Over on the PC World site, there's a new article posted about Etsy and its development practices and how it "grows in a unique fashion" because of them.

The Etsy staffers are also completely serious about their work, and these two features they share in common with their customer base, who are tying to earn side money, if not pay the rent, by designing the hand bags, walking sticks and hand-made chocolates that have made Etsy famous in the artisan and sustainable business scene. [...] The quality model for Etsy is cutting edge, but not unique. New developers are expected to push code to production on day one. That's not commit code, but push it to production.

The article gets into some of the technology they use there at Etsy (including NodeJS, Nagios and, of course, PHP), the atmosphere they try to maintain, how they do their code deployment and how they conform to various regulations, security and privacy concerns.