Wix internal tool called Wix Meet. A complicated and robust recruitment tool with an exciting message for attendees. There is no secret to building a tool like this and no hidden internal features. Anyone can build a system like this with tools available on the Wix platform.
How to boost your client numbers as a developer
Jacob Murphy and AJ Gorczyca, Act One Media with Joshua Alphonse, Developer Advocate
A session geared towards partners and business owners who work with developers, this interview, moderated by Joshua Alphonse, offered a look at the business side of empowering your offering with Velo. Jacob and AJ also left audiences with a way to approach charging for developer services.
Expanding Wix Bookings with the new eCommerce platform
Jacob Gontmacher, FED Velo Team @ Bookings
Another exciting angle for the eCommerce platforms was seen through this session exploring the new flexibility available to create any booking flow your clients need. To highlight new capabilities, Jacob began with a review of the OOTB functionality and the pain points bookings users have experienced. This was followed by a new site for a bathhouse built with a custom booking workflow, ability to have dynamic pricing by date and add-ons for your session.
Day 2
Still pumped from an exciting first day, folks began streaming in early again for day two and the energy was palpable yet again.
Day 2 Keynotes
B2B Integrations with Wix
Yaniv Vakrat, CBO
Day 2 kicked off with Yaniv reviewing the evolution of Wix from the market perspective. He also reviewed how enterprises have been using Wix for landing pages, internal tools, and full applications and how opening the platform has allowed Wix to create an enterprise specific solution and set of tools for the needs of this environment.
Professional Developer Tools
Yoav Abrahami, Head of Velo @ Wix Code
A much anticipated keynote from the creator of Velo, Yoav takes the audience through the growth of the developer experience on Wix and the future plans to continue to create a robust and professional developer platform. He offers many examples of the large scale and complex applications already being built on Wix as much of the inspiration driving this effort forward. He ends with a review of some of the exciting features released over the past year and a hint at what's next for developers building on Wix.
The human side of development
Robin Jinn, Executive Director OpenJS | Jody & Maddy McNamara, Socially Adept Solutions | Dalia Simmons, Backend Tech Lead
The final keynote on day two focused on who is on the other side of everything developers build. After speaking about all the exciting tools and evolution of the product, this panel discussion was a reminder that no matter what you are building, everything starts with the people on the other side and how important it is to understand the diversity of your users.
Day 2 Breakouts
Velo $w programming model workshop
Tom Enden, Tech Lead @ Velo
A common question from experienced developers considering building on Wix is whether they can use a familiar framework within the Velo environment. Tom is here to say, yes you can! This session focused on the $w programming model and how it was developed, then dove into how developers can use React or an MVVM model if preferred.
Build and Sell on the App Market Workshop
Alon Levi, Engineering Manager | Uri Cahan, Head of Developer Success
This advanced workshop focused on how to launch an app on the Wix App Market through creation of a “Coupon of the Day” customizable chatbot. The exciting takeaway from this session is that you can build anything you want, in whatever stack you are familiar with, and through connection to the REST API launch an app that can be a new revenue stream for your business.
The new development paradigm
Igor Shegolvev, UX Designer @ Premium
Offering another perspective on collaborative development, talented speaker and designer, Igor, takes the audience on a journey through his own experiences collaborating with developers on his team. He demonstrated how utilizing Wix Blocks improved his experience as a designer working with developers and increased the velocity of quality production.
Beats by Wix: Building an auto-scalable web service with velo and AWS
Jenia Barabanov, Architect and Guild Master
This session highlighted a passion project by server developer, Jenia, who is also a drummer. He inspires the audience to always consider Wix when building because you may be able to do more than you realize. The final application shared is a stem splitting service that allows him to isolate drum tracks for songs he wants to learn.
Developers’ Growth: The hard truth about your soft skills
Morad Stern, Head of Engineering Branding
Speaking to a packed room, Morad offered a break from the technical deep dives with a session full of practical advice for developers of any level looking to connect and grow their “soft skills”. Beginning with a personal story of feeling isolated after the unexpected loss of his job, Morad inspired the audience with his journey to building a robust and fulfilling network.
Winning the performance race
Gil Ecktein, Engineering Team Lead
There was a time when Wix was lagging behind competitors in page speed and overall performance. Gil took the audience behind the scenes of the issues they uncovered and specific approaches they took in regard to JavaScript download size that made a huge impact ultimately launching Wix above all competitors in page speed. He also covered how developers using Wix or any platform can consider the steps they took in their own sites to make sure they are building the most performant experience possible.
How to make the most of Wix Data
Justas Brazauskas, Server Developer @ Wix Data
Justas knows data, and he wants you to know it too. In this session jam packed full of useful information, Justas reviewed the most common data pitfalls he sees in user sites and how to avoid them. He also covered an eye-opening use case for the new data indexing feature that can be easily implemented on any Wix site.
How Wix is doing CI/CD
Tomer Pilossof, Head of DevEx
Another exciting look behind the scenes, Tomer presented to a captivated audience the incredible rate at which Wix is able to roll out new features to users while maintaining 99% uptime.
The Wix Community
This first Wix DevCon would not have been possible without all of the talented developers, partners, and agencies building on Wix and pushing the product forward every day. The feedback from attendees was overwhelmingly positive and full of energy. Here is a small sample of the feedback from attendees that truly captures the moment.
“I’ve honestly come away super excited for the future, both for my business and for what Wix is doing. But, I’ve also come away feeling a little upset that I could only spend a few days with all the amazing people that I’ve met and networked with. I can truly say that there will be people I’ve met these past few days that have either inspired me to push myself further, will become great friends and business partners, or even both. This is testament to all the hard work everyone has put in to make DevCon a success.” - Noah Lovell, noahlovell.design
“Highlight of #WixDevCon2022 Day 2: Meeting Yoav Abrahami, the creator of Velo
The entire conference was empowering, innovative, inspirational.... beautiful.
A celebration of life, imagination, and the future.
Thank you Wix for hosting such a memorable event” Melissa Hong, OMG Code
“It was an awesome talk Tomer Pilossof, you explained CI/CD in a way that we can take to our clients as a selling point.” Christopher Derrell, Head of Web Development @ Adtelligent
"THANK YOU Wix for giving Wix Partners the opportunity to attend a value-packed #WixDevCon2022. I have more to say - but I am still exhausted. It was a great conference. Made new friends, in person; learned A LOT!" Mariedyth Gayas, MNF Web Solutions
What’s Next?
As Yoav stated during his keynote presentation, “we are just getting started”. Expect to see more SPI’s, API’s, and developer centric tools that keep pushing the limits of what is possible. If you are looking to stay close to the action, join our Discord server to get the latest information on new products and events focused on developers.
That’s a Wrap! If you missed the Wix DevCon, click here to learn more about our upcoming DevStudio_Con.
