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Tumblr Engineering

Dispatches from the intrepid tinkerers behind technology at Tumblr.
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Tumblr Hack Week, January 2024 Edition

Once again it was Hack Week (more than just a day!) at Tumblr! This is getting repetitive in the best way. A couple of times per year we slow down our normal work and spend a week working on scratching a personal itch or features we want as user and see how far we can get with our hacks. One thing from the last Hack Week in September made it...

Thu Feb 8, 2024 20:52
alias please=sudo

alias please=sudoKeeping a site like Tumblr alive and snappy for you to post at a moment’s notice, all day and night, is no small feat. Pesky crabs sneak into our data centers and cut cables all the time…If you want to help our small but excellent systems team, want to work from anywhere, and are deep into nginx, mysql, kubernetes, and caching, join...

Wed Nov 8, 2023 20:54
Tumblr Hack Week, September 2023 Edition

Once again it was Hack Week (more than just a day!) at Tumblr! A couple of times per year we slow down our normal work and spend a week working on scratching a personal itch or features we want as user and see how far we can get with our hacks. One thing from the last Hack Day in March made it all the way to production: redesigning how direct messaging...

Wed Oct 4, 2023 21:14
StreamBuilder: our open-source framework for powering your dashboard.Today, we’re abnormally jazzed to announce that we’re open-sourcing the custom framework we built to power your dashboard on Tumblr. We call it StreamBuilder, and we’ve been using it for many years.First things first. What is open-sourcing? Open sourcing is a decentralized software development model that encourages open collaboration. In more accessible language, it is any program whose source code is made available for use or modification as users or other developers see fit.What, then, is StreamBuilder? Well, every time you hit your Following feed, or For You, or search results, a blog’s posts, a list of tagged posts, or even check out blog recommendations, you’re using this framework under the hood. If you want to dive into the code, check it out here on GitHub!StreamBuilder has a lot going on. The primary architecture centers around “streams” of content: whether posts from a blog, a list of blogs you’re following, posts using a specific tag, or posts relating to a search. These are separate kinds of streams, which can be mixed together, filtered based on certain criteria, ranked for relevancy or engagement likelihood, and more.On your Tumblr dashboard today you can see how there are posts from blogs you follow, mixed with posts from tags you follow, mixed with blog recommendations. Each of those is a separate stream, with its own logic, but sharing this same framework. We inject those recommendations at certain intervals, filter posts based on who you’re blocking, and rank the posts for relevancy if you have “Best stuff first” enabled. Those are all examples of the functionality StreamBuilder affords for us.So, what’s included in the box?The full framework library of code that we use today, on Tumblr, to power almost every feed of content you see on the platform.A YAML syntax for composing streams of content, and how to filter, inject, and rank them.Abstractions for programmatically composing, filtering, ranking, injecting, and debugging streams.Abstractions for composing streams together—such as with carousels, for streams-within-streams.An abstraction for cursor-based pagination for complex stream templates.Unit tests covering the public interface for the library and most of the underlying code.What’s still to comeDocumentation. We have a lot to migrate from our own internal tools and put in here!More example stream templates and example implementations of different common streams.If you have questions, please check out the code and file an issue there.

StreamBuilder: our open-source framework for powering your dashboard.Today, we’re abnormally jazzed to announce that we’re open-sourcing the custom framework we built to power your dashboard on Tumblr. We call it StreamBuilder, and we’ve been using it for many years.First things first. What is open-sourcing? Open sourcing is a decentralized software...

Thu Jul 6, 2023 16:40
Tumblr Hack Day, March 2023 Edition

Well well well, it was Hack Day once again at Tumblr. A few times per year we slow down our normal work and spend a day (or sometimes a whole week) working on whatever we want and see how far we can get with our hacks. Here are some of the projects that got made for our most recent Hack Day earlier this month. Some of these things you may also end up...

Mon Apr 3, 2023 20:06
Tumblr Hack Day, December 2022 Edition

Ah yes, it was Hack Day once again at Tumblr. A few times per year we slow down our normal work and spend a day (or sometimes a whole week) working on whatever we want and see how far we can get with our hacks. The main star of the last Hack Week was… pretty much all of them!Here are some of the projects that got made for our most recent Hack Day earlier...

Tue Dec 27, 2022 21:02

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