Top all-time · #363
Code as Craft
Company blog · codeascraft.comprogrammingweb
Code as Craft is the company blog at codeascraft.com, writing about programming and web. Since 2013, 152 different Hacker News readers have linked it 213 times, most often “Blameless post-mortems and a just culture (2012)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 7 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Etsy's engineering blog for blameless postmortems, documentation, HTTPS and certificate management, and infrastructure and anomaly-detection write-ups. Commenters describe it as a source of learning.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Blameless post-mortems and a just culture (2012)14 people · 16 mentions · first linked 2015-01-16
- /9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2015-05-19
- Etsy’s experiment with immutable documentation9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2018-10-11
- Etsy: Selecting a Cloud Provider6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2018-01-04
- Etsy’s Debriefing Facilitation Guide for Blameless Postmortems5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-11-18
- Improving the deployment experience of a ten-year old application4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-06-16
- How Etsy Ships Apps4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-05-15
- How Etsy Manages HTTPS and SSL Certificates for Custom Domains on Pattern4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-01-31
- How Etsy Formats Currency4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-04-19
- API First Transformation at Etsy – Concurrency3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-09-06
What Hacker News says?
Etsy is another company with extraordinarily talented writers. Their engineering blog "CodeAsCraft"[0] is superb and I invariably learn something everytime I read it. [0] https://codeascraft.com/
Comment linking /
on “Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber”Submitted We Invite Everyone at Etsy to Do an Engineering Rotation as a story · 293 points
HN discussionFor actionable advice on how to be kind while still capturing the lesson. I recommend this article by John Allspaw on blameless postmortems. https://codeascraft.com/2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems/
Comment linking /2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems/
on “Be Kind”Submitted Loupe: Etsy's New Monitoring Stack as a story · 242 points
HN discussionDocumentation has a tendency to not keep up with what it is documenting, etsy has a great blog post about this and their shift in philosophy around documentation https://codeascraft.com/2018/10/10/etsys-experiment-with-imm... . we've adopted something similar at work where we've necessitated that all support related questions be asked through https://www.discourse.org/ . This allows the most timely solutions to surf…
Comment linking /2018/10/10/etsys-experiment-with-immutable-documentation/
on “Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?”Submitted Etsy’s experiment with immutable documentation as a story · 187 points
HN discussionNo, sorry, and it's important to address this line of thinking because it goes strongly against what our top engineering cultures have learned about building robust systems. > Over the course of a programming career, there will be times when you're operating directly on a production environment, and one misstep can spell disaster These times should be extremely rare, and even in this case, they should've had backups…
Comment linking /2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems/
on “Accidentally destroyed production database on first day of a job”Submitted How Etsy Manages HTTPS and SSL Certificates for Custom Domains on Pattern as a story · 182 points
HN discussionOh thank you, I didn't know that was referred to as "observability" I thought it was just logging. This article from Etsy's engineering blog [1] was part of the inspiration for this question. Funnily enough when I googled "Etsy engineering logging" the 5th result was for a position on Etsy's observability team. [1] https://codeascraft.com/2011/02/15/measure-anything-measure-...
Comment linking /2011/02/15/measure-anything-measure-everything/
on “Ask HN: What are must-know concepts for back end development?”Submitted Etsy’s Journey to TypeScript as a story · 173 points
HN discussion> we won't ever write articles > Whitepapers. I probably should have said "content" instead of blog because I agree 100% with this. Point still stands. What the OP was referring to will likely become part of an engineering blog. a la : https://codeascraft.com/
Comment linking /
on “Our User-Mode WireGuard Year”Submitted Experimenting with HHVM at Etsy as a story · 150 points
HN discussionPerhaps not all tech companies care to push past human error in each postmortem (or even have a proper formal process at all), but some are known to do just that. Etsy and Google are among the well-documented cases. > This idea of digging deeper into the circumstance and environment that an engineer found themselves in is called looking for the “Second Story”. In Post-Mortem meetings, we want to find Second Stories…
Comment linking /2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems/
on “SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster”Submitted Hound: A Fast Code Search Tool as a story · 96 points
HN discussionInterestingly, this is the opposite of the direction much of the tech industry has been moving with post-mortems. - http://firstround.com/review/this-is-how-effective-leaders-m... - http://code.hootsuite.com/blameless-post-mortems/ - https://codeascraft.com/2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems/
Comment linking /2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems/
on “USS McCain collision ultimately caused by UI confusion”Submitted LXC – Running 14,000 tests per day and beyond as a story · 96 points
HN discussionEtsy | http://etsy.com | Brooklyn, NY ONSITE FULL-TIME I'm a product manager here at Etsy and love it here. More than 20 million people buy from Etsy each year and we have 1.5 million sellers offering 36 million unique handmade, vintage, and craft items. The people are really smart, friendly, a little quirky, and they care a lot about the product, the infrastructure, and the community. If you have read our engineeri…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2016)”Submitted Blameless post-mortems and a just culture (2012) as a story · 94 points
HN discussionEtsy https://codeascraft.com/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Which companies have the best blogs written by their engineering team?”Submitted How Etsy Ships Apps as a story · 87 points
HN discussionrelevant: https://codeascraft.com/2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems/
Comment linking /2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems/
on “January 28th Incident Report”Submitted Personalized Recommendations at Etsy as a story · 73 points
HN discussionEtsy's blog has some good posts [1]. [1] https://codeascraft.com/2012/03/13/making-it-virtually-easy-...
Comment linking /2012/03/13/making-it-virtually-easy-to-deploy-on-day-one/
on “A Beginner's Guide to Scaling to 11M+ Users on Amazon's AWS”Submitted How Etsy caches: hashing, Ketama, and cache smearing as a story · 58 points
HN discussionJohn Allspaw applied concepts from The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error to software post mortems. When I was at Etsy, he taught a class explaining this whole concept. We read the book and discussed concepts like the Fundamental Attribution Error. I've found it very beneficial, and the concepts we learned have helped me inn almost every aspect of understanding the complicated world we live in. I've taken thes…
Comment linking /2016/11/17/debriefing-facilitation-guide/
on “Amazon cargo plane crashes in Texas”Submitted Hound: A Fast Code Search Tool as a story · 47 points
HN discussionEtsy is the global marketplace for unique and creative goods. With more than 100 million buyers, and over 5 million sellers, we are an ecommerce company at scale. As part of our mission to offer a best in class personalized search experience, our Search Engineering teams continue to grow. I include links to a couple of our live roles, and we welcome applicants from all across the US & Canada for these positions. Eng…
Comment linking /2020/10/29/bringing-personalized-search-to-etsy/
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2022)”Submitted Reducing the Roots of Some Evil as a story · 43 points
HN discussion1)Highscalability http://highscalability.com 2)BraveNewGeek - http://bravenewgeek.com 3)Antirez(redis) - http://antirez.com/latest/0 4)Aphyr - https://aphyr.com 5)GitHub's Engineering Blog - both old and new https://github.com/blog/category/engineering http://githubengineering.com 6)Facebook Engineering https://code.facebook.com/posts/ 7)Twitter Engineering https://blog.twitter.com/engineering 8)Code as Craft - Etsy…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What tech blogs, podcasts do you follow outside of HN?”Submitted Developing in a Monorepo While Still Using Webpack as a story · 41 points
HN discussion
