Etsy's engineering team writes about deployment, metrics, blameless postmortems, and data infrastructure at the company.
HN commenters repeatedly call it an excellent engineering blog, especially useful to startups for continuous delivery and building reliable systems.
Response (awaiting moderation, I think it's the links?):
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> haha, that’s funny. i regularly use non-CouchDB databases and I get along great with
> all the people from other databases at conferences.
Oh, I tend to bite people when I find out they use another database . Maybe I should stop that?
> even if i did feel like we were competing, i wouldn’t care. this post really is about
> reliability issues i don’t think your users are fully aware of and i honestly hope that
> you fix.
You must be thrilled to learn that single server durability is coming. I look forward to a followup post extolling MongoDB’s virtues this fall.
> I responded earlier to the complexity of actually keeping something available that
> depends on [multiple servers]. so i won’t cover it again.
Yes, it is a difficult, but not unsolvable, problem. Mongo’s made a bunch of tradeoffs in the awesome vs. easy to program area. For instance, remember last year when CouchDB was saying MongoDB sucked because of its lack of concurrency? That it was too complicated to do concurrency in C++ and that Erlang was the way? Well, now Mongo has concurrency, so on to the next “must have” thing.
>You make it sounds like this is all just a matter of bugs, it’s not, and i find blaming
> it on users who don’t use JIRA or get on IRC a little distasteful.
People discuss everything from bugs to architecture to lunch on our various forums. I was trying to say, possibly badly, that we have a lot of ways for people with…
Brooklyn, NY
Etsy, Inc.
Hiring for developers, operations, and lots of other roles (including non-technical), see http://www.etsy.com/careers/
Etsy is the world's marketplace for handmade and vintage goods. To give you an idea of our scale, last year Etsy sellers sold over $500 million worth of goods on Etsy. We have 17 million active members, and do 1.4 billion pageviews per month.
Individual developers at Etsy deploy code to the live site around 30 times per day, so if you want to move fast at scale, this is the place for you. We have an amazing devops culture and an amazing engineering team that makes all this possible. Check out http://codeascraft.etsy.com/ and http://www.slideshare.net/etsy to learn more about how we do what we do.
We have big challenges, from making sense of all of this data to stopping fraud to helping our sellers be more awesome every day.
Again, check out our positions here: http://www.etsy.com/careers/, and feel free to email me directly at dbernal@etsy.com. I am a developer, not a recruiter, FYI, and I promise to answer any questions you have honestly (unless you ask something that's privileged, obviously.)
I had asked a similar question on Quora [1] few years back. Here is the summary:
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Engineering?sk=notes
- Google: http://google-engtools.blogspot.com/
- Twitter: http://engineering.twitter.com/
- Linkedin: http://engineering.linkedin.com/blog
- Dropbox: https://tech.dropbox.com/
- Instagram: http://instagram-engineering.tumblr.com/
- Netflix: http://techblog.netflix.com/
- Flickr: http://code.flickr.com
- Etsy: http://codeascraft.etsy.com/
- Yelp: http://engineeringblog.yelp.com/
- Heroku: https://blog.heroku.com/
- Airbnb: http://nerds.airbnb.com/
- Bitly: http://word.bitly.com/
- Evernote: https://blog.evernote.com/tech/
- Highscalability: http://highscalability.com/
[1] https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-companies-that-have-some-of-the-best-engineering-blogs
We've played around with:
OpenTSDB: http://opentsdb.net/
StatsD: https://github.com/etsy/statsd/ (description here - http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/02/15/measure-anything-measure-everything/)
OpenTSDB and StatsD seemed great for getting TS data in and producing nice dashboards, but they didn't seem to fit our needs for performing custom analytics on the data.
At the moment, we're leaning towards leveraging Cassandra based on our scalability requirements. Check out http://rubyscale.com/blog/2011/03/06/basic-time-series-with-cassandra/ and http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/advanced-time-series-with-cassandra to get an idea on how cassandra can help.
Etsy did. I don't think it was a good decision and I think the reasons they did had more to do with resetting from some bad architecture decisions, but they're the example I know of. http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/09/28/scaling-etsy-what-went-wrong-what-went-right/ I think the big lesson here would be: don't have separate DBA and Engineering teams.
On the other hand, I could name quite a few people who went the other way, like Urban Dictionary who run on our http://postgres.heroku.com service, too. (I don't normally name customers, but he recorded a video saying he liked us so I think it's fair game. http://success.heroku.com/urbandictionary )
About that video.
I was going to write something scathing about it, but that'd be useless. All I'll say is imitating Wes Anderson is tired and boring. Looks like it was fun to make and some people will like it for sure, but I think it pales in comparison to the Etsy recruiting video:
http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2010/07/09/etsy-is-hiring/
I hate to bring this up this tired discussion, but is this a NYC vs SF thing? The Etsy video could almost be considered dark and pessimistic, while the Twitter video is full of whimsy and infantilization.