> One way Etsy drives this kind of commitment to deep understanding that seems to underlie its technology choices, is limiting the number of tools it uses as a

> One way Etsy drives this kind of commitment to deep understanding that seems to underlie its technology choices, is limiting the number of tools it uses as a company. It would rather be the master of few tools than have a broad knowledge across many different ones. Every large(-ish) company I know has pretty strict rules about the languages, frameworks, and tools used for the main products. The more flexible of these do allow prototyping using a different toolsets. The ones that have a developer audience always experiment with new environments. New tools and new processed get adopted over time, but in many cases the cycle they go through emulated pretty closely the adoption cycle seen outside. Even if the new shinny toy syndrome is very strong in this field, this makes a lot of sense, as nobody really wants to throw away everything. (_While writing this I got to think about the numerous rewrites eBay has seen over years_). > The company owns and operates its hardware and networks in its own datacenter. Part of the reason for avoiding the cloud is control, but not necessarily just from a security perspective as you might think. The real reason is Etsy personnel want to get under the hood and understand every aspect of every piece of technology the company controls. I continue to be very curious about how polarizing the cloud remains.