Company engineering blog by Etsy
The engineers who make Etsy make our living with a craft we love: software. This is where we'll write about our craft and our collective experience building and running the world's most vibrant handmade marketplace.
2 posts in the last 90 days · newest 29 Sept
Emily Sommer
As computing use grows, so does its environmental footprint. While hardware and software have become significantly more efficient, AI demand is growing even faster, outpacing those efficiency gains and increasing the overall environmental impact of computing. What’s more…
Isobel Scott
Etsy is home to over 100 million listings from 5.6 million active sellers. Because the items for sale are unique and creative, there is no standard product catalog that tells us what they are. When someone searches for “light linen dress for summer,” our models must infer what…
Pat Geitner
Etsy’s marketplace is defined by the creativity and craftsmanship of our sellers and the hundreds of millions of highly diverse products they offer. You can find silversmiths who cold-forge recycled sterling silver, weavers who dye raw fleece with indigo and black walnut, and…
Amanda Steigman
When buyers search on Etsy, they need to quickly and easily find the perfect item. At the same time, sellers need to be confident their unique products are being seen by the right customers. Our Ads Search ranking model, which is built on a multitask learning foundation, is the…
Ella Yarmo-Gray
Etsy has maintained a sharded MySQL architecture since around 2010. This database cluster contains most of Etsy’s online data and is made up of ~1,000 tables distributed across ~1,000 shards. Over the last 16 years, it has grown significantly: combined, these tables have over…
Yuqing Zhang
Ever searched for something specific, only to be met with results that are close, but not quite? On Etsy’s Search Relevance team, that frustration is exactly what we are tackling. Our goal is simple yet ambitious: to help buyers find exactly what they’re looking for, and to help…
Kelly McManus
In 2021, we published a blog post titled “Increasing experimentation accuracy and speed by using control variates,” describing how we reduce the variance of metrics using CUPED in our experimentation platform. This is a follow-up on how CUPED has evolved at Etsy since then…
David Weinzimmer
Rarely are there opportunities for big, bold, game-changing improvements in web performance. The Speculation Rules API (SRA) is a recent browser development that offers just such an opportunity. This post details a joint effort between the search and the web performance teams at…
Vipul Setty
For more than 20 years, Etsy has been the destination for human creativity online. Our marketplace is home to more than 100 million special items made, handpicked and designed by more than 5 million sellers. These items and the real people behind them are what set us apart. But…
Athena Chang
Imagine you have a fabulous idea to drive more sales on Etsy by giving out free ice cream with every purchase. How would you know if it will actually work? One way to test this out is to run an experiment! An experiment is a learning tool that can help us see if a new change…
