Code as Craft

Posts related to engineering

• 09 October 2012 - Scaling User Security

  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 [...]

• 10 September 2012 - The Engineer Exchange Program

  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 [...]

• 31 August 2012 - What Hardware Powers Etsy.com?

  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 [...]

• 23 August 2012 - Posting PostMortems for a (generally) Non-Technical Audience

  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 [...]

• 10 August 2012 - Static Analysis for PHP

  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 [...]

• 28 June 2012 - Is It A Bird? Is It A Plane? No, It’s Supergrep!

  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 [...]

• 25 June 2012 - Javascript: Keeping It Classy

  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 [...]

• 24 May 2012 - Robots, Graphs, and Binary Search

  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 [...]

• 22 May 2012 - Blameless PostMortems and a Just Culture

  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 [...]

• 30 March 2012 - Kernel Debugging 101

  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 [...]

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