Wix.com back-end engineering guild activities and culture manifesto describes our guild activities and culture that support a highly innovative and renowned engineering group

1. Back-end Guild Manifesto

2. Guild Objectives
• Dev velocity & developer productivity
• Ensure products meet Wix production quality
• Promote code quality and maintainability
• Be the glue between the different groups.
• Teach and promote Wix culture
• Promote transparency
• Enabling the overall alignments
• Knowledge share
• Provide professional guidelines & tool-set
• Responsible for the professional development of the guild members
(training, workshops, conferences etc.)

4. esponsibility
wnership
uality
haring

7. • Software architecture
• Data architecture
• Scalability
• Performance
• Availability
• Fallbacks
• Monitoring
• Maintenance
• Deployment
• Networking
• Recovery
Back-end engineer’s responsibilities

9. Help groups to be more efficient
Understand developer’s time wasters and solve
them.
Provide feedback on infrastructure & dev
experience.
Manage dependencies (system & organization).
Smart use of shared infrastructure and code
base.

10. Dev velocity
Build tools for developers
Development infrastructure improvements (build
tools, deployment system…)
Platform infrastructure & framework

11. Looking into the future
Code quality.
Shared lesson learned.
Code maintainability.
Support company growth.

12. Knowledge share and alignments
1 on 1 mentoring
Develop training courses content
Mentoring
Workshops
Tech talks

13. Ensure production level quality
Best practices.
Post-mortem.
Peer review.
Production debuging .

14. Teach and share best practices
Project spotlight
Retrospective
Bug Hunts
Post mortems

15. Attract & Keep top talent
Build and enhance R&D Brand.
Engineers professional development .

16. Professional development & R&D brand
Tech talks
Blog posts
Pair programing
Meetups
Open source

17. When do you meet the guild
Before coming
to Wix
• Attract and recruit talent
When you join
• New employee training (Kickstart /
Pairing)
Daily
• Dedicated “guild masters” working
continuously with the teams
Dedicated time
• Guild day

18. New Employee Training
Culture
Knowledge gaps (TDD, Scala, Java, Design…)
Production scale (Patterns, Best practices…)
Continuous delivery
DevOps

19. Guild Masters
• Distribute knowledge cross teams
• Teach best practices
• Help in execution
• Help in education
• Review architecture
Guild masters are the guild’s top engineers dedicated to support
different groups

21. Guild Day
• Engineers work 4 days for their company
• Thursday is Guild day.
• Developers conduct quality enhancing
activities with the Guild.

22. Guild Day – Why?
• Builds cross-team relationships
• Shares knowledge
• Assimilate the culture
• Lesson learned cross teams
• Continuous improvement
• Promotes innovation
• Professional development

23. Weekdays guild activities:
Sun,Tue,Wed 10:15-10:30 – Representatives daily​
Mon 10:15-10:45 - Weekly meeting + Bug hunt
​Thu - Guild day​
​Guild day schedule:
10:00-11:00 Retrospec​tive
11:00-11:15 Break
11:15-11:30 Project spotlight
​11:30-13:00 Tech talk or Workshop
13:00- End of day: Lunch + Guild tasks (Games of
Gangs)

24. Production Bug Hunt
• Service owner picks a service running on production
• Open the monitoring system
• Explains the service to all Guild’s members
– What the service does
– Exceptions thrown in production
– Performance matrix
– Build warnings
• Get a list of AI from group feedback (sometimes for
dependent services)

25. Production Bug Hunt - Why?
• Improve service stability
• Teach developers about services they don’t own
• Understand how services behave on production
• Open discussion and ideas from guild members
• Discover unexpected use patterns
• Find bugs on production
• Lessons learned from other teams experience

26. Retrospective
• Main tool for continuous improvement
• Share lesson learned.
• Solve problems
• Suggestions on how to improve:
– Our team
– Quality of products
– Process
– Effectiveness of the R&D organization.

27. Retrospective – How ?
• Whenever developers encounter issues /
dilemmas, they are encouraged to post them
on a board (daPulse) for public discussion
• Topics posted on the board during the week
constitute the agenda for the retrospective

28. Retrospective – Board

30. Tech Talks
• Developers give a tech talks every week
• People from other departments in the company
• Guest speakers
• Open to anyone from Wix
• Using Meetup http://www.meetup.com/at-wix/
to invite outsiders to our internal talks (if
appropriate)
• Talks videos http://goo.gl/IDqXTi

31. Tech Talks – Why ?
• Training employees
• Knowledge sharing
• Educating about other activities at Wix
• Professional development
• Recruitment funnel

32. Project Spotlight
• Team presents an interesting project
• Present the new product
• Present the challenges
• Share interesting patterns / architecture
• Lessons learned

33. Empower a Company (Group)
• When a company/group needs help it can
request the Guild members to help in:
– Reviews
– Tests
– Infrastructure enhancements
– Training
– Extra manpower

34. Games of Gangs – Guild Tasks
• Build tools that help developers
• Enhance platform / framework
• Pay legacy technical debt
• Improve tests
• Research something new for your company
• Work on a task for a different group
• Work on an open source project
• 1 on 1 mentoring

35. Games of Gangs Objectives
• Improve code quality
• Improve developer productivity
• Find repeating patterns across projects - generalize
a solution or improve the infrastructure
• Learn other projects (easier to step in if necessary)
• Unbiased review of other projects
• Learn about problems and solutions other teams
faced and solved that you may also encounter.
• It fun and breaks the day to day routine

36. How it is Done
• Tasks are being done in pair programing (pair
with a developer from a different group)
• For each task you make you get bragging points
• Tasks are being suggested on a public board by
the developers
• Tasks need to meet one of the following
motivations (Improve quality, productivity, help
on a different project or knowledge sharing).

37. Games of Gangs Task Board
0pt - Single person task
1pt - Blog post or other branding activities
2pt - Pair with someone in your team
3pts - Pair programming with a person from a different group
3pts - Tech talk for the guild
4pts - Tech talk in dedicated meetups and conferences
4pts - Pair with off-shore developer

38. Project Rotation within company
• Team usually has more than one project
• Avoid having one developer working on same
service for long period of time

39. Project Rotation within company– Why?
• There is no single person with a knowledge on
a specific component
• Ongoing review
• Keep it interesting
• Team is the 24/7/365 production focal point
• Everybody owns everything

40. CFO asks CEO: “What happens if we
invest in developing our people and they
leave us?”
CEO: “What happened if we don’t and
they stay?”