We decided on building the mobile dashboard next for a few reasons. First, the dashboard is one of the most important parts of Tumblr—for many people it is their primary window into the content here. Because of that, most things that we develop inevitably touch the dashboard. It was time to raise the stakes.
The desktop dashboard and the mobile apps have been moving forward at a blistering pace, but have you seen the mobile web dashboard? It was stuck in 2015. Nobody ever made features for it because it was a completely separate codebase. We avoided that issue with the rewrite. Since the new version we’re building is responsive, our new mobile web dashboard will eventually also power the desktop web dashboard experience. This’ll make it much easier to maintain feature parity between the desktop and mobile web experiences.
Finally, we wanted to make something a little bit more complex than the image page, and the mobile web dashboard seemed like a good next step. It allowed us to start making authenticated API calls and figuring out how to pass cookies through our new server to and from our API; to think about laying the groundwork for a totally responsive dashboard, so we can eventually launch this for the desktop; to make a testing ground for progressive web app features like web app manifests; to start rendering posts that are backed by the new post format; and to figure out how to slowly roll out the new stack to a consistent, small set of users. We also had a pretty bad performance bug and learned a whole lot about profiling Node. (We plan on writing more in-depth posts about some of these topics soon.)
It is good
And the rewrite turned out really well. Even with more features like pull-to-refresh, a new activity popover, and modern audio and video players, we sped up our DOM content loaded time by 35%! The new page has a lot of modern web standards in it too like srcsets, flexbox, asynchronous bundle loading, and a web app manifest. You can install the mobile web dashboard as a standalone app now. It was also way faster and simpler to write using React than it was on our old PHP/Backbone stack.
We’re really proud of the new mobile web dashboard. We look forward to bringing even more new features to it in the near future, and launching even more pages on our new web infrastructure.
“In a sequentially ranked hierarchy based on level of critical importance, the disparity between us is to vast to quantify. Agent Stone?”
“The doctor thinks you’re basic.”
Ever since I saw Sonic the Hedgehog in theaters months ago I was planning out a Doctor Robotnik cosplay, and was hoping to debut it at Anime Central.
Then the pandemic happened.
So I’ve been sitting on this one for a while and a few weeks ago finally found the time (and the weather) to shoot it, and I’m extremely happy with how it turned out. I’m just sad I didn’t get to wear this to a con.
I also couldn’t pass up the opportunity to model the flight suit while I still had the makeup on. I bought this racing suit months ago for this exact purpose, originally hoping to wear this to ACEN.
Sometime soon I’d love to do the disheveled look from the very end.
