Code as Craft

Etsy has a great engineering blog-- http://codeascraft.etsy.com/

Etsy is a terrific company for development, especially for continuous delivery and how to build great systems. Their tech blog is excellent: http://codeascraft.etsy.com/

Congrats to the Etsy team. Their engineering blog "Code as Craft" is an excellent resource for startups. http://codeascraft.etsy.com/

Brooklyn, NY Etsy, Inc. Hiring for developers, operations, and lots of other roles (including non-technical), see http://www.etsy.com/careers/ Etsy is the world's marketplace for handmade and vintage goods. To give you an idea of our scale, last year Etsy sellers sold over $500 million worth of goods on Etsy. We have 17 million active members, and do 1.4 billion pageviews per month. Individual developers at Etsy deploy code to the live site around 30 times per day, so if you want to move fast at scale, this is the place for you. We have an amazing devops culture and an amazing engineering team that makes all this possible. Check out http://codeascraft.etsy.com/ and http://www.slideshare.net/etsy to learn more about how we do what we do. We have big challenges, from making sense of all of this data to stopping fraud to helping our sellers be more awesome every day. Again, check out our positions here: http://www.etsy.com/careers/, and feel free to email me directly at [email protected]. I am a developer, not a recruiter, FYI, and I promise to answer any questions you have honestly (unless you ask something that's privileged, obviously.)

this seems like a good thread to piggyback on. Could I get some links to " official development blogs"? I recently bumped into the one by Etsy (http://codeascraft.etsy.com/) and I'm sure there are many others. I find the first hand story of how different architectural decisions turn out in real world scenarios are way more valuable than all the blogs out there writing about any new hot piece of tech. I'm curious what you found interesting and even check regularly.

I had asked a similar question on Quora [1] few years back. Here is the summary: - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Engineering?sk=notes - Google: http://google-engtools.blogspot.com/ - Twitter: http://engineering.twitter.com/ - Linkedin: http://engineering.linkedin.com/blog - Dropbox: https://tech.dropbox.com/ - Instagram: http://instagram-engineering.tumblr.com/ - Netflix: http://techblog.netflix.com/ - Flickr: http://code.flickr.com - Etsy: http://codeascraft.etsy.com/ - Yelp: http://engineeringblog.yelp.com/ - Heroku: https://blog.heroku.com/ - Airbnb: http://nerds.airbnb.com/ - Bitly: http://word.bitly.com/ - Evernote: https://blog.evernote.com/tech/ - Highscalability: http://highscalability.com/ [1] https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-companies-that-have-some-of-the-bes…

Brooklyn, NY Etsy is hiring! -- http://www.etsy.com/jobs I'm hiring a Web Application Security Engineer, if you enjoy webapp pentesting and writing custom security tools you should drop me a line. Also, we're looking for a number of both junior and senior software engineers so if the posts on our tech blog (http://codeascraft.etsy.com/) are interesting to you come apply online.

We take this stuff very seriously, and I just worked with Rob (CEO), and we implemented this solution: http://www.etsy.com/teams/7716/announcements/discuss/6818578/page/1/ Being able to react to issues like this quickly is one of the great things about the Continuous Deployment process we have set up at Etsy. You can read more about that here: http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2010/05/20/quantum-of-deployment/

There were some great examples of open, honest communication from technical teams during these outages. I think it is a good trend. Etsy wasn't mentioned in the article, but they had an excellent letter to customers after an outage in mid-September. I forwarded it to my team because I thought it articulated perfectly the way I feel when our service goes down: http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2010/09/17/frank-talk-about-site-outages/

While it's relatively easy to comment on the stuff that gets to the homepage that shouldn't be there, the actual stories/discussion that don't make it there are a loss to our community. F.ex. I found the 7 comments and a brief appearance on a thoughtful article like the "Tracking all releases by Etsy" [1] disappointing. That would have been a great discussion, we all together didn't have. [1]: http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2010/12/08/track-every-release/ (Couldn't find the HN article anymore)

I heard they have a pretty kickass tech blog though! http://codeascraft.etsy.com/

Etsy - http://codeascraft.etsy.com/

Response (awaiting moderation, I think it's the links?): ------- > haha, that’s funny. i regularly use non-CouchDB databases and I get along great with > all the people from other databases at conferences. Oh, I tend to bite people when I find out they use another database . Maybe I should stop that? > even if i did feel like we were competing, i wouldn’t care. this post really is about > reliability issues i don’t think your users are fully aware of and i honestly hope that > you fix. You must be thrilled to learn that single server durability is coming. I look forward to a followup post extolling MongoDB’s virtues this fall. > I responded earlier to the complexity of actually keeping something available that > depends on [multiple servers]. so i won’t cover it again. Yes, it is a difficult, but not unsolvable, problem. Mongo’s made a bunch of tradeoffs in the awesome vs. easy to program area. For instance, remember last year when CouchDB was saying MongoDB sucked because of its lack of concurrency? That it was too complicated to do concurrency in C++ and that Erlang was the way? Well, now Mongo has concurrency, so on to the next “must have” thing. >You make it sounds like this is all just a matter of bugs, it’s not, and i find blaming > it on users who don’t use JIRA or get on IRC a little distasteful. People discuss everything from bugs to architecture to lunch on our various forums. I was trying to say, possibly badly, that we have a lot of ways for people with…

Statsd is awesome. http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/02/15/measure-anything-measure-everyt…

Maybe StatsD? http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/02/15/measure-anything-measure-everyt…

I don't think you read it very carefully; the second sentence links to the earlier article where they list the reasons they chose that tech over others. > I wrote about what I was thinking at the time here [1] [1] http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2010/05/19/mongodb-at-etsy/

Tons of stuff! Stay tuned for that in a future post :-) We posted about this in 2010: http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2010/02/24/analyzing-etsys-data-with-hadoo… Probably time for a refresh! - Avleen Vig, Staff Operations Engineer, Etsy

FWIW we do use virtualization for our dev infrastructure (everyone gets a vm) which uses KVM/QEMU and our CI cluster which is LXC based A bit about the dev infrastructure here: http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2012/03/13/making-it-virtually-easy-to-dep…

We've played around with: OpenTSDB: http://opentsdb.net/ StatsD: https://github.com/etsy/statsd/ (description here - http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/02/15/measure-anything-measure-everyt… OpenTSDB and StatsD seemed great for getting TS data in and producing nice dashboards, but they didn't seem to fit our needs for performing custom analytics on the data. At the moment, we're leaning towards leveraging Cassandra based on our scalability requirements. Check out http://rubyscale.com/blog/2011/03/06/basic-time-series-with-cassandra/ and http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/advanced-time-series-with-cassandra to get an idea on how cassandra can help.

Previously on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2594083 ↪ How Facebook _actually_ pushes updates to the site I came across this originally on the Etsy dev blog, rather than HN, and that particular post had some good other stuff about Flickr and Etsy: http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/06/01/pushing-facebook-flickr-etsy/

huuu - some links you may want to send him read: http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems/ and if he'd rather check it out in his car, have him listen to John Allspaw and Mike Rembetsy talking about blameless postmortem on the food fight podcast (the relevant part starts around the middle of the show): http://www.foodfightshow.org/2012/05/episode-14-live-post-mortem-with-…

The Etsy blog post that introduced StatsD is helpful: http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/02/15/measure-anything-measure-everyt…

You also have to be in a culture/environment which appreciates and encourages learning from failure, rather than placing blame. See what we do at Etsy. http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems

Etsy did. I don't think it was a good decision and I think the reasons they did had more to do with resetting from some bad architecture decisions, but they're the example I know of. http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/09/28/scaling-etsy-what-went-wrong-wh… I think the big lesson here would be: don't have separate DBA and Engineering teams. On the other hand, I could name quite a few people who went the other way, like Urban Dictionary who run on our http://postgres.heroku.com service, too. (I don't normally name customers, but he recorded a video saying he liked us so I think it's fair game. http://success.heroku.com/urbandictionary )

I'm tracking Graphite evolution since some articles from the Etsy engineers (Track every Release http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2010/12/08/track-every-release/ and Measure Everything http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/02/15/measure-anything-measure-everyt… However every time I look at the site it seems more and more an abandonware. Only a quickstart and no proper documentation.

Sure [1] [1] - http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/02/15/measure-anything-measure-everyt…

The slides without the talk are mostly useless, you're better off reading their Deployinator blog post: http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2010/05/20/quantum-of-deployment

Etsy's statsd and Graphite. http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/02/15/measure-anything-measure-everyt…

Yes, there are tons of unit tests that are run (voluntarily) before commits and (automatically) on staging pushes. And then once code is live we have many system and business-level monitors in place, so we know almost immediately if anything's wrong. More info about that here: http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2010/12/08/track-every-release/

About that video. I was going to write something scathing about it, but that'd be useless. All I'll say is imitating Wes Anderson is tired and boring. Looks like it was fun to make and some people will like it for sure, but I think it pales in comparison to the Etsy recruiting video: http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2010/07/09/etsy-is-hiring/ I hate to bring this up this tired discussion, but is this a NYC vs SF thing? The Etsy video could almost be considered dark and pessimistic, while the Twitter video is full of whimsy and infantilization.