Hacking solutions

Hacking solutions goes back to Etsy’s roots. Over the years, our hacking tradition has transformed from an exclusively technical event to a company-wide festival of innovation and collaboration. Today, every employee gets a chance to step away from their normal day-to-day job, think expansively and collaborate on new ideas during our yearly company Hack Week.

Some of the most awesome features of our site come from successful hack projects (not to mention some amazing pranks). The ability to 'favourite' an item by hovering over the thumbnail image was built during a Hack Week. So was a tool in our staff directory that lets employees send personalised recognitions to co-workers. We even used Hack Week to create an 'Etsy Museum of Unusual History', an experiential record of the early days of our company and the community we serve, complete with an embroidered art piece paying homage to a one-time site glitch — now an inside joke — and an array of punk-rock-style handmade buttons from early Etsy craft fairs.

While year-round, solutions-oriented hacking isn’t limited to any one team, we do have a team of Office Hackers whose full-time job is to use their hacker skill set to make the office more connected, interesting, useful and fun. Projects that Etsy’s Office Hackers worked on in 2015 included rolling out Oscar, our waste and recycling reporting system, to six offices worldwide; building a system that allows employees to easily discern whether the office alarm is armed; and deploying 3D printers to three offices and teaching employees how to use them.