A weird epic ramble about Etsy homepages from the middle 2000’s
I was #5 at Etsy back in the early days.  Three co-founders (who actually bought the site from some other dude, they didn&#x27;t create Etsy), Jared Tarbell, and then me.  (There were some other folks, support staff who technically worked for the investors IIRC)<p>It&#x27;s pretty much my only &quot;impressive&quot; job of my career, in terms of name dropping at parties.  But in terms of technology and business it was a madhouse.  I remember thinking &quot;Nothing like a business was happening at Esty.&quot; when they fired me.  (I was going to quit, but my girlfriend at the time convinced me not to, and then they fired me a week or two later anyway.  Long story.)<p>I always figured someone would eventually show up and want to interview me about it, but that&#x27;s never happened so far.<p>I&#x27;ve forgotten most of the wild stuff.<p>All the business logic was in stored procedures in the DB so as you can imagine it was always on fire.  Upgrading didn&#x27;t help because our growth rate was ridiculous.<p>The frontend PHP guy was a newbie to programming.  He barely knew what he was doing but he could nail those beautiful UX designs pixel-perfect.  The guy&#x27;s probably a millionaire now.<p>The backend sysadmin, DBA dude was a total Master-Blaster.  If he didn&#x27;t like it he would literally throw a fit and scream at the CEO and shut things down until he got his way.  He used to lie to the CEO all the time if he didn&#x27;t want to implement something he&#x27;d just say &quot;it&#x27;s impossible&quot;.<p>They built a skateboard half-pipe in the office even though none of us skated.<p>It was pretty nuts.<p>I found out later on that they hired me because my resume was the first one on craigslist that had Python on it.  Then during the interview they found out I used Devorak layout on my laptop and that&#x27;s why they hired me.<p>The &quot;middle layer&quot; they had me write was pretty much useless.  It basically passed requests from the webservers to the DB.  Over 80% of the API was empty methods, literally just a docstring, with all the processing happening in a decorator.<p>I implemented a cache in there (early use of Memcache.  Glyph hisself wrote a Twisted interface to it in front of mine eyes!  They were like &quot;We want to hire a networking consultant.  What about this guy?&quot;  Me: &quot;You want to hire Glyph and I get to hang out with him and learn from him!?  Yes.  Yes, please.&quot;  So that was nice.)<p>The thing is they didn&#x27;t turn on the cache.  It just sat there.  The investors pushed this Sid person onto us to try to get some semblance of adult supervision.  ...  I&#x27;ve told this story before,  Sid wanted some information on long-running requests, and I had to switch it (the cache) on in prod myself to show them that the required logging was already there.<p>There there was the other Sid who wanted to rewrite everything in Java.  (First Sid wanted to rewrite in C++.)  &quot;Project Phoenix&quot; he called it, that didn&#x27;t go over well.<p>(Recall that the problem wasn&#x27;t the implementation language of the server code, it was that <i>all of the business logic was in stored procedures in the DB</i> so rewriting the server code was never going to help.)<p>That&#x27;s all I got this morning.