[MichaelGG]

I'm consistently surprised with Etsy engineering. (I guess that means I am not updating.) For what appears to my eye to be a rather generic "e-commerce marketplace" (my only visibility is regretsy) they really do a lot of big engineering projects.

I would have expected that a public company in this position would scale back engineering since it doesn't, at first glance, seem to be directly relevant to their business (they're not a tech company). How does a company end up with "good" management that keeps the tech so strong?

[rjbwork]

I would guess it has something to do with tough lessons learned from their catastrophic early technical debt that brought the site and development to somewhat of a standstill right around 2009 or so.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eenrfm50mXw

[kristianc]

Many of the acknowledged leaders from a tech architecture standpoint started from the point of their architecture being a real mess. Soundcloud and Spotify come to mind.

[__derek__]

> (they're not a tech company)

Is that a nod to Anil Dash's post[1] arguing that there is no tech industry as such?

[1]: https://medium.com/humane-tech/there-is-no-technology-indust...

[bigiain]

A "generic e-commerce marketplace" like, say, Amazon?

[dc2447]

I love when the guys from Etsy present at conferences and they start with that joke:

We are a monitoring company with a side line in being an online marketplace