Unit Tests and Unicorns

Today is my final day over here at Tumblr, and it absolutely breaks my heart. 

I look back at my first day at Tumblr, having just gotten off the bus from Philadelphia, with just a small bag of clothes, on the Sunday before work. Worrying what I had just gotten myself into, but being greeted by smiling faces and getting dropped right into writing code. The next day, I started learning the system and working on understanding all the ways we scaled a site of this size.

From that time, I’ve seen the organization grow from 30ish people to where it sits now with almost 300 people and every second of it has been exciting. I was challenged every step of the way and hopefully, I challenged others to put their best forward. I myself have grown quite a bit, from the rinky dink engineer to a Senior Engineer who got to give talks over the country about Tumblr’s architecture. For those opportunities, I am eternally grateful. 

Probably the most important thing about Tumblr, are the people. I feel that I’ve met lifelong friends here and people who will be there to help and advise me throughout the rest of my career. I’ve had so much fun here with everyone, it’s so hard to put into words. Most importantly though, Tumblr gave me my beautiful fiancee. Without her, I’d still be eating Dorito Sandwiches, with a couch on my landing and most likely would continue to take the bus back and forth to Philadelphia on the weekends rather than enjoying NYC in all its glory.

I have never worked with more passionate or more talented people in my (granted, short) career and for that I thank every single person at Tumblr, past and present, for the best experience anyone could ever hope for.

I’m excited to start working on my own startup, and hopefully have a portion of the monstrous success that I have had over at Tumblr. 

John Bunting talks about different services Tumblr has built and how their architecture helps them be fault tolerant as they continue to grow.

I wanted to post this on my "professional" blog as well, but kept forgetting to get around to it. This is a talk I gave for QCon SF 2014 about Tumblr's architecture and how we make a lot of this website work at scale. 

Turns out it's not a bunch of mystical elves shoving coal into a furnace. 

We all need to cleanup our branches sometime. I’m terrible at this, and I know there are tons of tools that do this for you, but I’m a bit of a purist here. So I did a small CLI version to automatically cleanup my merged branches locally.

You could easily modify this to also delete branches remotely, but you probably should be careful about that. ;)

An interesting point on git branch -d is that it won’t allow you to merge a branch that isn’t already in master! So this is pretty safe.

Sometimes at Tumblr, I have to do some work with long running web requests, and sometimes catching them in the logs can be difficult. We run HAProxy with httplog turned on, and as you can guess, we get quite a bit of traffic running through these.

So I just wrote a small awk one liner to help me jump through these logs and quickly find requests that were greater than 1 second.

Check it out.

Recently, I was called out on an open-source project for having inadequate documentation on how to issue commands against an API. My initial reaction was, to say the least, quite childish.

"Absolutely not. No way. My documentation is totally perfect! Anyone who couldn't figure this out is just stupid. Come on! Read the code! Code is its own documentation!", I thought somewhat angrily as I read the Github issue.

I realized though, that I'm the one who really needs to take some time to step back. Someone asking me for help about something they don't understand is nothing to get upset about. It's someone reaching out on the internet to build something, just like me!

You see, I built the library that was brand spanking new to this anonymous person on the internet. I had knowledge bias, and that bias was alienating someone from being involved with my library. Hell, I'm quite aware of knowledge bias, and it still jumped up and bit me.

I think this gets worse when you have software engineers who are laboriously crafting over something to make it perfect. We're struggling for hours to build something that will be awesome, amazing and pretty much the best damn thing there is. (Well, until someone else builds it better) We are trying so hard to push forward that we forget, there are people still trying to figure which way is up.

So, the question is, "What do I do now?"

I wrote some damn documentation. I swallowed my pride and added more docs. I even went above and beyond a bit, just to prove to myself that I'm not that kind of an engineer, hell, not that kind of person. I can safely say though, my project benefited from someone being upset about documentation. That's the amazing experience of open-source.

I'm not ashamed that it happened, but I am a bit upset that I fell into that trap.

I'm a 25 year old programmer who spends a lot of his time in front of a glowing terminal, repeatedly pressing "i" and escape in repeating patterns. Putting text in a precise order on that glowing screen for other people to emote about. I say "emote about", because regardless of their actual emotions, no one is ever going to love everything I do but the fact that they comment on it is amazing.

It's pure magic. Building things, digital or not, is pure magic.

I'm writing this currently from a hackathon, where people are busily coding away in their favorite language to create something and show it off to their friends. This is the kind of culture I love being around. People that are thrilled to build the magic, hook the pieces together and make someone else smile.

I'll never forget one of my first computer class in college where a professor dropped me in front of a terminal and said "Alright, here's the terminal. It's your best friend. Your assignment is due Friday. I suggest you figure out a way to get Linux on your laptops or in a virtual machine". The fear was palpable in the room. All I could do was smile and dive deep into a world I had too little experience in. It was so exciting. I haven't closed my terminal since.

This blog is going to be about my triumphs, my failures, things I love and hate, and everything in between. We're going to try a weekly format for a little while and crank it up as we go along.