Welcome to Birthday Week

Hi, everyone. My name is Nikita Kaner. I'm product manager for Cloudflare Tunnel and Warp Connector. And I have with me my partner in Clarem, Karin. And we are going to present birthday week 2025. But before we dive into that, Karin, which products are you responsible for? How long ago have you joined Cloudflare? a product manager on workers so a lot of the work that i am on is configuration api and some of the cli experiences i've been here almost a year so it'll be a year in october um so it's very exciting to be a part of birthday week this year this is your first birthday week this must be so exciting it is very exciting i've turned like five years ago maybe a little bit more but it's the first one that i'm helping to organize so i feel like it's all brand new experience birthday week is always more than just a celebration, right? It's a tradition that's rooted in our mission of helping to build a better internet. Every single year, we're giving back to the community, to our customers and to the internet itself by launching technology that pushes the entire industry forward. One of the biggest announcements that we ever did in past birthday weeks was the universal SEL, where we've made encryption free for everyone. Nobody else was doing free SSL certificates, so that was massive. went back to the original blog post a couple of days ago and I think it contained the numbers like there are 2 million encrypted SSL internet properties and Cloudflare has 2 million sites so we're doubling the size of encrypted internet properties on the planet which is insane. That's crazy. It's absolutely crazy and then we had unlimited DDoS protection right establishing that security is a right not a privilege nobody was doing that everyone was charging for bandwidth everyone was charging for some sort of scrubbing centers something really weird and we were like no it's free you should be protected and it's free so I think this is so cool that for our 15th birthday we are continuing that tradition right so I'm pretty sure we can expect a full week of groundbreaking innovations and I know Corinne you know more so can you give us a little bit of a glimpse yes okay I'm gonna start before with like this themes of the week. So we're kicking off Monday. The whole theme is around democratizing development, which I think a lot of people are kind of feeling come up in the air, which is we all have more tools to become actual developers. I've seen it even with people who come from a completely non -technical field and they're like, I think I could make an app to just make this specific part of my life easier. It's very, very cool. So I think Monday is all about how many people are getting into development now and what we can. to make things more open, more accessible. Tuesday is all of our security, like how we are making a more smart, safe, and open web. And then Wednesday is more about, okay, everything that we're doing right now at the network level to make secure by default. Like that's how our network operates. And then Thursday is all the major announcements within the developer platform. So it's more centered on how the future of development is on Cloudflare. amazing infrastructure. We have the best network, affordable, and very developer -friendly compute primitives. Basically, all the problems of scaling infrastructure, working with infrastructure, completely abstracted away. And you can just use TypeScript the way that you're traditionally just used to. And then Friday is our big network and performance update, kind of rounding out the week of what we do best, talking about how we've made the internet basically just faster. You can give a sneak peek into Monday. Monday, we have big announcements. And then Nikita, I think you and I can kind of go back and forth of like the ones that we're excited about. One of our biggest ones is announcing that we are going to hire 1 ,111 interns in 2026. It's also kind of a huge statement because everybody is feeling this massive anxiety. Like if you look at the headlines of what the disruption of what AI is doing, so many people are coming out of school right now with just kind of figuring out how to apply their degrees or where. they sit in the market. And I think Cloudflare has always been really bullish on hiring people from all kinds of backgrounds. So famously, our CEO has an English degree. I have a literature degree. Journalist here. There we go. Lots of people kind of can come in with different backgrounds and apply them to the work because we are covering so much major infrastructure across so many industries. And this is a cool chance to just hire a really big influx of people that were raised on the Internet. And then also are more. used to using AI tools within school or within their other internships. And we're kind of just hiring almost like a fourth of Cloudflare. Come in, bring all your skills and kind of show us what you think could be improved. I'm so stoked for this. I don't know about you, but I have literally like submitted free job descriptions or free interns to join the tunnel team by team in 2026. Everyone wants more interns. Yeah, we have so many great ideas of what we want to build. We are so used to being very effective and smart around how we prioritize things. And I think having so many amazing young talent joining Cloudflare will unlock not only innovation that we already had in our minds and in our roadmaps, but also something completely brand new, fresh and clean in terms of perspective. So many of my favorite co-workers on my team started out as interns. And I think it kind of disrupts to the mind of thinking experience is what brings like the right amount of skills to work. And experience has like a ton. Like I've experienced obviously working on other dev tools, but sometimes it can hold you back, too, because you're like, I've done this before and I think it's a mistake. Whereas interns come in and just say, let's go for it. Let's actually just build. And that's you learn a lot more. I always admire anyone who is learning something new and I always want to support them and give something. and I'm so stoked that Cloudflare as a company applies the same. And I'm so stoked about the announcement that we are giving free developer features for all EDU emails for one year. So essentially everyone who is a student in the US and then we will expand, hopefully. So essentially, I think everyone is a developer in 2025. Like, come on, the barrier to entry this field is no longer there. It doesn't exist. Do you know anything else on this? that you want to share? Yeah, it's always just like, let's do the biggest thing possible. There's so many tools that I used in school when I was thinking of, okay, I want to break into tech like my senior year. It's really cool to know that more and more students are going to be able to build things. I'm really excited for this announcement. The next announcement that we have is that our startup program will now expand to include those nonprofits. So we had the project Galileo where essentially we were giving away some enterprise features. to non -profits but startup program is even bigger than that because it gives you access to most of the developer platform and all of the all of the cool brand new tech that we are giving away non -profits may also build something on top of it rather than just rely on us to protect their internet properties and the resources so it stops being just about securing and protecting the information and It becomes more about being modern and smart and progressive around distribution of that information and the shapes and forms that this installation. I think nobody is going to question the fact that we had maybe one dominating browser for the past 10 years, maybe three dominating operation systems for the past 20 years. And maybe it's great. maybe it's not so great but i like diversity i like having a choice and i like technology that supports open web not necessarily decentralized in every single way but open web where you know everyone has fastest and secure access to the information that they need to receive so the next announcement i think fits right into that slot do you want to talk a little bit about how we are baking app that open web we are financially backing and just supporting two big projects one of them is the ladybird browser which is kind of just starting from scratch with a huge focus on security and the really cool part of this is seeing from the background of like how our announcements get made at birthday week it's kind of like we're all talking about what would be really cool to get back to the internet or what would be an announcement that people would be excited about because they believe in the projects and with like a ton of care of making sure that we're as Cloudflare not saying that we're going to have control over something. It's really just centered on how can we make things more open. And then Omarki, the new operating system that is being talked about like just now, that's a pretty big announcement. I think that will be very, very interesting. And I'm excited just because it's really Cloudflare putting out, hey, these are ambitious projects to such a degree. We are interested and we're going to put our money where our mouth is. and support them literally no strings attached this is so cool and then i'm not sure about you i like going to the office i personally love the hybrid approach when you can choose like when you go i don't like going every single day but i do like engaging with both my office friends and i always like running into somebody new and being introduced to somebody new from a team i didn't know maybe they've just joined maybe they joined like earlier than i did but i had no idea what they're doing in the company like we are 4 000 employees plus strong and it's always a surprise and i'm so excited that we are about to offer free office space for startups with 10 employees or less because i just i can't wait to run into brilliant people that are building something that i have never even thought about and it will be a continuous sort of hub for innovation and i'm i'm sure i'm not alone like many many cloudflare people that i know that are coming to the office they come for collaboration and i'm pretty sure like this will be a game changer for people like me that go to the office for for this reason and for them what a great opportunity to come in and meet all of your folks and have a shared space without any commitment without any fees just come and hang out and engage with other people that are building high-load global-scale technology? Maybe they can ask questions. This one's so cool. I mean, selfishly, obviously, as a product manager, it's exciting because I feel like the most helpful feedback I've ever gotten is just people who are building on us, no matter the scale. Like, just people who are every single day using our products and can come in and say, can you just fix this one thing? And you're like, I can't believe I didn't think about that. You're so right. Especially like I... I've worked on a lot of open source projects and so I love just like hitting up random people filing issues or tweeting about us getting to meet those people in person and actually like bring other people over and say look what this person's making this is so cool I think it's great for them to get to prioritize their features and like you said there's so many people who are probably building things on Cloudflare and getting one of those like open desk places where you have to go pay money and and hang out but for free now you can come to Cloudflare meet other people like you are get ideas and then talk to teams to get things fixed so this one's really cool i love this one i love this one this is amazing and then i think we have a technical deep dive on monday too which originates from one of the developer platform teams do you want to give it some space and love i'll give it some space and love i need to go more in depth but yes this is this is a kenton blog who is just like at the forefront i would say like driving so much of the technical vision and always has been for workers And this is his, I think if you're familiar with Cap 'n Proto, then this blog is called Cap 'n Web. And it's all about kind of trying to solve the same problems that GraphQL solved, but doing it with TypeScript. That technical deep dive, I think, will be really interesting. I'm really excited to see what people think and get their feedback. I have another personal favorite that is on Friday, which is about how we essentially instantly made 20 % of the internet faster, which is something to definitely. look up to because this will be an insanely good long rate and i know that we will have more stuff on ai and vibe coding and how you can protect your corporate traffic from ai in a responsible way so think like shadow it for ai but as well how you can use ai to build something new from scratch for your product for your platform and then there will be a lot of stuff around post -quantum cryptography and i'm so stoked that we have people that literally devoted their entire life to this topic and they are the smartest people ever like i can't understand 50 percent of what they're saying but i'm always so excited to listen to them and just absorb everything that they're saying but definitely i think the best thing that everyone can do when it comes to birthday week is to follow along on our blog blog .cloudflare .com i know for sure that cloudflare tv will be bursting with segments from product managers engineers and other folks that are actually behind these products and features that are building the future of the of the cloudflare together with us this is going to be thrilling i know this is i'm really excited birthday week this is a really good one the schedule and the line is so good this year that I feel like we need to do it justice. Let's celebrate Cloudflare's 15th birthday together. Stay tuned on Cloudflare blog and Cloudflare TV. Excited to see you guys.