Constant self-upgrade and helping others do the same — that’s something all Mojam teammates have in common. Are you on the same wavelength, don’t believe in gatekeeping, and support open knowledge sharing? Then don’t miss our recap of the Highload fwdays’25 conference. This is our third time supporting the event as a premium partner. Why? Because our core value “BE PRO” is all about continuous growth — for both junior devs 👶 and seasoned seniors 🧙‍♂️.

Highload fwdays’25: Who Shared the Insights?

A panel of speakers at fwdays’25 this year had a great balance of representatives from well-known B2C companies, top IT industry leaders, and the public sector. Among them were representatives from:

• Wise
• Silpo
• Uklon 
• MacPaw 
• The State Operator For Non-Lethal Acquisition (DOT)
• EPAM
• Solidgate, and more

What Was Discussed?

The main focus of the conference was highload system development — explored from A to Z: Redis alternatives, prepping for peak e-commerce seasons, building low-cost clusters, scaling strategies, Elasticsearch stability tips, and much more. Here’s a quick review of the top highlights from Mojam team leads who attended — QA Team Lead Mykola and Development Team Lead Kostya 👇

A New Approach to Caching — or Why It’s Time to Say “No” to Redis

Anton Moldovan from DraftKings & NBomber LLC has had hands down the standout speech of this year’s fwdays. He discussed why it might be time to leave Redis behind and consider new solutions. Spoiler: Redis has critical limitations in resilience and scalability — both of which are deal-breakers for truly highload systems.

Mykola, QA Team Lead

“In short, Redis turned out to be a disappointment. It used to be a solid solution, but after resting on its laurels, it lost its edge. The competition in this domain is incredibly tough. The speaker highlighted ScyllaDB as a strong alternative, drawing a great comparison with Redis. The main advantages of ScyllaDB are higher reliability, decentralization, and speed — all crucial when dealing with highload systems.”

Kostya, Development Team Lead 

“Really enjoyed this speech — it was the first one and packed with interesting technical insights. The idea of replacing both Redis as a cache and the primary database with ScyllaDB was quite intriguing. I also learned more about how ScyllaDB handles failover, its Tablet concept, and got a nice refresher on the RAFT algorithm operation. In short, this database revealed itself from a new and fascinating angle. We don’t currently face the kind of issues described in the speech, but for highload scenarios, this could be a real game-changer. Definitely one of those talks that inspires.”

Preparing E-commerce Systems for the “Hot” Season

Solutions Architect at Silpo, Yurii Panaiotov, knows firsthand how hard it is to build an effective system that can handle heavy loads. New Year and Black Friday are events that the tech department in e-commerce must prepare for well in advance. The main discoveries of the Silpo team: a focus on early performance testing, autoscaling, and load balancing.

Mykola, QA Team Lead

“Awesome talk, really enjoyed it too. Probably because it focused the most on performance testing, which I absolutely love. The engineers iteratively prepared their system for peak loads with a strong focus on customer experience. For example, if a critical system component failed, the user wouldn’t lose all their content on the site (like an order with a list of items). Instead, everything was queued with retries to complete the flow.”

How to Build a Low-Cost Cluster Capable of Handling up to 1 Billion Vectors

Another highlight of the conference was a talk by Maksym Mova, Engineering Manager at MacPaw, about how project growth led to the search for new technical solutions within a limited budget. In the end, the company developed a low-cost cluster capable of handling thousands of requests.

Mykola, QA Team Lead

“Great talk that really showcased engineering at its best. Instead of throwing money at infrastructure, they solved a real problem by gradually improving technical solutions, which significantly boosted system efficiency. Personally, I learned about vector databases and how image search works by breaking images down into vectors.”

Feel the vibe of Highload fwdays’25 through our Reels!

We didn’t forget about the fun while diving into technical know-how. 🎤 We asked conference guests about their work (and not-so-work-related) routines:

• Found out which fictional characters people would want on their team and for which roles, according to fwdays’25 participants
• Asked them to describe their typical project day in three words
• Collected life hacks for creating a comfy remote work setup
• Ever wondered how a developer spends their Friday night? Some answers will definitely surprise you
• The tough stuff: the number one phrase you hear at every meeting
• For motivation: why PROs chose their profession

Want to find out how the fwdays’25 guests answered our questions? Hurry up to our Instagram and LinkedIn pages.

In Summary: Why Is Attending Conferences So Important?

• We truly believe that BE PRO is a way of life. It’s never too late to learn and maximize your knowledge 👩‍🎓
• Ukrainian IT is already making waves on the global stage, but we’re definitely capable of achieving even more. Let’s keep moving forward and leveling up our skills!
• Create the future — something you can do every day through knowledge sharing, community support, and bold decisions ✍️
• Conferences are not just about insights — they’re about connections. A fantastic chance to meet experts from all corners of the IT community 🫂

We hope to jam with you at new events very soon! 👋