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Tumblr Hack Day, September 2024 Edition
engineering
Summary
Tumblr holds internal Hack Days several times per year, allowing engineers to pause regular duties and build experimental features or personal projects. The September 2024 edition featured prototypes aimed at improving feed interactivity, community monitoring, and search interfaces across the platform. Following the launch of advanced search operators, one hack explored potential user interface elements designed to make these search options more accessible. To address feed interaction visibility without requiring manual refreshes, another prototype automatically updates note counts, reactions, and reblogs as users scroll feeds or view them through Patio. Finally, an activity tracker sidebar widget was assembled to surface near-real-time actions, including comments, reactions, and new member arrivals, inside active beta Communities.
Context
Tumblr engineers periodically pause regular roadmap work during Hack Days to build desired platform features and address user-facing needs.
Approach / What changed
Engineers created prototypes for search operator interface elements, an automated feed updater for note and reaction counts, and a sidebar activity tracker for beta Communities.
Takeaways
- Advanced search operators launched on Tumblr alongside Hack Day mockups exploring new user interface elements for those search options.
- A live engagement prototype automatically updates note counts, reactions, and reblogs as users scroll feeds without requiring manual refreshes.
- A sidebar activity tracker widget was created to display near-real-time member joins, comments, and reactions inside beta Communities.
Related reading
engineering.tumblr.com ·
Tumblr Hack Week, September 2023 Edition
Tumblr hosted its September 2023 Hack Week, pausing standard workflows to let engineers explore custom features and personal platform improvements. Following the production release of a direct messaging redesign from the March Hack Day, this edition produced several prototype projects. The Tumblr Patio project created a multi-column dashboard view allowing users to organize feeds such as Following, Trending, Activity, searches, and Collections side-by-side. Another team developed Tumblr Booths, an integration leveraging sibling platform WooCommerce to enable blogs to sell physical and digital goods directly. Finally, the Avatar Frames and Hats project prototyped purchasable and giftable cosmetic items for user profiles across the network.
engineeringengineering.tumblr.com ·
Now testing: Best comments first
Tumblr has introduced an experimental comment sorting option called Best comments first for users browsing content on the web platform. This new sorting capability functions directly alongside standard chronological options within the comments view on any individual post. The engineering team designed this feature to help readers discover interesting conversations much more easily while actively demoting spammy comments. The implementation is currently undergoing active live testing and fine-tuning exclusively on web, with engineers soliciting community feedback to improve how it operates. Accompanying engineering records highlight various Hack Day prototypes, including LibreTranslate post translation, keyboard command palettes, and dense multi-column feed views.