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Once, many years ago, my company was working with Tumblr on some kind of integration, and for some reason, the engineer I was working with emailed me a filed called something like tumblr.php that was the “show the main blog page” source. It was one of the most spaghetti-ish overly-long unreadable pieces of shit I’d seen in decades.

So this excellent set of tweets does not surprise me in the least.

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I used to work there and indeed the source code is a huge monolithic PHP nightmare based on an ancient version of some forgotten framework and hacked on by hundreds of developers over the years. There was a huge amount of code dedicated to rendering content that depended on bugs from the application’s earliest days plus new behaviors that were introduced over time. Every request required a full start of the entire tumblr application - they didn’t trust the code to process more then one request per invocation so it exited after sending a reply. Developer turnover was huge due to the code base being a nightmare and no management support for refactoring.

But if you could stomach working with the code the catered lunches from Dos Toros and Luke’s Lobster were epic.

I remember visiting tumblr.com once a long time ago and they were actually serving the index.php file as a download rather than rendering the homepage. It was indeed a several thousand long file of spaghetti code.

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