🏗 Introducing Cloudflare Developer Speaker Series

Everyone, welcome to Cloudflare Developer Speaker Series Spring 2022. We are super, super excited to bring you another edition of our Speaker Series. My name is Christian Freeman. I'm the engineering manager for our developer advocacy team, and I'm joined by a couple of guests today to intro the Speaker Series, tell you a little bit about what it's all about and also a little bit about Platform Week, which has started this week as well. And then hopefully tell you a little bit about the talks that we are excited to see today. So, Dawn, you want to start by introducing yourself? Sure. Thanks, Christian. Hi everyone. I am Dawn Parzych. I am the director of product marketing for the Developer Platform at Cloudware. Cloudflare. Wow. I started here about six weeks ago. I think this is my seventh week and immediately was thrown into like, Hey, we're doing this Platform Week and help us with it. So it's been a wild ride and I'm super thrilled that this has come together and we're airing this show this week. So we'll be talking more later. Gift, over to you. Hey everyone, I'm Gift, a new developer advocate on the Workers community theme. I specifically focus on the developer productivity and one of the things I'm actually excited about what we've been working on is the new release of Wrangler, which we actually just released like a few minutes or a few hours ago. So I'm quite excited about that and also about the talks that will be airing today. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. We got a lot of exciting stuff going on this week for sure. So we'll spend a little bit of time, I think, talking about that. But I thought we'd start just by talking a little bit about what the Speaker Series is and why we're excited about it. This is, I think, the third iteration, I should know this, I believe it's the third iteration of this that we've done. Cloudflare has a very interesting I mean, we have a live streaming platform, which I think is a pretty unique, interesting thing. And also being pretty active and plugged into like open source communities. And just the web dev community at large, we have a really interesting opportunity to invite people to come on Cloudflare TV and speak kind of in a conference style on Cloudflare TV, on all kinds of different topics, not just Cloudflare related, right? The ecosystem of web development is constantly changing. And what we had people come and speak about six months ago, nine months ago, things are always different as everyone in the web dev community knows. A lot of the talks today, and also tomorrow, it's going to be a two-day series, are really just covering what's new and what's interesting and yeah, there's there's a lot of interesting stuff there. So I guess maybe to start because I think Gift, you spoke at our last Speaker Series. I'd be curious to know what was your experience as a speaker in that and being invited to that? What are your thoughts on that whole process? Yeah, I guess it's actually surreal to even be here hosting or just, you know, last year when I was invited, at first I didn't know that Cloudflare had their own TV, so that was already like my first shocker. And then going through the process of coming on to speak, it was really nice to see myself alongside other developers in the community talking about, you know, not just Cloudflare elitist or anything really. I give a talk on something that was not Cloudflare specific, right? So it was really nice. And I'm even happy that we are continuing to do this every time we have some Innovation Week. So this is nice. Yeah. Yeah, I think that awesome. We, I think, have actually a fair number of people who spoke at previous Speaker Series and made their way to working here, which is really, really fun, especially out for the developer advocacy team in particular. That's just a really great, a great... I really like that we hire people out of the community and stuff like that. Dawn, what are your what's your impression of Speaker Series and stuff like so far? Coming to it like, like you said, seven, seven weeks is what you said. So you're pretty new to it, right? Yeah. It's been great. I've organized similar things, I've done conference organizing and finding speakers, and I always think it's such a hard thing to find people to speak, and this wasn't nearly as hard as I've had in the past. So when people reached out, like immediately, like, yes, I want to do this, I'm like, Oh, this was way easier than I thought it was going to be. I think people have come to recognize what Cloudflare offers and a chance to be part of this was something lots of people were interested in. So it was a it was a fresh change from things I've worked on in the past. I have also organized conferences. I used to organize remote conferences a couple of years ago and it's it's a lot of work. Yeah, it's really exciting to see it all together. I mean, today and tomorrow, I'm really excited to see all the talks come together. But it is a ton of work. It's a really cool time that we live in that we can basically put all this together and everyone's kind of working from home and stuff like that still, I think. And just like being able to learn from other people that you wouldn't really have a chance to meet in person is really cool. Yeah, that's awesome. Well, one thing I think that some people may know if you're kind of plugged into like Cloudflare, and what we're up to is that we are in the midst, I guess we are officially or officially in day two, but it's kind of like day one of like announcement wise of our Platform Week, which is one of our innovation weeks that we do at Cloudflare, where basically every day we are announcing new features, new products, and we think it usually makes a ton of sense to kind of position the Speaker Series around the same time as Platform Week, but at the same time as all of these amazing talks are coming on which we'll talk about here in a couple of minutes, there is a ton of really exciting stuff being announced, particularly around Workers, especially Pages, I think has a lot of really exciting announcements, but today there is a ton of awesome– So like we're open sourcing the Workers runtime, which is amazing. It was probably day two when I started working here about three years ago. I was like, Huh, I wonder if that's ever going to happen. That will be really interesting. And here we are. So that's super cool. And basically every day this week you can go to blog Cloudflare dot com, you can see like the new blog post of a landing page. What's the URL for that Cloudflare dot com slash platform. Platform. - Hyphen week. - Yeah, or hyphen week. Yeah. So lots of exciting stuff there. We also are going to actually have, every day this week, a What's new in... What's new for Platform. We can't remember what the exact segment is called, but there's a daily segment with all of the PMs who wrote our announcements and stuff for Platform Week, talking about what they announced today. It's kind of a more informal conversation, so you definitely want to check that out. And that will be airing after the Speaker Series. Yeah, every day this week. So yeah, there's a lot of exciting stuff. There's frankly too many things to keep track of. My head is a little... I'm a little overwhelmed, but I'm excited about the Speaker Series stuff because my background in web dev and going to conferences and stuff like that, I think it's super cool. So maybe one place we could start just to kind of look at the schedule and stuff like that. I would love to hear like what talks you both are most interested in. Dawn, do you want to start maybe like what's the the one this morning that you're most excited about? Sure. I'm most excited about the talk that's happening after this because I'm also on that segment. And after this segment, I'm going to be chatting with Caitlyn. I've been following her journey on Twitter as she went from working in the beer industry to becoming a software engineer. And she went through boot camp. She's open about her learning. She's like very big proponent of learning in public. And she's written a book on her experience and things. Other people that are going through boot camps can learn to help them as they make the journey into the software world. So I'm really excited to get to speak to somebody that I've been following on Twitter for years and make a personal connection with them. That is so nice. I personally am also looking forward to that because I read the talk description and I could relate to it so much. So looking forward to that session for me. I guess all the talks are actually very nice. It's super hard to pick which one I am looking forward to for me to be the Debbie Byrne stock on Playwright testing. So I had a conversation with her one time when she made a blog post about Playwright and I've seen it before, but I've not actually looked into it. And then we had a conversation about it, and it was really interesting to learn that there's actually a different tool than what I was used to that you can use to do like browser testing. And Debbie's going to be talking about that how to use it to test on both web browsers and I think you can do multiplatform testing Playwright. This is me just saying out of the top of my head, I've not still used it for me. Maybe this talk is going to give me that push to go check it out and see how I can use it in writing tests for my applications. Yeah, I'm actually very interested in that one as well because I have basically never done browser testing well. So there's a tool that does it. I'm yeah, I'm excited to learn about that. Yeah. For me Rob Sutter's talk on serverless APIs using fauna and Workers. Prana is very, very interesting to me and I've played around with it a bit like coming from like a GraphQL and Full Stack background. And I also love to kind of dork out on demos, especially like live demos. So I'm excited for that. Like showing anything with like Workers and deploying serverless functions especially that are backed by data. That's something I always get really excited about. So yeah, I think that'd be great. And there's a couple other ones here today. Colby Fach is going to be speaking on ecommerce and particularly how to handle media in ecommerce. It's actually a couple good talks. I think Colby's will be this will be a big focus of his. But then there's another talk tomorrow that are specifically around performance and things like that, something that Cloudflare cares a lot about. And we've done a lot of stuff with our different products. And also just like being in the ecosystem, being able to measure core web vitals and stuff like that. And so Colby's talk is going to be about like how to improve the media experience in ecommerce applications, which should be really interesting. And then the final talk of the day is also something that I care about. I'm actually interested to see kind of what the context is, which is John Feminella's talk, I hope I say that name right, "Business context is developer productivity". And the idea that developers can make better decisions if they have context to actually understand what they're building and things like that, which I can relate to, having been in places where that is done well and places where that's not done well in the past. Very relatable. So, yeah, a lot of a lot of interesting talks. I think maybe it would be a good time to just check in and give people some of these links again to go find this stuff. So the Speaker Series schedule, which will also include, by the way, after the fact, when everything is aired, you will be able to rewatch these talks pretty quickly after they air. Actually, Cloudflare TV team is legit. They get it ready to go and rewatch like very quickly after. So if you go to Cloudflare dot com slash developer speaker series. So developer dash speaker dash series is it dash or hyphen? Dawn, you said hyphen earlier, but yeah, I don't know, let's say hyphen. But if you if you go to that URL, you'll be able to see the full schedule. So all of the talks and then you'll be able to rewatch them as well after they finish airing. So that's a great place. And then another thing that we haven't mentioned is our Discord server, which is Discord dot gg slash Cloudflare dev is the primary one though to get an invite. Do we have the link to the Discord somewhere on the Speaker Series page? Hmm. Maybe we should add that today. I should add that, I'll go check afterwards. Yeah. So, yeah, if you go to our Discord server, there's actually about 12,000 people there right now, which is pretty unreal to me. I remember when there was ten people there, but the Discord server for both Workers, primarily, it kind of started as our Workers Discord Server, it's now grown to be the sort of general Cloudflare developers Discord. We have a channel in that Discord called Dev Speaker Series where people can talk about the different talks, share links, extra information. So that will be a really good resource for people to stay kind of plugged in with other attendees and viewers and then also obviously with the rest of platform and stuff going on. There's going to be a lot of other interesting stuff there this week. So announcements and things like that. We also have some live events going on there as well. This week. We're going to have a community call on Thursday and then also an R2 question and answer segment. This should be cool with the R2 team. Yeah. So there's a lot of stuff going on. So yeah, I think. Am I missing other links? What do you all think? I think the one to call out will be the blog as well because every announcement that will be where they live. So blog dot Cloudflare dot com. Yeah yeah totally. Yeah blog dot Cloudflare dot com, funny enough the Speaker Series blog post that I wrote is like pretty much buried at the bottom of the page now because we wrote five other blog posts that went out today or something like that, which is pretty amazing. Like I said, there's a lot of stuff going on. I think at the last count it's over 30 blogs that we're doing. I think I can share that. I don't think that's taking any secret or surprise away about what we're announcing. There's 30 different blogs, at least 30. Yeah, absolutely. And one thing I think that I'm excited about in regards to the platform, again Speaker Series, sort of pairing them around the same time is tomorrow we have some really interesting kind of different spins on some of the announcements that we'll be doing. So Sunil from the Wrangler team is going to be talking about Wrangler 2, which was like Gift said, it was released was it like today or yesterday? Probably yesterday at like the middle of the night. But today, today. 6 a.m. Pacific Time. Cool. Yeah. So yeah, it'll be a cool way to get kind of a different spin. There's like the blog post version, which is very sort of for people to read through and stuff like that. But tomorrow, Sunil will be giving that same sort of information in like a, like a developer conference talk format, which I think is a really good fit for like announcing an ECI. So that will be really cool. And then Greg Brimble, who's on the Pages team, is going to be doing something similar with some, some Pages announcements. I was about to spoil it, but I won't spoil anything. No spoilers, but some Pages updates, hence the name of the talk, Cloudflare Pages updates, which is very vague. But yeah, there'll be some cool stuff there and I think it's just it's awesome to have going back to kind of what we talked about at the beginning, like the the TV, TV thing, it's like a really interesting format that we have access to and like we do write a lot of blog posts and those are really interesting and cover things in a particular way. But having a Cloudflare TV presentation where someone can go through in live demo, it really shows what the features are and gives people context in a totally different way. So yeah, I think that's super cool. If I remember correctly, Dawn, that was something that you told me that you really liked when you interviewed here, right? As the Cloudflare TV segments around Innovation Week and like these kind of different spins on things, right? Yeah, I did. I was going to do all the research and read the blogs, but also like stumbled on like the Cloudflare TV segment. And I'm like, oh, like I like those that the blogs are like, so, the blogs, there's such a dump of information and it needs to be right. Like that's what you want in a blog. But I was like, I want more. Like, I'm not like, I'm not getting the excitement behind it. But then like seeing the segments, I'm like, oh, that's like it was drawing like all the connections between all the different blogs for me. So yeah, I like this. And the other thing I really like about this series that we're doing is we were very intentional when bringing speakers in where it wasn't just people that are going to come and talk about Cloudflare and Cloudflare products and how they're using them, or like our internal teams, like we needed a little bit of like our engineering teams sharing what they're doing. We needed a little bit of our customers and then we needed a little bit of just like, here's just general industry trends that aren't necessarily tied to Cloudflare, but this helps inform how we're making the decisions and why we're making the decisions we make as a company. So like having a balance across all of those three things is really important. Yeah. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. We I mean, there's easily a world in which it's just Cloudflare talks nonstop, but like, let's be honest, if we were like the attendee, that wouldn't be super interesting. Right? And, and a lot of this stuff, you know, going back to we're talking about with like web vitals, web performance, stuff like that, like sure, you can find Cloudflare products and things like that, that relate to that or whatever. But like Colby's talk is and Henry's talk tomorrow are more industry wide, like you said. And, and for instance, like Caitlin's talk, and similarly, actually tying out that idea, I thought it was funny you mentioned learning in public, correct me if I'm wrong, Gift. That was like exactly what your talk was about prior to joining. So I think having that kind of like soft, soft skill or whatever you want to call it, kind of content is super useful and interesting to I actually tend to enjoy those ones more because I can go find a GitHub repo for a lot of things that are like sort of technical, but like hearing people's experiences getting into the industry or like how to how to learn more effectively and stuff like that. That's always been a favorite of mine. So yeah, it's, it's cool to be able to kind of put together a schedule and stuff like that. That kind of helps people get a little bit of everything. Yeah. Personally, I like that. It's a good balance of everything, not just Cloudflare industry trends and soft skills, things you could take and apply into your new life, not necessarily your job or the tech you're working with. I like that a lot. Yeah, absolutely. So let's see, we got a couple more minutes before we start. I was trying to think of other things that we can. We can talk about what? Let's do this. Since I don't think Gift and I at least are on the call later, I don't know if you are done, but I'm curious. Like what's everyone's favorite Platform Week announcement today so far? Day one. I'm... I'm really excited about the Winter Community Group that's been announced. Yes, I will call it Winter. I had to do a bunch of sales enablement trainings and other stuff earlier this week, like trying to call it by like the full name. I'm like, Yeah, that's not going to happen anymore. So the community group we formed with Deno and NodeJS and other businesses to kind of standardize server side runtimes that hasn't existed previously And I'm very excited to see like what we're going to be doing with that. And even just today and last week, there's been like some buzz in the Twitter world about it. So I like watching that kind of stuff. Yeah. For me, I'll say is put the StackBlitz and collaboration with Cloudflare, because one thing that I like and I see that we are also chasing that here, Cloudflare is making developers productive and I see that with the partnership we have with StackBlitz, you can start working on your Workers project directly on the browser. Like there is no barrier to entry anymore because you can just spin up like a tab on your already developing your Workers there. And it's so nice because we already have templates for you to work with. We have the TypeScript templates if you want to just spin up your Worker that works already and it's really nice. And I know that there are lots more, you know, innovation that is going to go on on that end. And the other thing for me that I'm really excited about and I've been lucky working on as well, is the Wrangler release. I joined Cloudflare three months ago now and I was working with the developer, developers and engineers working on rewriting Wrangler. So it was a complete rewrite and it's written in TypeScript. Of course, super fast. I think one of the best things is just seeing how you can just go from like 0 to 100 in like a few minutes to get started with. Cloudflare is now really easy for developers and also we've done a lot of improvements in the previous version and now we are, like I said, we're more focused on developer productivity. So that's like one of the things that we try to improve in all of our product and platforms. And I'm going to drop now, everyone. It was great having you here. I've got to go get ready for the next segment, so I hope to see you all on that. As I sit down and talk to Caitlin. Yeah. See you in a couple of minutes. Yeah. Gift, you should also mention, I mean, yes, you're involved in the Wrangler stuff, but we have a full video course that came out today as well. Right, you're getting started. What's changed with Wrangler and stuff on our YouTube channel as well? Of course. Yeah. We have actually two videos, one already went live on the newest features in Wrangler, so you can actually see me walk through them with like a demo. You can also as well attend the Newstalk tomorrow because he's going to be sharing a lot of that I have in video. But definitely do check out our YouTube channel. Yeah. Yeah, that's super exciting. And the stuff you're talking about earlier, the stack, with stuff like there's a lot of new ways to really get started with Workers in like literally a minute, we have all these nifty new URLs which are exciting to like jump to a specific template and run it all in your browser. And a lot of that couldn't happen without Wrangler too. So there's a lot of really nice sort of like feedback loops of like new products and stuff like that, that are helping make the experience better generally. So yeah. So that's, that's really exciting. So yeah, I think we are, we're almost out of time here. So I'm going to again plug just a couple of things for people to go check out as the developer speaker series gets on its way. So like Dawn said, she had to jump off to literally be in the very next call, which is going to be the first talk of the day with Caitlin. And so that's going to be at Cloudflare TV. Like literally just stay where you are, it should transfer over to to the next talk. If you want to see the full schedule, Cloudflare dot com slash developer dash speaker dash series, that will have the full schedule. And then like we mentioned earlier after the talks air, you will be able to rewatch them like on demand. The links that go to each talk on that schedule will also end up being the final URL for each talk. So that's a great way time zone wise. It's not great, it's the middle of the night or something like that. You can go and watch there. And then finally, like we've been talking about, Platform Week is going on right now. It's our Innovation Week where we're going to be announcing new products, new features literally every single day. There is a overwhelming number of blog posts. It's it's insane. And you can find all of those at blog dot Cloudflare dot com. You'll find all the new announcements. And then we also have a sort of landing page recapping everything that's happened during Platform Week and that's just at Cloudflare dot com slash platform dash week. Almost done with links, I promise. There's so many. The last place. Yes, the Discord. That's the last place I was going to say. So, Discord dot gg slash Cloudflare dev. You're going to be able to find our Discord community. There's like 12, maybe 13,000 people there almost. We have a specific channel for the Speaker Series where you can talk to other attendees about the different talks, share links and stuff like that. But it's also a great place to just get plugged into the entire Cloudflare Developer ecosystem, so definitely recommend that. Yeah. What else? Anything else? We have a 1:15 left, what else should we send people to before we run out of time here, Gift? Maybe one last place would be the YouTube channel. So we have Cloudflare. I'm always forgetting Cloudflare Developers. I believe it is YouTube dot com. No, it's not. It's going to finally. Yeah. We will find a way to share the link after the fact. But if you search for I believe the video is called "What's New in Wrangler?" It was just published this morning. You'll be able to find that. I think it might be either Cloudflare Developers or Cloudflare Workers. We should know. I think. It's I think it's Cloudflare Workers, because I mix it up every time it's Cloudflare Workers. Yeah. So there'll be more videos coming out there and yeah, a lot of events and stuff going on. Make sure to follow Cloudflare dev on Twitter as well. We'll be tweeting links to all of the new product announcements and also stuff about Speaker Series. So yeah, we are just about at the end here, so thank you everyone for tuning in. Yeah, it was nice. Thank you. Hope you enjoy the rest of the Speaker Series. Thank you so much, everyone.