“We need at least one friend who understands what we do not say.”
— Dr. Sunwolf
engineering
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