Code as Craft

I’m Randy, the Designer Director at Etsy. We think of design like all crafts. We do it best when we have a deep understanding with our tools, so our designers write code alongside our engineers. Together we shape what we build every day. Most days I step into our office, and I see crochet-covered duct […]

(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 […]

Fred Brooks was awesome! Here are a couple of links to blog posts by folks who were there: Fred Brooks at Etsy on Software Development and Collaboration Geek Rockstar Fred Brooks on Design Original post announcing the talk below: When I talk with technologists (and we are hiring, so I do a lot these days!), […]

The authors of Peopleware (a must-read) wrote: “The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature.” At Etsy, cooperation between the dev and ops teams is important to me as CTO for one simple reason: things work better that way. When a productive fluidity exists between those two teams, […]

At Etsy, our mission is to enable people to make a living making things.  The engineers who make Etsy make our living making something we love: software.  We think of our code as craft — hence the name of the blog.  Here we’ll write about our craft and our collective experience building and running Etsy, […]