🏗 Introducing Cloudflare Developer Speaker Series - Day 2

Hey everyone, welcome to Cloudflare's Developer speak your series, day two. Here we go, it's happening, day two. My name is Kristian Freeman. I'm the engineering manager for the developer advocacy team here. And I'm joined like yesterday with my two co-hosts, Dawn and Gift. Don, you wanna introduce yourself? Yeah. Thanks, Kristian. Hi. I am Dawn Parzych. I am the director of product marketing for the developer platform here at Cloudflare. Gift. Yeah. Hi everyone. I'm gift going and I work as a developer advocate at in workers developer community team and I'm mostly focused on the developer productivity thing here, working on Wrangler and some of the cool stuff. So we were on day two here. We did a similar intro call yesterday, where we talked a little bit about the developer speaker series talks we're excited about. I imagine we'll do something very similar today. We'll see where this call takes us, but I think generally we'll do something very similar. Let's start by kind of introducing what the Speaker Series is. Maybe people missed it yesterday. Good news. You can rewatch all the talks, which is something we'll bring up, I'm sure a couple of times here for our intro call. So you can rewatch to me yesterday. But essentially the idea is, as you know, tuned in to Cloudflare TV. We have a very sort of unique format here. We have Cloudflare TV as a live streaming 24/7 platform, and especially with Platform Week going on right now, which I'm sure we'll also talk about during this call. There's a lot of really interesting, exciting stuff to talk about both at Cloudflare and like what we're doing announcing for developers and stuff like that. But also we want to bring people from within the industry, web developers, speakers, educators, and give them an opportunity to teach people what's new and exciting in the web dev world. So this will be I should have looked this up since yesterday as keep not knowing if it's our second or third. I believe it's our third. And I think about it, I think it's our third iteration of the Speaker Series. And every time we do one of these things have changed a lot. The ecosystem continues to evolve. There's a lot of really exciting stuff going on, so I would think maybe a great place to start. Like I said, we're in day two. So there were, I believe, six talks yesterday or five or six talks. I'd love to hear from Gift and Dawn. What were your favorite talks of yesterday's Speaker Series? You know, for me, I would like to say all of them were really good. I especially liked the one that Dawn co-hosted with Caitlyn where she spoke about going to boot camp, and then she wrote a book about her experience that was really enlightening. And also, I really enjoyed Kobe's and Davis talk as well. Like I remember, I said it was really looking forward to it was really good. I'll definitely reward the ones that I missed because it was super late for me towards the end of it. But yeah. Yeah. You like. I really enjoyed Debbie's talk. I think the community I think the Discord was, you know, pretty active during parts of her talk, which was really great. I was really enjoying John's talk as well. And then unfortunately, he had technical difficulties and so I missed the last 10 minutes. So I've got to go talk to John to see if he has that talk. You could share it with me so I can hear how it concludes. Yeah. Yeah. That's what happens when you do a live streamed remote conference, right? Real life. Real life happens. Yeah. Fingers crossed for all the speakers today that they do not have any technical difficulties. I know yesterday with Caitlin, she dropped off twice during our interview, but she came back, so it was good. Yeah. So for those talks that you mentioned, and I think it's a good time to let people know you can go, like I said of rewatch any of them. And to do that you go to cloudflare dot com slash developer speaker series. So developer dash speaker dash series. We have the full schedule for both yesterday's talks and today listed there and then also links to each page on Cloudflare TV where you can go and rewatch the talks. So if you missed any of those, we keep them around. We also re-air them. I believe we still re-air a lot of the segments from our previous speaker series here on Cloudflare TVs, so they'll definitely be many opportunities to catch those. Maybe. Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about today's talks. I'd love to hear what you all are most interested in. In today's talks. We got another, let's count, one, two, three, four, five talks today. And yeah, what excites you today or what things are you most interested in? Okay. I'll go first. Yeah. To me, I'll say I'm curious about Greg Stock because, you know, today we had like two launches from Cloudflare Pages, so I'm guessing that would be covering like some of the. So I'm really curious to see what that would be. And also Bryan's stock on the edge of my server. That is a talk that surprisingly enough, is kind of related to a talk that I'm preparing for a conference when I read the talk description. So I'm also very interested in seeing how he approaches that and what he will be sharing alongside the performance talk from Henry. So I think all of them are going to be good. Yeah looking forward to them. And when you're like, I feel guilty, like picking a favorite. Like, they all sound really good. And I know a number of speakers personally, so I don't want them to think that I'm not looking forward to their talk, but I am very much looking forward to, yesterday we announced the general availability of Wrangler two as one of our Platform Week announcements and today Sunil is giving a talk on that. And I'm very happy to see this because it was my second week at Cloudflare and I heard him give a version of this, an internal event. And immediately after that I said, You need to give this during the Developer Speaker Series. So I'm like very grateful that he agreed to do that and it's a fun talk. I liked it and I'm just looking forward to all that. I'm not picking a favorite today because like I said, I know many of the speakers. Yeah. I think one thing. Yeah, I... Well, kind of similar. I'm actually interested to see Greg's talk. I know. I know a fair amount about Wrangler 2, I have been following the development of used it a lot of seen gifs videos that she did on Wrangler 2. I feel like I have a pretty good understanding of that, the feature set and what's coming out with that but some of the Pages stuff I don't know as much about, I've seen it kind of as it's been worked on the last couple of months, but I like seeing live demos and so getting that perspective on some of our recent products, like in a sort of talk format, especially in like a live coding format I always really enjoy. So that'll be good. I also just like that it's called Cloudflare Pages Updates. It's very, very vague, which is funny. It was like the way that we could announce the, the talk before, you know, like Platform Week and, and the speaker series really kicked off. So that, that'll probably make me laugh for some time after this. Just the, the vagueness that we had to do. But yeah, I think it'll be it'll be great. And then I guess also should plug the very last talk of the day. I will be in that with James Ross talking about nodecraft's migration to Cloudflare Pages. So it's actually a funny sort of follow up I guess, because in a previous Innovation Week, I interviewed James. Nodecraft is basically a game hosting company, a game server hosting company, so their main thing I think is like a Minecraft server, which a lot of people don't know is like pretty beefy computer requirements to host that sort of server. But a lot of other games like they do server hosting for as well. And so they've been really long time users of both Workers and Cloudflare in general and have done a lot of things like open source and stuff like that with like how to host sites using Workers. And so this will actually be exciting for me because last time we talked he was like, Yeah, I think Pages we're going to move eventually, but there's like a couple of things we still need or whatever. So it's exciting to actually see that they are, you know, that that's happening and they have the tools that they need. And so we'll be diving into all of that stuff and just kind of talking about like what the story was transitioning from like the early days using Workers and Worker Sites to moving into Pages and actually how Pages has all the tools that they need. So yeah, should be, should be fun. And that'll be one of three Cloudflare TV segments that I will be on today. So I'm settling in and getting my broadcaster mode on. But yeah, I am super excited for all of them. And we talked a little bit yesterday about web performance stuff too. That's kind of like a common theme in some of our external speaker talks. So Colby talked a little bit about that stuff yesterday. And then Henri talking about some of the kind of the basics, which is always a talk format that I like is everyone knows like a little bit about web performance I think, but people don't know like the sort of like foundation, like here's all these little terms and things you need to know. So I think that'll be a really informative talk, something that I will probably go back and rewatch too, because web performance stuff really never. It's never not relevant like it always. Uh, yeah, I think. I mean, I think we actually covered all the talks, which is great. Maybe one thing, Dawn, I would love to hear, I think I kind of did this spiel yesterday, so I'll spare people from it. But maybe from your perspective, I would love to hear like your thoughts on like Speaker Series and how it relates to Platform Week and what we have going on right now. Like across the company, do you see any sort of like how we think about doing the Speaker Series and how it ties in to the broader story we're telling during Platform Week? Sure. Yeah. So for those that don't know, like Cloudflare is known for hosting what we call our Innovation Weeks, where we take a week out of the year and multiple times of the year and do a whole host of announcements, things we are thinking about building, things that we have started to build, things that have moved into general availability really just to show how we're continuing to innovate. And this week is Platform Week. And what we're looking at during Platform Week is providing kind of all of the building blocks that developers need to build on Cloudflare. We have our seed and we have our security product, but we also have this newer developer platform. And so we're bringing in all of those building blocks. And so the Speaker Series we look at as a way not just to hear Cloudflare take on what's happening, but to hear from members of the community, to hear from industry leaders. It's one thing for us to say, like, these are the things we're doing and you should do. But we want the practitioners, we want other people in the community that have built things to come and share like, Hey, these are the things that we've built. And so that's where the Speaker Series comes from, where we've got a couple of Cloudflare presentations today because we thought it was important for you to hear that. But the rest of the talks are all people from the community, people that we know, people that you want to hear from to see what they're building. And so we like to kind of weave these things in during our innovation weeks. Yeah, it was a lot of fun kind of pulling all of this together and going to people that I've known for years like Henri and were like, Hey, like, we're doing this thing. I want you to talk like what performance is so important? And like we had a fun conversation about it and that led to his talk later on today. What's my feel on all the goodness that is Platform Week and the Speaker Series. For sure. Oh, that was great. Yeah. I mean, I think I agree with everything you said. I like it's we're always looking for different perspectives. I mean, as a company, and particularly on like Workers and Pages, like we definitely have like a, we have guesses and like ideas and bets, I guess you could say of like where we think things are going to go in terms of the web development ecosystem. And I always learn a lot from other people who are thinking about different things than I am and like focus on different aspects of like developer experience and web performance and stuff like that. So... Quick interruption. I think this is probably a really good time to plug our Discord Channel as well. Yeah. Yes, totally. It's a way for you to share your thoughts with us. We're all in that Discord Channel and we do want to hear from you so you can join the Cloudflare Developer Discord Channel. You can find information for it on our website and our blogs all over the place. Yeah. Yes. So the invite link. See, I have it memorized now. I say it so often, it's it's discord dot gg slash cloudflare dev. And yeah, like you said, it's a great place for there's like 12,000 people there, honestly, maybe closer to 13,000 now, people talking not just about Workers, but also just general web development, different frameworks and stuff like that, particularly how they relate to Pages. And we're also always adding new products there too. Actually, I was just talking to someone this morning from the Images team who they want to get involved in the Discord and have conversations about Images and, and like all the other products really that Cloudflare has. So yeah, so definitely get your invite there. There is also a channel I think you said, Dawn, there's some chatter in there specifically around the Speaker Series. I actually haven't checked it. Has it been pretty active of people in there talking about stuff? People are, the speakers are dropping their slides in there and posting, you know, few things here and there. We've also used it to share like announcements. We're like, okay, things are broken right now. Like we have lost our speaker. So but yeah. That's fun. Yeah, and we also have some stuff in there this week about Platform Week we'll be having a community call which is kind of like a, like a Twitter space format, like audio only stage call that will be on Thursday. So we'll have some people from the developer advocacy team there sort of recapping everything that's going on with Platform Week. Also that includes the Speaker Series. So be good to hear from other members of the team besides Gift and I, like what talks we liked and found interesting and just like how to go and rewatch those and stuff like that. And then yeah, we'll be talking obviously about the rest of Platform Week stuff there too. And then they'll also be R2 Q&A. So the R2 team, which is like our storage product, will be sitting in for another sort of audio only call talking about. Well, I can't say too many things. Let's just say it's some stuff that's going on. And then maybe I feel like some of it actually has been talked about publicly. But I'll just. Say there was a tweet earlier this week. So I saw that. R2. Yes. So R2 will be moving into open beta sometime this week and they'll be answering questions there. And we'll have a thread that people can ask questions it really anything about about R2, so yeah so a lot of exciting stuff going on. Again, that link is discord dot gg slash cloudflare dev. So yeah, like, like Dawn said, it's a good place to really get plugged in. Give us your thoughts on whatever stuff web dev related that you're thinking about. Or let us know that you're interested in speaking at the next Developer Speaker Series, because we always like having new voices and participants on here, so feel free to reach out to us and say, I want to talk. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we I mean, I can't imagine this will be the last speaker series that we do. So there's more innovation makes, there's more Speaker Series. And then art aren't always necessarily even tied together. I think we've done some in the past because felt sort of like timing wise, it was the right time to have another one of these. And we have a really great team of Cloudflare TV people who are really great at helping everyone kind of get up and running on this platform. So. Yeah. So maybe here in our last sort of third of the call, we could switch gears a little bit and talk about more generally like Platform Week stuff. So yesterday we had talked a bit about some of the things we were most excited about. Maybe we'd do something similar today. So if people don't know, you can just go to blog dot cloudflare dot com. There are, I think, last count, a million blog posts published every single day in regards to platform stuff. Not really a million, but really like so many exciting announcements from all over the company. And today I think a really big theme while — there's sort of two — one is Pages. There's a lot of exciting stuff going on with Pages and really talking about kind of the future of that platform and then Workers for platforms. Some really interesting stuff there and I'll just plug real quick later today. You can find it on the Cloudflare TV schedule. There's going to be a What's New in Platform Week call. And basically all of the authors that were involved in the blog post today, we'll be talking in greater detail about their announcements and about the blog post. So you'll definitely want to check that out. If any of them in particular, you're like, Wow, I really want to learn more about that, especially from the sort of perspective of the people building the product and thinking about how it fits into the wider story we're trying to tell with all of Cloudflare's products, that's definitely a good place to check out. So yeah, I'd love to hear kind of like we did yesterday. Like what? What things are you all most excited about? Maybe gift. You want to start? Yeah, sure. For me, I'm really happy about, like, the updates in Cloudflare Pages. Of course, Page was released I think in February. Not sure when I joined. Like now is generally ever available for everybody to use. So for me, I have my own personal project and I literally saw the difference in build times when I tested it out. So it's really nice to see that we're innovating and making sure that we are prioritizing the developers and how they use our products. And as well as the other announcement on Pages, direct upload, I think that I've also had people ask me why is this not, you know, a thing you do with Pages? But I'm also happy that we currently have that. Essentially what direct uploads is, is that now you can do uploads of assets without connecting to like GitHub or GitLab can directly serve your own pages or assets. And it's nice to see that we are innovating stuff, you know, adding new features into the platform. So yeah, those are the things that I am excited about. I think I'm very eagerly waiting for the Workers announcements, the service bindings, the ability that you can now call a Worker from another Worker. And we're kind of building that workflow out so that it's not just like you get one Worker, but like you can request something from another Worker or send something to another Worker. And in parallel with that announcement, we indicated a change in our pricing where if you get a request from one worker and it sends it to another Worker, Worker one is now idle. We're no longer charging. We're not charging when that worker is idle. So you're not being charged twice for things that are taking place. So you're not being charged for the duration that Worker one was executing, even though part of it was wait time and Worker two was running. It's charged for the total duration. So as you're building strings of Workers, you're not having to pay like double for processing and compute time because nothing's being done. They're just waiting for somebody to give them information. So that's been really interesting to watch that come out. And part of that is what's kind of helping us to enable this workers for platform announcement that came out as well, where as a platform or provider you can make Workers available within your product for people to develop on so that they can create their own custom workflows. So there is like kind of some method to what we announcing and how we're announcing things. And so like the service bindings with Workers is really one of the pieces that now helps us do the work for them. So that's been nice to see. Yeah. Yeah, totally. It's exciting to see us take out the Workers as platform stuff because there's been a lot of conversation about it internally and I love kind of seeing the vision spelled out is always, always really exciting. Yeah, for me. So just to echo what both of you said, service bindings, I'm really excited about actually. Funny story when I started as a developer advocate here in like 2019, I think that's a long time. That was like maybe third or fourth day. I was working as a developer advocate, sitting in customer calls and just trying to figure out like what even is Workers like what? What are people trying to like do with this or whatever? That was like one of the first questions that we got was like, what if I wrote a bunch of Workers and I want to start calling them from each other? And we had a story for it which is just like using HTTP. But yeah, the service binding stuff is really exciting and I like that we're being thoughtful about the pricing of it. So that's great. And then obviously pages really excited for the future of pages there, you know, the fast build stuff, it went out like so smoothly over the last couple of months that like it's funny, I've already kind of forgotten that it was ever not fast. Like we've been using it in all of our stuff. Like our developer documentation was using the fast builds beta really early on and it was a huge improvement. So that's all been awesome and I'm just excited to see more people with direct uploads be able to use Pages really like whatever way they want. So that's, that's super exciting. So yeah, just to, to kind of recap, if you want to learn more about the Platform Week stuff, you can go to blog dot cloudflare dot com. You can also go to cloudflare dot com slash platform week. So platform dash week, I think that's the right. That's the right URL, right, Dawn? So that will have all of the blog posts throughout the rest of the week, all of the announcements that we're making in one sort of nice place where you can just sort of scroll through all of it. It's going to be a very full page by the end of the week, honestly, into next week as well. So this is going to continue to be there's going to be a lot of stuff there. So there's that. And then also, as I mentioned, if you go look at the Cloudflare TV schedule, there's going to be a what's new in Platform Week sort of call that we do every single day during this week with the different PMs and authors of the different blog posts that covers from their perspective, like what we're announcing. And it's a cool place to hear. Yeah. Here, hear the vision like from from their point of view. Yeah. So I think I may have covered every hour we feel about is there anything else we should let people know about before we transition over to the first talk of the day? I'll just add to also check out the Cloudflare Workers YouTube channel. So it's youtube dot com slash cloudflare workers. We released two videos on the Wrangler 2 release, so in case you want to check out me going through those things that was released, you should watch those videos. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, definitely. What do they say? Like and subscribe, right? Right. If you watch the videos? Like and subscribe. Yeah. And there's going to be hopefully more videos coming soon. But it's, yeah. Great overview of particularly for Wrangler 2, all the stuff that's changed. And then I think the second video is basically how to migrate, right. Yeah. A lot of people. Did we share? Did we share the content that we're making on the YouTube channel with through our Cloudflare Dev's Twitter account? Yes. Yes, actually, I did one yesterday. So yeah. Yeah, I thought the new. So I'm still trying to figure out like how things are going to be communicated and pushed out. So yeah. So that's another place you can go is that Cloudflare devs Twitter channel for updates. Yeah. So that's I mean, there's a lot a lot of places to check out. So with our last 45 seconds or so before the developer Speaker Series starts, where can people find you both online? Maybe let's mix it up a little bit from from yesterday. I don't think we had time for that one. Gift, do you want to start? Yeah. Laura Gift on social. So Twitter. Laura Gift literally everywhere. Yeah. I am. I am on Twitter as well as DParzych, so D-P-A-R-Z-Y-C-H. I am not good at coming up with names. I went with unoriginal. Yeah. Yeah. No worries. Yeah. And then twitter.com slash cloudflare dev to find all of our stuff. All right. We are just about out of time, so thank you, everyone. Enjoy Speaker Series.