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A Big New Beautiful Future for the Web at Tumblr

In the ten years that Tumblr’s been around, a lot has changed in web technology. We’ve kept up, of course, but it’s always been a process of addition, layering one new technology on top of another. And what we were working with—a custom framework built on top of Backbone, messily entangled with a PHP backend and its associated templates—was becoming unmanageable. Our piecemeal conversions to new technologies meant we had thousands of ways posts were rendered (only a moderate exaggeration). And each of those had to be updated individually to support new features or design changes.

It was time to step back, survey the world of web technology, and clean house in a big way. That we could finally test some of the new tech we’ve been itching to use was just a little bonus.

We started by laying out our goals:

A web client codebase fully separated from the PHP codebase that gets its data from the API in the same way our mobile apps do

A development environment that’s as painless as possible

Dramatically improved performance

Isomorphic rendering

Robust testing tools

Built on a framework with a healthy and active community, with some critical mass of adoption

With those goals in mind, we spent the beginning of the year on research - figuring out what kinds of things people were building web apps with these days, tooling around with them ourselves, and trying to assess if they would be right for Tumblr. We landed, eventually, on React, with a Node server (running Express) to make isomorphism as easy as possible. On top of that, we’re using Cosmos for developing components, React Router for routing, and TypeScript to make our lives better in general. (My colleague Paul already wrote about what went into our decision to use TypeScript here.)

As if writing an entirely new stack wasn’t enough, we realized along the way that this was our perfect chance to start deploying containerized applications with Kubernetes, a first for Tumblr. We had never previously deployed a node application to production here, and didn’t have the infrastructure for it, so it was a perfect green field on which to build another new and exciting thing. There’ll be more to come later on Kubernetes.

So where are we now? Well, we’ve launched one page powered by this new app - image pages, like this - with more to come very soon. 

Though it may seem simple, there’s a whole new technological world between you clicking that link and seeing that page. There’s a ton more exciting stuff happening now and still to happen in the future, and we’re looking forward to sharing it here. Wanna get in on the action yourself? Come work with us: https://www.tumblr.com/jobs.

- Robbie Dawson / @idiot

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mlem

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That tumblrcoin feel

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I currently own 19 Tumblcoins, the future of meme currency.

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I am investing in Tumblcoin by uploading every image I’ve ever made without context.

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Exclusive Interview with Tumblr’s Chief Coin Officer

The value of Tumblcoin has exploded, leaving some to wonder if it’s too late to throw their entire savings into this completely unstable market. Official Tumblcoin News sat down with Tumblr’s Chief Coin Officer to ask them what you want to know.

Given Tumblcoin’s erratic behavior in its 14 hour existence, what would you say to people who want to invest right now?

The only way to win is to play. We’re urging users to reblog and like their favorite memes to drive the value of TBC higher and higher, and we’re counting on them to create and post original memes to shatter the ceiling of this market.

Are some memes worth more than others?

This is an equal opportunity cryptocurrency, and we plan to keep it that way.

In retrospect, was it a poor decision to call Tumblcoin “The Unsinkable Currency”?

If we had to go back and write the press release all over again, I would have absolutely not painted a picture that likened Tumblcoin to the Titanic. That was, admittedly, a big whoops.

Anything parting words?

The people behind Tumblcoin are confident in blindly saying that it is smooth sailing from here on out. You would have to be a fool to not invest in TBC today.