Etsy Engineer Bethany Macri on preventing Cover-Your-Ass engineering

It’s natural for all programmers to be afraid of making mistakes and losing their job. But by helping developers share and even celebrate their failures, enterprises can significantly improve development processes, says DevOpsCon keynote speaker Bethany Macri. “By acknowledging that failure is inevitable, we (at Etsy) created a safety net for ourselves,” the speaker told her DevOpsCon audience in Berlin.

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The Etsy programmer also explains why Etsy, a self-proclaimed metric-driven company decided to take the long road away from PostgreSQL and switch to MySQL over the past few years. Etsy is an online marketplace whose community spans the globe, with buyers and sellers coming from more than 150 countries, and, most interestingly, where every new developer is required to push on their first day at the job.