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Tumblr Hack Week, September 2023 Edition
engineering
Summary
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.
Context
Tumblr engineers occasionally pause regular development cycles for a week-long hack event to build desired platform features and test prototype concepts.
Approach / What changed
Teams built several prototypes during the September 2023 event, including a multi-column feed viewer named Tumblr Patio, a WooCommerce-backed marketplace feature called Tumblr Booths, and purchasable avatar decorations.
Takeaways
- The March Hack Day at Tumblr previously resulted in a full production redesign of the direct messaging interface.
- Tumblr Patio prototypes a dense multi-column layout supporting side-by-side streams such as For You, Following, Activity, specific blogs, searches, Trending, and Collections.
- Tumblr Booths leverages sibling platform WooCommerce to provide blog owners with dedicated spaces to sell physical and digital creations directly on the site.
Related reading
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