💻 Welcome to Developer Week 2023

Hello, hello, hello and good morning to everyone. My name is Leroy Lasenburg. I'm the product marketing manager for the developer platform and I'm very excited to announce that today is the first day of Cloudflare Developer Week 2023. We have everything all dedicated to the developer and the developer community and today I have two of my most favorite people on the planet here with Ricky Robinett and Nevi Shah to tell you all things and give you a great preview of what we have in store for this week. All right, so starting with Ricky. Ricky, introduce yourself to everyone and share what's going on with Developer Week. Yeah, hey everybody. What's up? Nice to get to see you all. I guess you're seeing me, I'm not seeing you. Nice for you all to see me and kick off Developer Week. I am super stoked for a couple reasons. First of all, this is my first Developer Week here at Cloudflare so it's a little special to me and it's been a lot of fun leading up to it and oh my gosh, what do we have in store? So much. Today I was especially excited about because we dropped a bunch of AI stuff for you all to play with. We're going to be talking about that in a session in about an hour on Cloudflare TV but just to tease that out a little bit, we've got some chat GPT plugins, we've got AI assistant called Cursor in the docs that will help you find the information you need and we have something called Constellation AI which lets you do inference on the edge with workers which is really exciting. So stoked to see what you all build with everything we've got and I'll hand it over to Nevi. Yeah, thanks Ricky. Hey everyone, I'm Nevi. I'm a product manager on the workers team. I think what's really exciting about these Developer Weeks is I feel like our mission is the same, right? We want to unlock new tools for our developers, we want to remove the friction for our developers but I think the way that we do it every single year is different and I think this focus on AI this week and today is super, super cool but it's not all AI. I think there's a lot of announcements that are coming up in the week that have been asked for for a really long time. A lot of really great updates to some products that went into open beta last year, a lot of really great developer experience and developer productivity announcements specifically related to pages, to workers. So I'm really excited to kind of see how the community kind of reacts to these and also would love to hear as you see the announcements coming out, what more do you want to hear, right? We're constantly working on adding more to our product suite, to our feature suite. So I think these Developer Weeks are a really great way for us to show everything that we've been working on but also get feedback from the community as well. Indeed, indeed and Developer Week again is running through May 15th through the 19th so we have a plethora of the announcements and product news and information to share with the developer community. Both Rikki and Nevi, how can developers that are checking us now on Cloudflare TV and also through our Discord community, how can they get involved in Developer Week? Jump on the Discord, start talking to our, I know our PMs and our engineering teams are having ask me anything session throughout the week. I know that we're going to be completely active on Twitter talking about the different announcements like engage with us, talk to us. We would love to hear from you and also again we have blog posts going out so definitely let us know what you think. But I think a lot of our teams are going to be kind of talking over Discord. Rikki actually who runs the community team as well as the DevRel team might have a little bit more information but like yeah, Rikki, what are some other ways that the community can get involved? Yeah, I was going to say Discord too. I feel like that's a great place. Also the community forum so community.Cloudflare .com is a great place to hang out with us. Nevi and I are both on Twitter. A lot of the team's on Twitter so you can come hang there. And yeah, I think one of the things I'll say is when I joined, I was like blown away by how active the community is on Discord. So like a big shout out to all the community who's hanging out there and then like Nevi said, if you have questions that is like your quickest path to getting to the people who worked on the stuff that we're launching this week and I know they're excited to hear feedback. We actually had like a thread internally this morning with like screenshots of a bunch of feedback and ideas already from stuff that launched this morning so it was really incredible. I also think what's really fun, Rikki, is you just joined Cloudflare, right? And I think that with you joining there's this whole, I don't know, new wave to interact with developers. Like I kind of wanted to know what you felt about joining. I know you had a really great blog post this morning. Like tell us a little bit about, yeah, why you joined Cloudflare and kind of like what you see for the next year and beyond. Yeah, so I have a story I didn't tell in the blog post that I'll tell. Tell it. The moment when I was like I think I want to join Cloudflare was actually birthday week last year and I remember, so I'm a developer, so I was on Hacker News during birthday week and like every day a new article from Hacker News, I was like oh my gosh, what a day with all of these new tools. Like as a developer, like I am so stoked about all of this stuff and then I was like oh my gosh, like doing developer relations and community work, like the root of it is like having great products for developers and I was like Cloudflare is just releasing all this amazing stuff and my birthday is September 27th, which is also Cloudflare's birthday, so like then oh my gosh, there's something here. The stars have aligned. Yeah, the stars have aligned. So I mean I think that what to expect, you know, over the year ahead is just like us getting out with you all in the community more and more. So if you're in New York, definitely come hang out with us at the Remix NYC meetup on Wednesday this week. I'll also be at API Days New York this week, so if you're going to be around there, drop me a note on Twitter and we can say hi, but I think like us just getting out in the community with you all more and like, you know, empowering you all to use all these great products is something that's going to happen more and more. Can you guys both speak to, you know, the prevalence of AI being integrated into the developer platform and how developers ultimately can take full advantage of AI now with our new announcements? Absolutely. Ricky, you want to start or should I? You can go first, Nevi. Cool. I kind of, I think it kind of goes back to what I was saying before about how, you know, we're constantly looking at ways to like heighten a developer's productivity. I think we do this in a lot of different ways with our with our weeks, but with AI specifically, the goal that we try to aim for on the developer platform is just like, how can we get people started as fast as possible, right? How do we remove any barrier to entry onto our platform and how do we get people from idea to deploy in a matter of seconds, right? I think something that I always think about is, you know, when my dad goes to Cloudflare.com, like how easily can he actually deploy an application? How complicated does it really have to be? And I think that AI plays a really big role into kind of quickening that process so that anyone can get onto our platform. And I think that's really cool about some of these announcements that we had today. And you'll hear more about it of like what launched today later in the segments. But Ricky, I don't know. What else do you want to add to that? Yeah, I think that was great. I mean, I will share a story. So Christian shipped a great blog post last week on building chat GPT plugins with Cloudflare Workers. And so Friday afternoon, I was with my daughter seven. And so I always try to build stuff that we can do together. So we play this game called guess the character, which is like we think of a character and it's like 20 questions with character she knows. So I wanted to build that as a chat GPT plugin. And so I use Christian's blog post to build that. And I think that it had this moment when I built it, deployed it really quick. I like had a chat GPT plugin running in like 30 minutes. And then the character it picked for us was Aladdin. She didn't know that. And she said, is the character in a Broadway show? And I didn't like train my plugin to do this somehow, like through the magic of AI, it knew to make another API request to my plugin to like get data from Wikipedia on characters who have been in Broadway shows. Like it just knew how to do that. Like I didn't build that. And it was amazing. And my mind was blown. And I think that at least most of the developers I talked to are having those moments where it's like, I didn't even know what just happened. But this is amazing. And I think that for us making you get to that moment of like the light bulb going off as quick as possible is really the place we want to play. And I think like posts like Christian's of like, yeah, the like getting the code deployed publicly someplace where you can like do something with it should be really, really easy. And then you can do the things that are hard, the things that require like developer creativity to make happen. And I think the other side of that coin, which I think when anyone hears AI, right, there's so many fun and exciting possibilities. Your life is easier. Things go faster. But then, you know, there's definitely the other side of the coin where it's like, well, that's kind of scary, right? So I think Cloudflare this week also, not only are we talking about ways that it can improve productivity and the experience, but also like how are we securing these products that are using AI and how can companies kind of leverage Cloudflare to really like protect their sensitive data. So I think that's a really important part. And I think, you know, Cloudflare is in the best place to be giving advice and to be shipping products like that. So I'm really excited about how we're kind of balancing that week as well. And I think it's really interesting to CEOs and founders and folks that are looking to build on top of Cloudflare. Now, you both understand that, you know, I've said there are extreme benefits with AI and integrating AI into the developer ecosystem. But what are some of the concerns that many developers would ultimately have with AI or anything that we'd ultimately address, say from a security standpoint? So I'll start. I think one of them is, you know, a lot of companies now are seeing their employees start to use products that use AI. So I don't know if you're a developer who wants to like check a piece of code and put it into chat GBT, like that could be scary. Or even just, I don't know, Ricky, if you have examples of products that companies use. But I think, yeah, there's like sensitive data that gets leaked into these tools. And so that's pretty scary for companies. And so I think like one of the announcements that I really liked, we have two, I guess one is just how to secure sensitive information for your teams using our zero trust platform. And then the other one that we have coming up later in the week is just sort of like best practices for building LLMs. And so I think it's a good consideration. I think there's still more work to be done and there's still a kind of like this idea of security that still needs to be flushed out a little bit more. But I think these are good starts for folks who are just dipping their toes into the AI space. I definitely don't think it's comprehensive, but I think it's a good, yeah, it's a good step in the right direction. Yeah. I think one of the interesting things as a developer is we're seeing these applications go from like zero to, you know, a million, like overnight, like the virality of what people are building is truly like blowing my mind. And I think with that is just understanding the scale and, you know, things like how do you rate limit and make sure someone's not like taking down your whole application? How do you like, you know, do something like a waiting room so that like, if you like get overwhelmed that like your site doesn't go down. And I think that that is like, you know, with the good comes the bad. And I think that being prepared for like the challenges of scale is like a fun problem to have to face that reads posts on securing your LLM API applications is going to be really helpful, I hope in that part of it. And security always comes as kind of like a buzzkill sometimes, because you're like, oh, if I have to do this, then that's going to like totally like ruin the experience for the user. So I think reads post like coming up in the week does a really great job of kind of acknowledging that, like, hey, I know that security can be kind of a buzzkill, but like, it is really important. So like, here are some ways that you can kind of balance the two. So I really like it's a really good read. And one of our major efforts here at Cloudflare too, is to help developers kind of control their cloud computing costs, or their costs across for bandwidth, or for egress fees. How do some of these announcements, obviously, throughout the week are going to ultimately help control developer costs over the course of these announcements? I'll take it first, Ricky. Yeah. I mean, I've been talking to a lot of companies building on AI and Cloudflare. And I think that the thing with that I keep hearing is about R2, right? And it's not even necessarily about this week. It's just like, if you're building with your own models, you need to put those somewhere. And like, you may need to run multi-cloud because like GPUs are really like a scarcity, right? And so you're like trying to find the GPUs and you have your like training data that's like very large living somewhere. And I think with, you know, R2 and like the no egress on it is like the perfect place wherever you want to do your training to put those models. And so that is the thing that I've seen AI companies get the most excited about, developers get the most excited about, truthfully. Yeah. And I think Cloudflare, we already see a lot of developers building their applications on Cloudflare today. But I think like if you have a company that you want to build on top of Cloudflare, like we want to hear more about it. We just launched today, I think an AI for startups program, which I think lets you kind of bypass the, I think it's like bypassing the referral requirement, or there's a requirement that the startups can now, AI startups can now bypass. So definitely trying to encourage folks to build on top of Cloudflare when they're, you know, building their applications. Awesome. All right. And again, this is the first day. So we're all obviously excited to finally get to this day. It's been a lot of planning and a lot of strategy to get to this point. So we, you know, want to give everyone a sneak peek and preview of what to expect over the week, but we don't want to tip our hats too quickly just yet. Do you guys have any last thoughts, or Nevi? Yeah, I was going to say like, in addition, you know, there's, yeah, this whole AI story that we're telling too, but I think tomorrow is going to be a really exciting day, specifically as it relates to backends and databases and kind of our database story that we've been telling over the past couple of quarters and years. So excited about that. And then Wednesday, I'm on the experiences team. So really excited about Wednesday, which is this really nice, a lot of additions to Pages and Workers, like I said, but really emphasizing like the local experience, the future of Pages and Workers. I know we get a lot of questions on like, well, what's the difference? When do you use one over the other? And then Thursday and Friday have kind of like this mixed bag of announcements. So it's a really exciting week. I'm so proud of everyone who's kind of been involved in putting this together and super excited to get these products in the hands of developers. Yeah, I, so my first day at Cloudflare, which was like six weeks ago, when we were like, really getting- Oh my God, six, it's only been six weeks? Yeah, six or seven weeks, I know. And it's been, yeah, it's been wild. Is, someone shared a doc with me called developer pain points for developer week. And it was a list of like, so many of the things we hear from you all in the community that like, you need us to like, fix or add a new feature. And, you know, we're talking about the big flashy things a lot, but I think we got through a lot of that list for this week. We're going to see a lot of that stuff. So I'm excited, not for like the big flashy things, but the little things that are going to make developers' lives easier. And then there's something, I won't say what it is, I won't tease it out too much, but along the pagers workers, you know, updates, there's a new thing there that I'm very excited about that I'm going to demo at the Remix NYC meetup. And if you were at RemixConf, you may have also seen some of this, I think. And so I'm really stoked for that, not to sound too mysterious, but I think it's going to be helpful for developers. And Reggie, would you mind just giving a little bit more information about the Remix meetup again? I know you mentioned it a few times. Yeah. In New York, Wednesday at six at the CockroachDB offices. So yeah, come hang out. Nebi, are you coming? I absolutely am. I think we'll tweet some information about it too. So definitely head to our Cloudflare Dev Twitter. Also keep following our Cloudflare Dev Twitter, because that's where we're going to post a lot of our updates. I know that we love to see and read all of the comments that happen after every announcement and tweet at us if you wanted to see something that you didn't get to see for the week. That's right. That's right. So again, as Nebi and Reggie mentioned, you can definitely interact with us on our developer Discord community. We'll also have our posts available on our Cloudflare Dev Twitter handle. So you can stay tuned and stay informed with all of the announcements throughout the week as well. And be sure to check out our blog and our dedicated hub at Cloudflare.com backslash developer -week. That will have a full listing of all of our product announcements and news. And again, be sure to check us on our Discord. Any last comments or mentions, Reggie and Nebi? Obviously, we're getting started and getting revved up for developer week. But any last things you want the audience to know? Give them a try. Every time we announce something, I think the first thing we want to see is, did you try it and how did it go? If you're afraid or if it didn't work, then that's also something that we want to know. But we really want to be able to give developers things to get their hands dirty. So don't be afraid to roll up your sleeves. Yeah, yeah. And just to add, show us what you build. We only put these things out in the world so that you all as developers can build amazing things. And so seeing what you're building with everything we release is part of the joy of putting this out there. Yeah. As a PM, I can definitely attest to that. I love seeing what people build. It only helps to inform me more on what my next steps are with the product. So yeah, give us a shout. All right. All right. Again, Ricky, Nevi, thank you guys so much for joining us today and letting everyone know on this first installment of Welcome to Developer Week 2023. We have a number of segments that are going to be scheduled throughout the week of what's launched today, where our team will give brief overviews and details of what was launched, what announcements were launched, what product features were going to be launching, and what new AI integrations we'll have within the developer platform. So once again, be sure to follow us on Twitter at CloudflareDev for our posts and stay informed of all of the news and announcements. Be sure to check us out on the developer Discord community. And we look forward to seeing all of the announcements and sharing the announcements with the developer community. Again, Ricky and Nevi, thank you guys so much for joining us today. And let's go for Developer Week 2023. Let's do it. Thank you. All right, guys. Take care.