The Etsy site performance report is amazing

This is gonna be quick – I just found out yesterday that the Etsy developer blog (code as craft) publishes a site performance report every quarter.

I love this for so many reasons – it’s a public commitment to having good site performance (and seth walker from Etsy has a talk about that!), it’s regular and constantly changing, they have GRAPHS, they explain what internal changes caused that 25ms drop, and they talk in depth about their measurement tools and what the advantages & disadvantages are of each one. I’m definitely going to be coming back to this frequently.

It covers both backend and frontend performance. If you’re interested in web performance, you should look at Lara Hogan’s talks & book “Designing for Performance” on frontend performance. (if you look carefully, you’ll notice that a lot of those Etsy site performance reports are written by her).

I also found some slides Web Performance and Tools at Etsy by Mike Brittain that are great.

I couldn’t find an index of the older posts so I made one myself for my own reference. Here’s everything I could find:

I would love to make a performance report like this at work.

One other tiny thing I love about this – the 2014-2015 reports are all (with the exception of one) written by women. I asked someone about this and they were like “yeah that’s because the Etsy performance team is mostly women!”. And Lara Hogan from before is Senior Engineering Manager of Performance and Infrastructure Chief of Staff.

Of course having majority-women teams and teams led by women is a totally normal & reasonable thing but it made me happy to see. While we’re talking about things by people I admire who work at Etsy I’m going to link you to Ryn Daniels’ incredible post On Showing up to the Table. They also have a book coming out called Effective DevOps!