Code as Craft

We love our human customers. That said we get a lot of traffic from robots too. This is great, especially when they use the Etsy API. However, they sometimes misbehave. And they misbehave frequently in the late hours, not unlike a legendary East Village night club. This time Craig Ferguson isn’t at the door to […]

Last week, Owen Thomas wrote a flattering article over at Business Insider on how we handle errors and mistakes at Etsy. I thought I might give some detail on how that actually happens, and why. Anyone who’s worked with technology at any scale is familiar with failure. Failure cares not about the architecture designs you […]

A dark fog had been rolling in that night, and we had been setting up a new cluster of servers for our CI system. CentOS 6.2, LXC and random kernel panics were all there to lend a hand. The kernel panics were new to our party, having been absent at the previous cluster setup. The […]

At Etsy we have one hard and fast rule for new Engineers on their first day: deploy to production. We’ve talked a lot in the past about our deployment, metrics, and testing processes. But how does the development environment facilitate someone coming in on day one and contributing something that takes them through the steps […]

In a past post, Divide and Concur, we told you how we approached dividing our large test suite into smaller test suites by keeping similar tests together rather than arbitrarily dividing. Dividing tests by common points of error made triaging failures systemic failures quick, and enticed everyone to write faster, more deterministic tests, but not […]

At Etsy, we are constantly evaluating the security and safety of our members as they use the site.  One way we do this is by analyzing user generated content (UGC) for possible problems.  As part of the process we integrate results from the Google Safe Browsing (GSB) service. Typically this is client-side technology used by […]

A few places to look for us in the next few months. Michelle D’Netto and Lindsey Baron, February 23, Selenium 101 Workshop. Brooklyn, NY. Laura Beth Denker, February 24, Scaling Communication via Continuous Deployment. London. We’re sponsoring Devopsdays Austin, April 2nd and 3rd. Austin, TX. Look for us. John Goulah, April 11th, Starts with S […]

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 […]

Most product ideas are shitty, yet we spend the majority of our lives working on them. As a product hacker, you’ll be working on a constant stream of ideas that excite you to the point of obsession; staying up late writing code, thinking about it every waking and non-waking minute. We’ve all admitted that a […]

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 […]