I push, therefore I am: two days at Etsy (2013)

http://mhawthorne.net/posts/2013-etsy-netflix-I-push-therefore-I-am/

by luu • 6 years ago

173 75 6 years ago

mhawthorne.net

zeristor• 6 years ago

Is there anything else like this from the last year or so?

oftenwrong• 6 years ago

Dan McKinley's talks are not that recent, but are similar:

https://mcfunley.com/

He is another former Etsy developer.

elliebike• 6 years ago

I really like the idea of a developer exchange - does anyone know of other places that have done this?

alex_duf4• 6 years ago

The Guardian (my employer) and the BBC ran sessions to exchange about how to make a news app.

It's on pause given the current situation, but it was very informative!

bArray2• 6 years ago

What kinds of problems would you face in creating a news app? Surely content delivery is the same as that through the web page and for displaying the content you just use some cross-platform UI library?

(From somebody on the outside with absolutely no idea.)

gigatexal2• 6 years ago

Cross company is awesome but even better would be cross team within the same company. No single thing could do more to break us v. them thinking and silos than this imo

gen220• 6 years ago

We have an infra rotation program, where application and service programmers can spend a quarter or two working under product infrastructure on whatever their infra passion is. It’s great to see somebody’s passion for a big change boil for a year or two, and then they rotate in and are given the authority to make that change.

That being said, I’d love to see people rotate between application and service teams. Some applications and services are years ahead of others in terms of their maturity and scaling problems/solutions, so there’s a lot of tacit knowledge to be spread. We have a monorepo so self-starters can read code and commit messages, but a formal program would really help accelerate and democratize the knowledge spreading.

orta• 6 years ago

Artsy did a randomized dev team swap, where team leads stayed and everyone under shuffled: https://artsy.github.io/blog/2017/09/11/DevSwap/

hoorayimhelping• 6 years ago

I recall us doing this a couple of times when I was at Etsy (2012-2015). I think we did it with Github as well.

The thing to keep in mind is that accepting non team members and getting them meaningful work to do was already part of Etsy's culture. New engineers would bootcamp with a team for a couple of weeks when they joined. So the culture was already set up for this - managers and team members knew what to expect from a teammate who may not be a domain expert.

I think the way to start a program like this is to start with an internal bootcamping type program and learn and make mistakes through that.

gergelykralik2• 6 years ago

Is the site down for everyone else, or just me?

bosie• 6 years ago

works for me, loaded also very quickly.

gravitas2• 6 years ago

Mobile firefox gives me an untrusted SSL warning, after accepting I get a "Dreamhost site not found" error.

gergelykralik2• 6 years ago

Same here. Tried with VPN from US, EU, no dice.

brendt_gd• 6 years ago

6. Maybe PHP Doesn’t Suck

Being a PHP programmer, I can concur: https://stitcher.io/blog/php-in-2020

pavel_lishin5• 6 years ago

While many of the arguments against PHP still stand today, there's also a bright side: you can write clean and maintainable, fast and reliable applications in PHP.

You can, but in my experience, most people don't. Especially in Wordpress land. I've paid for plugins with egregious problems that "work okay" because error reporting is silenced.

if you want to, you can write modern and clean PHP code, and leave behind much of the mess it was 10 years ago.

But most people haven't, and I'm not really interested in spending my career and hobby time playing Russian Roulette with coworkers and collaborators.

kozhevnikov• 6 years ago

Can it be helped with a good linter? JavaScript had similar problems as there were more bad things about it than good, but with ESLint and a good config (Airbnb's or other) community evolved and most of the new stuff adheres to best practices by default.

Juliate2• 6 years ago

You can, but in my experience, most people don't.

The same argument can be said of all languages.

It's true with PHP because the language is popular.

It's true with Java, because the language is pop^Wthe holy grail of entreprise software language.

Having seen both worlds in small and large corporate settings (and others, in Ruby, Python, C, Perl), I somehow prefer PHP, because at least, it does not pretend to be "the right thing" for enterprise software.

jdxcode• 6 years ago

as someone that knows vanishingly little about PHP, is there anything in PHP I can't do in say, TypeScript (or at least not as expressively?)

hibbelig• 6 years ago

It’s less about the language and its expressiveness. PHP has a shared nothing concurrency model. For the typical Web 1.0 requires response processing it’s quite convenient.

stickfigure• 6 years ago

That section really should have been retitled:

6. Maybe Monoliths Don't Suck

There really wasn't anything PHP-specific there. My monolithic Java backend restarts much faster than webpack can rebuild my frontend. Complex microservice systems (like Netflix's) make for complicated developer setups in any language.

winrid3• 6 years ago

Are you using Spring? I've seen medium-large Spring Java apps take 10-15s to start. Not to build - to start. They're usually very fast then though.

jcp2fa• 6 years ago

I think it is important that engineering organizations identify a primary thing that they want to excel at. It affects the day to day mindset of the engineers, gives context to help with decisions, and provides guidance for what types of engineers we want to hire.

Aligning expectations is extremely important, especially when hiring - the culture of an engineering organization has an outsized impact on the final product. I have seen a lot of contention when people are brought into an environment where they expect to be moving fast, only to realize soon into the job that stability is much higher valued than frequent releases.

Jach• 6 years ago

I agree with your general point about engineering culture (there's also more broadly the company culture) and it's always frustrating when management can't decide what the engineering values actually are to any real specificity, leaving it in the hands of each team doing interviews.

I disagree though that stability and frequent releases need to be traded off -- it seems only at infrequently releasing orgs do people think that. As for new people coming in and being surprised by the slowness, I see it most happen with acqui-hires rather than new hires, since new hires who want to avoid being surprised by such things tend to ask enough questions (like "how are releases done?") in the interview stage.

Tarks• 6 years ago

Bryan's amazing talk on this nails it for me https://vimeo.com/230142234

dgritsko• 6 years ago

the biggest problem we face is maintaining an understanding of what is happening in our system

This really resonated with me. Distributed systems are _hard_ and tests (while valuable) are no substitute for being able to reason about what your application is doing and what might be affecting it.

schraitle• 6 years ago

I was stuck by this part too. It made me think of advice I read recently that went something like this:

"The best way to see the results of a change to a complex system is to make it and see what happens"

fallat• 6 years ago

Etsy sounds fun to work at. I like their ideology from this guy's perspective.

Too bad we couldn't see the other perspective. From what I hear Netflix is generally nice to work at too, but from the sounds of it may be more stressful.

spyspy• 6 years ago

The article was really interesting but given it was written in 2013 I wonder how much of it is still true. They're both probably very different places to work than they were 7 years ago (for better or worse or same same but different).

OJFord• 6 years ago

A lot of the Etsy engineers seemed to find this fascinating. I think the main reason for this is that they run in a data center and control their own hardware

I'm shocked that Etsy, then or now, is at a scale where that's even close to making sense, that it would even be a discussion.

I wonder if it still is, I don't know how its size has changed over the intervening seven years, but with the explosion in popularity of I/P aaS I think it would be even more surprising today.

bichiliad2• 6 years ago

This is fairly old at this point; we were in the process of migrating to the cloud for several years and completed the bulk of the effort recently: https://cloud.google.com/press-releases/2020/0219/etsy-compl...

breakingcups• 6 years ago

Do you have any insights into performance or cost difference?

dx034• 6 years ago

Own data center rarely makes sense. Colocation can work out well for companies with a lot of demand where one location is sufficient.

Dedicated servers (where you don't own the hardware) can make sense pretty quickly, the cost of managing that can be lower than cloud offerings even for mid-sized companies. PAAS or IAAS didn't really change that. Once you have a certain size, having your own department to manage hardware isn't that expensive in comparison.

carapace• 6 years ago

Sometime these decision are made because, say, the co-founder/CTO just loves his machines.

atom_enger• 6 years ago

This used to be true but we are now 95%~ in Google Cloud.

trca• 6 years ago

We're almost entirely migrated into GCP now, roughly 95% done. Here's a CodeAsCraft article from when we started the project in 2018 about how we selected GCP vs AWS or Azure, and what the expected effort to migrate would be: https://codeascraft.com/2018/01/04/selecting-a-cloud-provide...

cryptozeus• 6 years ago

Fantastic write up.

Curious and respectful.

readarticle• 6 years ago

It was really interesting to see Etsy experiencing the same issues as Netflix in serving multiple devices and UI styles with the same API, and attempting to solve the issue with a similar conceptual approach but with a totally different technology stack. I think we will see a lot of new ideas in this space over the next few years as more companies feel the need to adjust their API designs due to device coverage, bandwidth constraints, UI innovation, and so on.

Less than two years before GraphQL was publicly announced

zackmorris• 6 years ago

From the article:

5. Designing a Platform is Designing an Organization

An ex-colleague of mine taught me the phrase “you ship your org chart”, meaning that the structure of your system in Production usually matches the structure of your organization. In my experience this is true.

Also known as Conway's law, this was the single biggest lesson at my last job (just before it ended). I've come to believe that nearly all code problems are actually people problems.

So for example, we aren't really web developers, we're coders who work around the numerous problems introduced by decades of design by committee. We aren't game developers, we're coders who make forward progress despite a level of wheel reinvention not seen in any other industry. And so on and so forth.

Me? I've decided to take a break from programming for a while to let the churn die down. I'm still listening for possible gigs, but for the most part I'll be working on the other areas in life that I've neglected over the last ~20 years. Maybe get back into art, blog a little, invent something. Unfortunately I don't have the luxury of a large savings account or investments, so I'm doing this on faith and relying on the evolution of humanity in these times.

johnmoonyy• 6 years ago

Really cool read. I didn't know companies have these type of programs

8. Always Keep in Mind What You Want to Excel At This was very touching. I haven't thought about my work in this way. I have a general idea of what I'd like to do and improve on but it doesn't always translate to my day to day.

I push, therefore I am: two days at Etsy (2013)

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