The Best Post on Marco.org

The One-Person Product, by Marco Arment, strikes me as the pinnacle of blogging. It’s a personal, detailed and purposeful piece telling the story of Tumblr.

It offers a unique perspective on fascinating issues that are clearly close to Arment’s heart: quality, independence and craftsmanship.

[David Karp, founder of Tumblr,] expects people around him to be similarly into work and Tumblr, and often drove me hard with seemingly impossible demands. But David has a lot of Steve Jobs-like qualities, and like many people who worked for Steve, I look back on Tumblr’s crunch times with mixed feelings: I don’t want to return to that stress level, but David pushed me to do amazing work that I didn’t think was possible.

Because the photography is so great, we really get to see the people behind the product—it becomes obvious that great things are made just by people.

The unkown, yet essential, people behind Tumblr: Jacob Bijani, Jared Hecht, Meaghan O’Connell, Peter Vidani, and Josh Rachford.

Marco’s prose explains the challenges and the triumphs they experienced. The post explores the life of a company, from two people to an acquisition by Yahoo; it’s a tale of growing up, with values intact.