Code as Craft

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 […]

This past summer we completed a project that spanned several months of planning and preparation – moving our source control from Subversion to Git. The code that runs our search engine, front-end web stack, support/admin tools, API, configuration management, and more are now stored in and deployed from Git. We thought some of you might […]

At Etsy, we deploy often, from head, and everything that is committed is to trunk and must be ready for production immediately. This makes it very important to test your code before committing; otherwise, you will be holding up everyone else from committing and deploying since trunk always needs to be clean. Over a year […]

There’s nothing more frustrating than not understanding what’s right in front of you, as the non-German speakers among us might surmise after watching the clip from comedy programme Loriot above.  At Etsy, we’ve been working to build the world’s first truly global marketplace, allowing buyers and sellers to connect and have meaningful exchanges, regardless of […]

By Noah Sussman and Laura Beth Denker. Splitting Up A Large Test Suite Lately we’ve been deploying code 25 times a day or more, and running automated tests every time we deploy. Conservatively, we run our tests about 25 times on a normal business day. At Etsy, deployments are managed by engineers, not by ops […]

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 […]

(Note: this post is a largely non-technical discussion about technical issues. It’s mainly written for the shoppers and sellers on Etsy, but I’m posting it on our engineering blog because I think engineers might be interested.) The other night we had an outage. Put frankly: outages suck. They suck for shoppers, and sellers, and they […]

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 […]