Welcome, Fellow Nerds

Tumblr grew tremendously in the past year. In the last twelve months, the number of pages we serve daily has more than quintupled, while our small team continues to roll out huge new aspects of the platform. The story of the humbling growth of our creative communities has been well told. Up until now, however, little has been said of the messy mechanics of building the systems that serve up petabytes of data to millions of simultaneous users.

With this blog, we’ll be sharing with our fellow engineers how our massively scaled, deceptively simple blogging sausage is really made. This blog will be riding close to the bleeding edge of our development, rather than just presenting neatly tied up solutions. In addition to long-form posts about larger initiatives, we’ll be regularly posting everything from clever code one-liners to the colorful graphs our team looks at every day — just like any other (incredibly geeky) Tumblr blog.

We’re developing lightning fast notification services using Redis, multi-datacenter MySQL sharding tools, and so much more to support not only an order of magnitude more blogs, but also an order of magnitude more powerful features. Starting with today’s announcement of our newly revamped API and the decisions that went into designing it, I hope you’ll follow our team as we continue to build the best platform for creative expression in the world.

And if these are the things that get you excited, we’d love to talk to you about joining the team.