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 […]

Note: This post was co-written by Avleen Vig (@avleen) and Zane Lackey (@zanelackey). In mid-January of this year we started an initiative to remove Java browser plugins from all employee systems at Etsy, as we feel this is a best practice to be striving towards. To that end, we wanted to discuss the challenges we […]

Here at Etsy we (ab)use our memcache infrastructure pretty heavily as a caching layer between our applications and our database tiers. We functionally partition our memcache instances into small pools and overall it works fabulously well. We have however suffered occasionally from what we call “hot keys”. What is a “Hot” key? A “hot key” is a […]

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 […]

You may have noticed a theme in many of our blog posts. While we do push the technology envelope in many ways, we also like to stick to tried, true and data driven methods to help us keep us sane. One of the critical components of our infrastructure is centralised logging. Our systems generate a vast amount […]

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 […]

How do you make changes to your database’s structure that’s getting hammered 24×7 without any disruption? If you use Oracle and paid millions for it, it’s built in. If you use Mysql, it’s one of the holy grails of database operations, and one we’ve learned to do here at Etsy. We have a sharded architecture, […]

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 […]