3 ms·

> tumblr is fractally broken. it's not wrong in any specific way, it's wrong at every possible scale.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
hamburglar 5y ago
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.
- tmcneal 5y ago
  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.
- zxcvbn4038 5y ago
  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.
Karellen 5y ago
This line is likely inspired by the concept of "Fractal Wrongness": https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Fractal_wrongness https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Fractal_wrongness and 2012's "PHP: a fractal of bad design": https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/
- asplake 5y ago
  I believe so too. Love the definition here though!
- SahAssar 5y ago
  > Fractally wrong people are often immune to the stopped clock rule because they are not exactly stopped clocks. More like clocks losing a random number of seconds a day, in the wrong time zone of the wrong planet, in the wrong solar system. That's a wonderful definition.
  - robert_tweed 5y ago
    I think it's a bad analogy. A clock losing a random number of seconds per day is actually correct more often than a stopped one.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

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.

tmcneal 5y ago
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.
zxcvbn4038 5y ago
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.

Karellen 5y ago

This line is likely inspired by the concept of "Fractal Wrongness": https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Fractal_wrongness https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Fractal_wrongness and 2012's "PHP: a fractal of bad design": https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

asplake 5y ago
I believe so too. Love the definition here though!
SahAssar 5y ago
> Fractally wrong people are often immune to the stopped clock rule because they are not exactly stopped clocks. More like clocks losing a random number of seconds a day, in the wrong time zone of the wrong planet, in the wrong solar system. That's a wonderful definition.
- robert_tweed 5y ago
  I think it's a bad analogy. A clock losing a random number of seconds per day is actually correct more often than a stopped one.