Culture is always evolving and doesn't come for free. This is the story of Etsy's journey from 4-person startup to an international organization and the culture that we all work to foster.
(GMS) $1.35 Billion • 44 million members, 1.2 million active sellers • 26 million active listings • Nearly Every Country Performing Transactions • > 600 Employees
CEO • Brings a clear understanding that community is very important • Prioritizes a culture that supports community • Chad Dickerson brought on as CTO • Brings a clearer focus to the engineering team • “This siloed culture cannot work, we need to start over”
life • It was even expected to a degree! • Engineering projects were often low impact • Community needs to be a technical focus • Survived the holiday season … just!
MySQL for everything • ‘If it moves, graph it’ • Ganglia, Graphite, FITB, Nagios, Naglite • Starting to use this data for work/life balance as well as technical/systems reasons
silo holdovers (Sprouter gone!) • Non-standard technologies removed from production • Engineers receive 3 annual goals: • Speak at a conference • Write a blog post • Release open source software
more Engineering focused • Chad to CEO • Kellan promoted to CTO • Allspaw promoted to SVP of Operations • Consolidates importance of engineering culture to the very top of Etsy and increases stability
Statsd, Logster, Deployinator, Supergrep, Schemanator • Overall maturing of engineering - platform & people • Automation & config management solidified (Chef) • Security front and center • Security without negative impact to culture?
Dev & Ops as being integral to culture • Applying our core principles & learnings to security • Emphasis on security being a facilitator not a blocker • Security often enforced with terrible cultural impact • Build a human and effective security organization
growth in hiring, allow easy team transfers • Some major changes around product • Internationalization • High impact products (Shipping Labels, Gift Cards) • Became a certified B-Corp
power of business to solve social & environmental issues • Impacts engineering in new and interesting ways: • Waste, Recycling, Compost, Flushes (Yes we graph them!) • Efficiency of our tech, data center usage & partners • ‘Make the world more like Etsy’ - Extending the culture
environment • Allows PCI compliance without disrupting the culture • Interface with the web stack via a restricted Internet facing API • Get serious on Data Science • Dedicated Hadoop cluster for full time data scientists • Taking some chances and broadening of our engineers
term goals & not just keep the lights on • More headcount allows us to take chances • Focus on social/environmental impact, internally & externally with communities • Open source all of the things
IRC logs, images) • Opsweekly: Categorize and report Nagios alerts • Superbit: Allows simple querying of Vertica, Elasticsearch & big data by anyone who knows SQL • Catapult: Communicates experiments and related metrics (including conversion impact) • Begin a refocus on a Mobile/API First product vision
with tooling that levels access and allows interrogation by ALL • Designated Ops • Engineering invested in transparency & trust • The world doesn’t wait, mobile is the future
Integrating another engineering culture can be tough • Language, timezone and human cultural differences • Can be very successful, but don’t underestimate
(Elasticsearch/Logstash/Kibana) • Mobile First has increasing product focus • Mobile CI infrastructure embedded & ramped up • API First is huge effort and development push • Technical work for quality of life: On-call sleep tracking
communication investment • Understanding usage patterns • Accommodating that usage and factoring into the project • Describing the purpose of the project (not just about $$) • Technology can find its way into unexpected corners of your stack!
the changing tech landscape is key • Continuous Deployment hard in the ‘App Store world’ • Continuous Integration still applies of course • Continuous Deployment becomes Continuous Delivery • Use API to enable feature flag-driven native apps
✓ Automated build & test cycle ✓ ✓ Keep the build green, always ready to release ✓ ✓ One button deploys ✓ ✓ Business dictates when to deploy ✓ Every passing build deployed to prod ✓ All enhancements gated by feature flag ✓ ?
Build your apps in a reproducible way after each push to git • Identify bugs, missing dependencies early & often • Integrate security testing throughout lifecycle • Improve Mean Time To Recovery • Stop stressing about releases!
Wide surface area (50,000 LOC) High MTTR ! All of the bugs we’ve written More opportunities for failure Narrow surface area (< 100 LOC) Low MTTR ! A fraction of the bugs we’ve written per release Imagine that we’ll write
M&A • Integrating other engineering cultures inside your own is a challenge you should prepare for • Core tooling changes require great thought & communication • Mobile focus does not mean the end of always pushing • Tooling for happiness & W/L balance is a win for all
growth or M&A activity • It takes effort to keep it so however • Ensure our API is up to the job of supporting Mobile First • Ensure core tooling changes are understood & embraced by all • Communicate our engineering culture & history to new hires
continuous work • Iterate & improve - Even when you think you have ‘it’ • Don’t give in to potential disruptors like growth & security and let them destroy your culture
McDonnell) Slides: http://slidesha.re/1xYxZrG Video: http://vimeo.com/51310058 Scaling Etsy, What Went Wrong, What Went Right (Ross Snyder) Slides & video: http://bit.ly/po8zIj Etsy’s Journey to Continuous Integration for Mobile Apps (Nassim Kammah) Blog post: http://bit.ly/1yiGWwc Mean Time to Sleep (Ryan Frantz, Laurie Denness) Slides, Blog post, code: http://ryanfrantz.com/mtts/
ryanfrantz
elasticinfra
micoinc
dwchiang
gmofh_hr_team
boostdraft
satoshi256kbyte
dmmcom2025
eikohashiba
mkitahara01985
cynd
d2cid
vpon
reverentgeek
3n
tanoku
keithpitt
palkan
tammyeverts
mojombo
samlambert
cromwellryan
kevinliebholz
holman
![Questions? [email protected] @Ryan_Frantz](https://files.speakerdeck.com/presentations/916807f07f450132d6c52a0240a77894/slide_58.jpg){kind=link}