UNTLD

Here's some of the note I sent to the amazing team of 200 people that lovingly look after Tumblr every single day. It's a small but mighty team who work tirelessly in service of this beautiful community:

“My friends, no one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything.”

-Abraham Lincoln

The time has come for me to start a new chapter in my life. While this was a very difficult decision for me to make, I made it knowing that I’m infinitely grateful for my 8 years here.

I learned a great deal from our founder, David Karp. His uncanny ability to empathize with a community of millions of artists, activists, creators, and crusaders had a meaningful impact on how I tried to guide our path. I wasn’t always successful in that pursuit, but I can honestly say that I gave it my very best. Tumblr has grown up in many ways since my early days here, and I think its survival instincts and resiliency have formed it that way. Having a stable, mission driven parent company in Automattic has helped with that maturity.

I truly believe that Tumblr is one of ( if not the only) last outposts of true internet culture in the world today. Culture starts here. People feel comfortable inventing it, giving life to it, re-mixing it, and celebrating it here. They don’t have to perform, don’t have to impress, don’t have to be fake….they can be who they really want to be, exploring and growing in the process. Tumblr is a bright, shining light in a stormy, uncertain and unforgiving sea. It’s unique, it’s weird, it’s surprising, it’s sarcastic, it’s funny, it’s messy, but it can also take your breath away. Embrace that. Celebrate it. Be confident in it. This February marks Tumblr’s 15th birthday, and it deserves one Hell(site) of a party.

This entire team punches above its weight every single day. Keep punching, keep going, don’t listen to the naysayers…prove them wrong. I’m fiercely proud of all of you and the incredibly hard work that you do every day….and most of all…I’ll miss you dearly. All the best,

Jeff

Today, Tumblr’s owner, Verizon Media, announced that Automattic plans to acquire Tumblr. Automattic is the technology company behind products such as WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack, and Simplenote—products that help connect creators, businesses, and publishers to communities around the world. 

We couldn’t be more excited to be joining a team that has a similar mission. Many of you know WordPress.com, Automattic’s flagship product. WordPress.com and Tumblr were both early pioneers among blogging platforms.

Automattic shares our vision to build passionate communities around shared interests and to democratize publishing so that anyone with a story can tell it, especially when they come from under-heard voices and marginalized communities.

We look forward to continuing to create products that empower your self-expression and sense of community and that build a better, more inclusive internet. 

We’re excited for our future together!

I got older. And as I got older the already-questionable premise of this blog started to feel just-plain-creepy.

I got sleepier. When you get older, you get sleepier.

I had a family. My child was born in April of 2016. You can see the immediate and precipitous decline in posting volume thereafter.

My child was sick. He was born with cystic fibrosis. This has been devastating. And time-consuming. His breathing treatments take hours daily, which contributes to the sleepiness discussed in item 2.

I threw myself into my work. For the first couple of years of working at Tumblr, it was far and away the best job I’ve ever had. And likely ever will have. The office was thick with weirdos and we were given a shocking amount of freedom to do whatever we wanted—as long as it was relatively inconsequential. Visionaries did not do well at Tumblr. Jokesters and aesthetes did perfectly. I spent all my time filling our official channels with stupid, confusing garbage that I was horribly proud of, and remain proud of to this day.

Work got bad. They hired some visionaries. I spent two whole years writing and rewriting unused company vision statements at the behest of these visionaries. The uselessness of this task was overwhelming. I should have picked myself up and posted modest entertainments on this modestly entertaining blog, but instead I simply wallowed and fretted and atrophied.

As did everyone else who clung on. We almost reveled in the poison of it all. We drank too much and filled the Tumblr app and Tumblr staff blog with nihilistic discontents. There was pleasure in that.

I grew doubtful of my talents. Maybe these visionaries were charlatans, but maybe these charlatans were right. Maybe I needed to come around to their way of thinking. Maybe everything I do is bad, lame, indefensible. Maybe this blog is exhibit A.

I got shy. I would compose texts and not send them, fearful of how boring they were. 

I got depressed. That soft, round depression that inspires nothing. A prickly depression can be a decent creative driver. But this was just a blob.

Drawing Garfield was a way to deal with this depression. This should be plain to anyone who has seen those posts. People started sending me links to kooky Garfield stuff, which I appreciated, but which had the unintentional sourness of a children’s birthday present. You like Garfields so I got you a Garfield! Soon your room is full of Garfields because that’s what you’re about. You stop caring about Garfield but you keep up the charade so no one’s feelings get hurt.

I am approaching mid-life, now, or perhaps I am firmly in it. And the outlines of a crisis are forming and they’re exactly as boring as you think. I’m not creatively fulfilled. Boo hoo!

We tried to leave America, do you know that? I had a very nice job lined up in Montreal. Less pay, but Montreal is cheap. Montreal is also generous with benefits if you are a citizen or a permanent resident. But it turns out you cannot become a citizen or a permanent resident if you have an expensive pre-existing health condition. Cystic fibrosis such a condition, so Canada did not want us. Another blow, one too hurtful to talk about on this dumb little blog. 

I could not talk about any of this stuff on this dumb little blog, but it’s all I’ve been able to think about for the last two years.

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.

Tumblcoin Tumbles; Reveals Inherent Risk in Imaginary Currency

Literally dozens of people panicked today as TBC crashed. “I really thought Tumblcoin was the future of currency,” said Tumblcoin investor xxxcryptoboy421xxx.

When asked how such a dip in value could occur a mere hour after Tumblr referred to the cryptocurrency as “completely sound” and “unsinkable,” their Chief Coin Officer appeared to dissociate completely.

Investors claim a drop in the Expanding Brain meme as a possible source of TBC’s recent violent fluctuation.