Code as Craft

One of the things that we like to do here at Etsy is to push the envelope. Pushing the envelope means reaching deep into unknown technologies and approaches, and to experiment in areas that we are not familiar with. It’s in this vein that we’d like to share some early and unfiltered work: The Turbo […]

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 […]

A little while back, we hit an extremely embarrassing issue: 32-bit signed integer overflow on some primary keys. In our architecture, an unsigned 64-bit key is generated by a global ticket server, but the sharded tables’ schemas did not use BIGINT UNSIGNED as the column data-type. Inserts into the affected tables started failing en masse […]

Summer is ending New security features Sweeping in like Fall The Etsy Security Team is extremely happy to announce the simultaneous release of three important security features: Two factor authentication, full site SSL support, and viewable login history data. We believe that these protections are industry best practice, and we’re excited to offer them proactively […]

Co-authors: Marc Hedlund, SVP, Product Development at Etsy Raffi Krikorian, Director, Platform Services at Twitter Your first week at any new job is (at least if you chose a good job!) filled with tons to learn, new ways of doing things, and working models that you might have considered unattainable in the job you just […]

Traditionally, discussing hardware configurations when running a large website is something done inside private circles; and normally to discuss how vendor X did something very poorly, and vendor Y’s support sucks. With the advent of the “cloud”, this has changed slightly. Suddenly people are talking about how big their instances are, and how many of […]

The other day I posted to the Etsy News blog about some recent outages we’ve had. We haven’t given this much information about site outages in the past, and this particular post was written for the non-technical-minded members of the community. The process of writing it was a challenge for me. It underscored the lesson […]

At Etsy we have three tiers of static analysis on our PHP code that run on every commit or runs periodically every hour. They form an important part of our continuous deployment pipeline along with one-button deploys, fast unit and functional tests, copious amounts of graphing, and a fantastic development environment to make sure code […]

Etsy parties have come to earn quite the boisterous reputation — there may or may not have been kegs dragged up to the roof on a particularly balmy occasion, not to mention cadaver eating contests and mariachi bands. Thus, one of the greatest survival skills I have come to hone here at HQ is the […]

Here at Etsy we employ a few internal tools for employees to help administer and moderate the public-facing site you have all come to know and love. One of these tools to which we introduced you to earlier (Compass) is used by our support team to handle member inquiries and oversee listings and shops. Last […]