Post on Code as Craft

Today we launched a huge redesign of Etsy’s seller tools that was the culmination of over a year’s worth of work (more on this later). I contributed to a post on Code as Craft, Etsy’s engineering blog, on some of the interesting technical challenges we faced and what happens when you have a blank canvas with which to work.

Read here: Rebuilding the Foundation of Etsy’s Seller Tools

What blameless really means

Part of Etsy culture is blameless post-mortems. It’s a term I’ve heard used a lot and up until last week I thought I thoroughly understood. Etsy supports an environment of learning, people make mistakes, don’t point fingers, etc. All good things and things I believe in.

On Friday I was involved in a smallish incident on the site; I was driving a deploy and, long story short, the deploy didn’t go perfectly. Nothing serious happened and the site was fine so we didn’t have a post-mortem, but I had that terrible I-did-something-bad feeling in the pit of my stomach all day long. True to the culture, no one at Etsy pointed fingers (as expected), but I still felt pretty awful and like I could have done better.

Building Erin Nolan's website

For the past three weeks, I’ve worked with my best friend and fellow designer Erin Nolan on rebuilding her website to be fresh, flexible, and easily updatable. Her last site ran on Wordpress, and while it made sense for her to use a CMS to manage her site, Wordpress wasn’t cutting it. After redoing my own site with Siteleaf and having a really good experience, we decided to give it a go.

Interview with Badass Lady Creatives

I spoke with Melanie Richards from Badass Lady Creatives in an interview published on Design Work Life.

A redesign with Siteleaf

The last time I redid my website was almost exactly two years ago. I was ready to leave my job and needed a refreshed portfolio. (Side note: why are so many of us terrible about updating our websites unless we’re looking for a job?) It had been a bit of time since I built a website from start to finish (designers at that company weren’t allowed to touch code), and I spent a three-day weekend proudly handcoding my brand new site. It was a completely static site with no templating and probably some terribly-written CSS, but it worked.