How Etsy Prepared for Historic Volumes of Holiday Traffic in 2020
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Re: How Etsy Prepared for Historic Volumes of Holiday Traffic in 2020
#2Does anyone know why the first deployment of the day needs to compile the whole codebase on all hosts? Stumbled over this part.
Re: How Etsy Prepared for Historic Volumes of Holiday Traffic in 2020
#3Does anyone know why the first deployment of the day needs to compile the whole codebase on all hosts? Stumbled over this part.
I think it's simply a badly worded way of saying they would need to push the build to 1000+ hosts after they compile it.
Re: How Etsy Prepared for Historic Volumes of Holiday Traffic in 2020
#4Let's hope they're not trying to log in with Google on their phones, because that hasn't worked for about a year now.
Re: How Etsy Prepared for Historic Volumes of Holiday Traffic in 2020
#5I run a small 3D printed jewelry business (https://lulimjewelry.com) where I sell on my own website and also on Etsy.com. The Etsy team handled Christmas great this year (although it was my first Christmas in the platform so I don’t really have much to compare it to). Specifically they handled the communication around the mail delays very well, both with me and with my customers. It’s really interesting to see the tech decisions that had to be made to make those communications!
Re: How Etsy Prepared for Historic Volumes of Holiday Traffic in 2020
#6The article was rather a disappointment compared to other articles Etsy has put up on their blog.
It was overall just lackluster and the TL;DR can be entirely summed up as, more than doubled traffic without issue (and no technical insights really).
Re: How Etsy Prepared for Historic Volumes of Holiday Traffic in 2020
#7The article was rather a disappointment compared to other articles Etsy has put up on their blog. It was overall just lackluster and the TL;DR can be entirely summed up as, more than doubled traffic without issue (and no technical insights really).
I agree. I learnt nothing from it.
Re: How Etsy Prepared for Historic Volumes of Holiday Traffic in 2020
#8Let's hope they're not trying to log in with Google on their phones, because that hasn't worked for about a year now.
Just tried it with my iPhone 12 Pro and worked fine. Logged in with Google on the first try.
Re: How Etsy Prepared for Historic Volumes of Holiday Traffic in 2020
#9The need for code freezes around high traffic events is usually a sign of very poor engineering culture, where patching extreme tech debt is much higher priority than technical excellence or product improvements that help the customers.
A code semi-freeze for weeks is incredibly alarming. How much unremediated tech debt must be causing that?
That is a massive red flag that Etsy engineering culture must be something like the SRE tail wagging the product engineering dog. I would bet that you only get rewarded at Etsy for being a visible firefighter, stopping failures on nights or weekends, jumping in front of outage bullets, and that if you take the time to design systems robust enough and safe enough that they don’t need code freezes in the first place, you are never going to get recognized or rewarded.
It’s baffling that not only did they have to resort to a long code freeze - but they even approved a public blog post bragging about it.
Boy, that tells you a lot about the culture. Not going to be seeking jobs there any time soon.
To put in context, I work for an ecommerce company that routinely sees 10-15x traffic around Black Friday -> Cyber Monday, and around Christmas to New Year. We don’t do any code freezes for the load, almost all of which is handled through auto-scaling in our on-prem data centers.
Re: How Etsy Prepared for Historic Volumes of Holiday Traffic in 2020
#10The need for code freezes around high traffic events is usually a sign of very poor engineering culture, where patching extreme tech debt is much higher priority than technical excellence or product improvements that help the customers. A code semi-freeze for weeks is incredibly alarming. How much unremediated tech debt must be causing that? That is a massive red flag that Etsy engineering culture must be something l…
An opinion no doubt informed by extensive experience in high-volume ecommerce.