Code as Craft

People are passionate about where they live. At Etsy we need to keep track of lots of different locations, such as buyers’ billing and shipping addresses and sellers’ shop locations. As Etsy continues to expand internationally we wanted to provide better localization and translations for our location place names. We determined that the best way […]

At Etsy, we want to use data to inform what we do. We have an awesome culture of obsessing over graphs and building dashboards to track our progress. But beyond tracking the effects of our changes from minute to minute via graphs on big screens—which is a great way to see if a change has […]

Many of you probably use BitTorrent to download your favorite ebooks, MP3s, and movies.  At Etsy, we use BitTorrent in our production systems for search replication. Search at Etsy Search at Etsy has grown significantly over the years. In January of 2009 we started using Solr for search. We used the standard master-slave configuration for […]

By: Diego Alonso As we mentioned in Teaching Etsy to Speak a Second Language, developers need to tag English content so it can be extracted and then translated. Since we are a company with a continuous deployment development process, we do this on a daily basis and as an result get a significant number of […]

This holiday season we launched a redesigned version of a product we call “Gift Ideas for Your Friends”. The product works by connecting with your Facebook account, analyzing thousands or more of your friends’ likes and interests, and then making recommendations across millions of items in Etsy’s marketplace. Social commerce has been somewhat of a […]

If Engineering at Etsy has a religion, it’s the Church of Graphs. If it moves, we track it. Sometimes we’ll draw a graph of something that isn’t moving yet, just in case it decides to make a run for it. In general, we tend to measure at three levels: network, machine, and application. (You can […]

Buying gifts is hard. We created the Facebook gift recommender on Etsy to help you overcome the feeling of gift-giving writer’s block. To do so, it surfaces your friends’ interests from Facebook’s social graph and compares them across millions of items from Etsy’s marketplace. The product works by (1) connecting with your Facebook account and […]

We spend a lot of time gathering metrics for our network, servers, and many things going on within the code that drives Etsy. It’s no secret that this is one of our keys to moving fast. We use a variety of monitoring tools to help us correlate issues across our architecture. But what most monitoring […]

Hi! Dan McKinley and Wil Stuckey from the Etsy Curation team here. We’ll be your hosts for a three-part series about the use of MongoDB here at Etsy. The Curation Team. Well, half of it. (Photo credit: Elizabeth Weinberg.) In this, the first entry, we’ll give some background on how and why we use MongoDB, […]

Browsing Etsy’s marketplace, you can find over five million active item listings posted by 158,000 different sellers. Digging deeper, you may heart an item you really like (we have over 40MM total hearts), or maybe even buy a thing or two (2009 marketplace sales of $180.6MM). On a monthly basis, Etsy generates over 750MM page […]