Tumblr Engineering (Posts tagged interns)

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna

Tumblr Summer Intern: Walter Menendez

This summer I got to join Tumblr as a search team intern. This was a dream come true: I spend a lot of my day on Tumblr sharing content with others and generally indulging in the specific Tumblr lingo and lifestyle, so to do it all day was just too unreal. (Fun fact: I got hired through Tumblr, thanks to a post on this very same blog!) I didn’t expect to like New York as much as I did and I’m so heartbroken that I have to leave Tumblr and go back to school.

The search team is a really cool team to work on because we do a lot of really critical, quantitative thinking about the highly subjective, qualitative content on Tumblr. My projects definitely required a thorough understanding of Tumblr’s users and their idiosyncrasies in order for our data to make any sense. It was cool to just go into our databases, scrape some data and do all kinds of things with it. It definitely opened up my view of Tumblr as a community and, well, I also found a ton of stuff to follow/reblog while doing so. 

I go to MIT, where a lot of my research background is in data visualization and large data sets, so one of my first projects was to work on a data visualization for our trending post stream. The search team had been working on trending content for quite some time now, focusing on the three core forms of content on the site: blogs, tags, and posts. Blogs and tags had a decent amount of front end work but trending posts not so much. We basically had a list of post URLs that were deemed trending based on our metrics, but we had no idea what they looked like, nor did we really have any intuition on to what extent they were trending. To fix that, I built a D3.js based visualization, while grabbing posts from our PHP framework. There was a fair amount of tech involved! From processing JSONs to animating images, the visualization took a fair bit of work. At the moment, it’s more of an internal thing but hopefully, users all over Tumblr will be able to see it as well.

My second project was much more data intensive and focused on search traffic analysis. Tumblr had rolled out trending tags to mobile during my time here, which was a great way to discover more content on Tumblr. However, those metrics and algorithms were only based on post creation. Since more people consume content than they do create it, there was a lot of interesting data lying in tags and their search counts. I started scraping data from our page logs and effectively did a very high level count over hundreds of thousands of tags. Afterwards, I would save the data into Redis and would then compute some statistics and ultimately rank the tags based on how trending they were.

This analysis was a really cool project because every morning as I ran my scripts to collect and process the tag data, I got to see the progression of current events all of a sudden going from single digit counts to thousands of hits. It was also a great way to stay up to date with news as I would often Google a tag that I had no idea what it was referring to. Another cool part was comparing my ranking to our current rankings in production, and seeing just how aligned and different we were.

My time at Tumblr definitely couldn’t have been possible had it not been for the staff here. They’re all so knowledgable and approachable and hilarious, so while my roommates would groan about going to “work”, I would skip on my merry way to a blogger’s haven. Plus, we have dogs. Who wouldn’t rush to the office to see those?

Forever reblog!

- Walter

Engineering interns tumblr

Tumblr Summer Intern: Eric Leong

I spent this summer as an intern on Tumblr’s Android team. I joined as the team had just transitioned to Android Studio, so we were all learning how to work with the new IDE together while familiarizing myself with the code. On the first day I even made a pull request to ignore a folder created when installing Android Studio. My tasks throughout the summer were to implement features the team hadn’t gotten around to yet, allowing me to brush the dust off my Java and touch the various parts of the codebase at my own pace.

I mainly focused on user-facing feature development, which involved grappling with the intricacies of Android animations and the Tumblr app. My first task was to develop the notifications widget and revamp the existing post creation widgets, which turned out to be a great way to play with the Tumblr codebase and the newest features of the Android framework. I had full responsibility for the features I developed, with the design and QA team assigning bugs to me, which was both exciting and humbling. I had the most fun working on features I knew no one else had implemented, like “swipe back”, and realizing that I was pushing the boundaries of the Android platform.

It was an incredible experience to watch my code end up in the hands of our Android users and watch my friends play with the features I built. I’m also proud that I had a chance to fix issues and add functionality that I wanted to see in the app. Even when I did not directly work on a feature, my feedback helped shape the design and implementation.

I had an amazing summer working with the Tumblr team, who provided guidance amidst a flurry of questions and showed me how design and code can come together to produce a beautiful app. Me and my fellow interns were brought closer together by our love of photography and the Tumblr community.

It was an unforgettable summer at Tumblr where I played my small role in bringing creators the audience they deserve.

- Eric

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Tumblr Summer Intern: Jared Stern Working at Tumblr as a summer engineering intern, I was flung headfirst into a mysterious world replete with terms I did not understand, people I did not know, and a codebase that defied all attempts at...

Tumblr Summer Intern:  Jared Stern

Working at Tumblr as a summer engineering intern, I was flung headfirst into a mysterious world replete with terms I did not understand, people I did not know, and a codebase that defied all attempts at understanding. I asked many questions, and slowly realized that with a little thinking I could figure some things out myself. Slowly, I got to know the tools and languages (now I know some PHP!) and gained a bit of confidence in dealing with our code.

Much of my work dealt with a couple of Tumblr’s back-end services, which handle a lot of the heavy lifting for the web application—mostly moving data around so the app can quickly access everything it needs. I was given quite a bit of responsibility, which was exciting and instructive and frightening, particularly when I broke an important thing on my third Tuesday. Luckily, my other work was a bit less eventful.

I eventually got more comfortable (a bit more comfortable, anyway!) with deploying changes to our code. In addition to services, I worked on a few small projects closer to the site’s front end. I fixed a bug in the bookmarklet that caused posts to be created incorrectly. I fixed an issue in our internal administration site so the site would be more responsive at peak times. On one occasion, I worked with a member of our support team to fix a single tumblelog that curiously would not load past its thirteenth page. It was a pleasure to be able to fix an actual user’s actual problem.

Through all of this I had the honor of working with the fabulous Tumblr team, people who were friendly and helpful and knowledgeable, and who went out of their way to help me along. All told, it was a marvelously challenging, interesting, and educational summer.

- Jared

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Tumblr Summer Intern: Jacob Haip This summer I interned as a product engineer in the Creativity team under Pau Santesmasses. I was tasked with removing handlebars.js and prototype.js, two javascript libraries we were using for HTML tempting and...

Tumblr Summer Intern: Jacob Haip

This summer I interned as a product engineer in the Creativity team under Pau Santesmasses.  I was tasked with removing handlebars.js and prototype.js, two javascript libraries we were using for HTML tempting and simplifying javascript code.  Nothing was wrong with these libraries but we were also including underscore.js and jQuery, libraries with similar features, so it was a bit of a waste.  To help free Tumblr of these libraries, over the course of the summer I rewrote ~15,000 lines of code to port prototype.js to jQuery and handlebars.js to underscore.js.

The transition was a challenge not because the libraries were that different but because of the how scattered the old code was throughout the website.  I’m happy to end the summer having removed handlebars.js and all but a couple isolated pieces of prototype.js.  It was also cool to have touched so many pieces of Tumblr in the process.

Users should enjoy faster load times throughout the website.  Here in the office this is about a 1/3 of a second faster load time and this is even more noticeable on slower internet connections.  It’s also nice to know that the rest of the people in the engineering team will have two less libraries they have to worry about.

It was a pleasure to be a part of the Tumblr team during such an exciting time: the Yahoo! acquisition and Tumblr gaining more of the attention it deserves as the place for brands.  The other interns were amazing and I loved how I got to know all of them and not just the engineering interns.  I look forward to joining my friends once again at MIT but I will miss all the people I have met here.  MIT maybe be good at science but it sure isn’t good at art and I will miss the creativity of all the people in the office and being a part of the truly creative community on Tumblr.

- Jacob

engineering tumblr interns

This summer the engineering team at Tumblr got to work with some amazing Interns.  We asked each of them to share their experiences and tell you a little bit about the projects they worked on.  Here is the first in a series of upcoming intern profiles.

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Tumblr Summer Intern:  Iain Nash

This summer I interned at Tumblr as a front end web engineer working with the discovery team. I had amazing opportunities here to build awesome things that many people see, but more important, to work with a creative and dynamic team, and be able to contribute to Tumblr. Additionally, I loved spending the summer in New York - really is an exciting place to be.

I started off getting setup with my own development box and similar access to full time employees at Tumblr. While I started off with smaller projects to get to know the codebase and team, I quickly started getting bigger and bigger projects. It was really overwhelming at first to deploy the tumblr.com codebase within the first week I was here, going from only writing tiny things to a site as big as Tumblr.

The first big project I worked on was making a new logged out tag page. Throughout the summer, I was mostly mentored by Johnny Benson, who really helped me out with how things are done and constant creative and practical decisions involving my work. I also worked with Tag Savage for many of the design changes I was working on. It was always fun for me to hear “if this isn’t too hard to do…,” and be able to make a proof-of-concept by the day’s end. In fact, the current tag page design started off as refinements to a current tag page, then grew into a bigger project when I took these suggestions on. The layout of this page is rather unique - smart sliding rows, and it took a good deal of code to make it work properly.

I also had the opportunity to clean up and improve on some of the already stunning login and register views. These pages were mostly complete, just needing some design and code tweaks. It was a bit nerve wracking deploying these pages as there was a chance I could have missed something and would break login. Most of the changes I made were on the backend PHP, so that going out without a hitch was great for me.

I really enjoyed the other interns at tumblr this summer - previously, I would be the only intern at a company, now I had other interns working with me. Going to lunch, exploring the city was always fun with the other interns.

Now, it is time for me to head back to school at the University of Southern California, and face the homework, the time crunches, and the assignments once again. Seeing Tumblr grow and change over the past few months was a cool experience, and I’m glad I was able to be a part of it.

– Iain

tumblr engineering interns profiles iain nash