Server Challenges at Scale: from Reliability to Advanced Search capabilities

About the event

• Date: 2025/02/12 (Wednesday) 18:00 (starts 18:30)
• Location: Didžioji str. 28, Vilnius (Wix Town Hall Office)
• Language: English

Agenda
6:00 p.m. – Welcome to Wix.com: doors open; treat yourself with drinks & snacks
6:30 p.m. – Hero to Zero: Evolving Resilience From a Hero Culture to a Zero Error One by Aviva Peisach
7:00 p.m. – Semantic Search & Hierarchical Navigable Small Worlds by Julius Chudiajevas
7:30 p.m. – Follow-up networking

About the talks

Hero to Zero: Evolving Resilience From a Hero Culture to a Zero Error One by Aviva Peisach

How do you move an organization from a culture of heroic production firefighting to one of consistent, proactive reliability?
At Wix, we transformed our approach to resilience and error prevention & handling, shifting from relying on heroic interventions to fostering a "Zero Error" mindset, where errors are prevented, caught and resolved as early as the development phase and achieved five nines production availability!
In this talk, I’ll share how we:
* Evolved monitoring, alerting, and troubleshooting automations to provide proactive out-of-the-box solutions for developers.
* Automated resilience principles via our platform engineering framework to ease up testing, enforce limits, timeouts, and validations effortlessly.
* Created a zero-error policy, focusing on eliminating errors from the get-go, dramatically reducing daily production errors by 80% in 3 months!.
* Prioritized a mindset shift, fostering proactive quality improvement through visibility, collaboration, education, scoped and scalable processes.

I'll share practical steps we took & tools we built to reduce noise, prevent recurring issues, empower developers, and scale improvements across the organization.
Whether you’re dealing with alert fatigue or looking to improve reliability, this story offers lessons that can help any team move toward a cleaner, more sustainable production environment. and free you up to build the next amazing (and reliable) thing.

Semantic Search & Hierarchical Navigable Small Worlds by Julius Chudiajevas

A practical look into how semantic search works and why it matters. We'll explore how AI models transform text into vectors, and how the Hierarchical Navigable Small World (HNSW) algorithm makes searching through these vectors efficient. Using real examples, we'll see how combining traditional text search with semantic capabilities leads to better search results, including some unexpected benefits like multilingual matching.
This talk covers the basics of vector embeddings, HNSW graph construction, and practical implementation insights from real-world experience. Suitable for developers and tech professionals interested in modern search technologies.

Bios

Aviva Peisach is the head of Wix's Backend Engineering Guild and Wix-Identity company, with over 20 years of R&D leadership experience. Aviva leads Reliability & engineering at scale initiatives across Wix. Aviva is also a mother of three, a coding teacher, belly dancer, author & speaker.

Julius Chudiajevas is a student in VilniusTECH and almost 2 yrs WixSearch Backend engineer. Although he is just in the beginning of his career, his work on enhancing Wix's search capabilities impressed us a lot, and he's now ready to share it with you too.