Cloudflare TV

Rita Kozlov: From Israel and math to the US, computer science and Cloudflare Workers

Presented by: João Tomé, Rita Kozlov
Originally aired on October 31 @ 1:30 AM - 2:00 AM EDT

Join host João Tomé to learn about some of the remarkable people who make up the Cloudflare team. On this episode, you'll hear from Rita Kozlov, our Sr Director of Product (Workers), who joined Cloudflare in 2016 (almost seven years ago). We will hear from her experience growing up in Israel and learning from mathematicians parents to wanting to learn computer science and joining Cloudflare. We’ll also get to know how Cloudflare Workers platform came to be and Rita’s role in expanding it.

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Transcript (Beta)

Hello everyone, and welcome to We Are Cloudflare. I'm João Tomé, a writer and storyteller of sorts, and here with me I have Rita Kozlov, Senior Director of Product at Cloudflare, based in New York.

Is this correct, Rita? Hello. That's exactly right.

I'm excited to be here. Thanks for doing this. You joined in 2016 Cloudflare, so it's been a ride of a few years already.

Before we go into your period at Cloudflare, let's start on who are you, in a sense.

Where did you grow up?

How was your upbringing? Sure. I grew up in Israel, in Haifa, which was a fun place to grow up and also a pretty big technology hub.

I was always around technology.

My parents are from what was previously the Soviet Union. I grew up there and then I moved to the U.S.

around the age of 14 to Athens, Georgia, which is a small town where the University of Georgia is nearby.

I've been in the U.S.

since then. You spoke about in Israel there was already technology around you.

How was growing up in that environment? In what way, what type of technology was around you and influenced you?

I think generally, if you think about it, it's a relatively new country in the general relative history of the world.

I'd say it's always been pretty fast in terms of technological advancements.

A lot of things from some of the original technologies that cell phones are powered by were invented there.

That was just something that was often really talked about.

Startups were really talked about. Both of my parents are in the STEM field as well.

Even in a nascent way, it was always something that was there and in the background and pretty top of mind.

Also, I was relatively young, but it was just something that from a young age you had computer classes and things like that.

It was important there, the computer being part of the technology.

There's a lot of science in your family, right?

So science also is a driver, right? Yeah, definitely. What's kind of funny is so my mom and my stepdad are both mathematicians.

I was pushed to do a lot of math when I was younger.

I participated in competitions and things like that.

Then eventually, as every angsty teen, there was a point where I thought, I'm going to rebel.

I want to do what I want to do. I don't like this. I don't want to do math.

Of course, irony would have it that I ended up in computer science and in tech, which is not that far -fetched from math.

But in my mind, I was very determined.

I'm like, no, I'm going to go in a completely different direction, do my own thing.

That's interesting. In a sense, the basis you had was important, although you were doing a different thing in terms of not specific mathematics, but that basis is really important for what you do, right?

So the basis was important. Yes, very much so.

When did you, in the US already with 14, when did you start thinking of what you want to be when you grow up?

Was technology already playing a role in your mind of choosing where to study, things like that?

So that's also kind of interesting.

I thought I was going through a bit of a rebellion phase. One of the things I guess that was actually interesting about moving to the US was I didn't speak much of the language here.

And so as far as classes and school, math was very much my strong suit.

But at the same time, I wasn't as drawn to it. And I really enjoyed things like history classes.

And so I remember, and I really enjoyed government classes, I liked activities like mock trial, which I don't know if folks are familiar with that concept.

But the idea is basically, you're given a prompt, and it's like a fake little court, and you get to be a lawyer.

And I remember there was a point where near the time when I was graduating, I was like, you know, maybe I want to go be a lawyer.

And I was thinking about going and studying something like political science or international affairs.

And I was actually talking to my computer science teacher at the time, because I was still taking computer science classes.

And he was like, you know, if you really want to be a lawyer, and you think about it, there are so many other students coming in from political science backgrounds or from international affairs backgrounds.

And what could give you a really interesting edge was if you went and studied computer science.

And that could be a really interesting angle as a way of getting into that.

And that really enticed me. And also, actually, the state of Georgia has a really great program called, interestingly enough, Hope, where if you have a certain GPA in high school, then if you stay in state, your tuition is paid for, which provides huge incentive to stay in state.

And Georgia Tech was one of the schools that I got into.

And they have a really great computer science program. And I thought, well, I guess I'll go and I'll study computer science.

And then I can do law later if I want.

And my plan was actually to double major in computer science and in international affairs.

And I remember within my first semester of college, I started taking computer science classes.

And I was like, I really don't need to do this double major thing.

It's, first of all, too much work. Exactly. It instantly became a lot less interesting.

And I started meeting a lot of students that were doing really cool internships at companies like Microsoft and Google.

And I started seeing a lot more opportunities for myself there, where I was like, OK, being a lawyer is not the only path where you get to exercise parts of your brain that are being maybe forming arguments or thinking through things in a particular way.

There's other interesting ways to do that. So you were at college at around what year, just to situate us in terms of what the technology industry was back then?

This is around 2011, 2010. So exactly. So back then, the mobile was already starting in terms of being important in technology.

And of course, tech companies were growing, as we know.

But in a sense, in that period, what were the inspirations you took in terms of going?

You already spoke about influence, like teachers influence you, where to go, the program in Georgia.

But what were other influences from the industry back then of you like, OK, I will go into this and I will try to do something in this industry?

That's a good question. I mean, I think social media in a way was really taking off.

And, you know, Facebook was really big.

Instagram was kind of starting up. Mobile was a really huge thing. Everyone was talking about it.

And actually, when I was in university still, I was still trying to figure out what part of tech was interesting to me.

And the way that the computer science program in Georgia Tech actually works, you can do specializations, which in a very nerdy way, they call threads.

And so the two that I really liked were there was a people thread, which kind of focused on human computer interaction and UI and UX.

And I was really interested in the way that humans interact with technology.

And there was also a media thread and an information security thread or I forget what exactly it was called.

But actually, I took one of my favorite classes there.

And interestingly enough, and there were some steps in my career in between there, but it ended up I think we ended up talking about Cloudflare quite a bit, actually, and just the general theme of DDoS and cryptocurrency or just cryptography in general.

And everything was presented in terms of little puzzles.

And so that was something that I found to be very enticing.

But I would say I didn't have as many influences at the time. And I think that that's where actually internships were a really useful thing to do while studying because it exposes you.

It's very hard, I think, within an academic environment to understand what in the industry you're drawn to.

But having industry experience is really helpful in understanding, okay, this is what I enjoy.

This is what I don't enjoy.

This size company is good for me. This size company maybe isn't.

Of course. And it's all about the project, of course. When did you start working?

Where? So the first projects you were like, with a task and trying to do something.

What was that experience like? So I did a couple internships when I was in college, both at Microsoft.

Interestingly enough, Windows Phone was a really big thing there.

And so my first summer, the first project I worked on was the time picker for Windows Phone.

So if you still use one of those, that might be a bit of my code still running there.

And then the next summer that I came back, that was actually the time when Satya Nadella took over.

And so it was very interesting to be there one summer under Balmer and then come back another summer under a very different type of leadership.

And all of my projects and all of my teams that I came back to kind of very instantly changed.

But that was the first project that I worked on that I think I really professionally got paid for.

I was very excited about it.

Of course, of course. And then how was... So it didn't take you long to come to Clouflare, but how was that process of doing stuff in Microsoft and then coming to Clouflare in 2016, right?

So after my internships, I didn't leave feeling like I wanted to necessarily directly after my first college job, after my first, sorry, internship, come back to a really large company like Microsoft.

And I wanted to go somewhere a bit smaller where there was more opportunities and more opportunity to kind of have very high energy.

And I was really set on working at a startup.

So I moved to San Francisco and I was like, okay, here I am. I'm just going to find something and work as a software engineer.

And I ended up joining this company called Six Cents as a software engineer.

And after my first year and a half or so as a software engineer, which I really enjoyed, one thing that I realized was that I really missed having, or I was really yearning for it to be a part of my job to constantly talk to people.

Like I was the engineer that was constantly chatting everyone up.

And I think everyone was a little annoyed by, and I was like, this is something that's really missing for me.

So I think one of the things that's interesting is when you first start looking at career options, especially in tech or otherwise from the outside, I think it seems like the only jobs that exist are software engineer.

Maybe you kind of know about roles as a PM, but there are so many jobs that exist at a tech company that you never kind of hear of unless you work in the industry.

And so I was talking to someone on the sales team and they had a really interesting idea and they were like, I think you'd be a really great solutions engineer, a sales engineer, because it's a great mix of you still get that technical side and you get to solve really technical problems, but you get to work with customers.

And so you kind of get to have that human facing, customer facing aspect to it.

And the feedback, exactly. And that sounded directly up my alley.

So I started thinking about what are companies that might be interested in software engineers or in solutions engineers, which would be less of B2C companies and more B2B companies.

And I thought actually back to one of my computer science classes where we talked about DDoS and I was like, oh, Cloudflare seems interesting.

And I applied and I met with Trey, who was our head of solutions engineering at the time.

And Cloudflare was really small at the time.

And everyone I think on the SE team had a solid 10, 15 years of experience. And I was still very early in my career.

And so I really appreciated him giving me the opportunity to still go in and interview and things went well.

Yeah, yeah.

And here we are. And here we are. Actually, I spoke with Trey here in this segment.

So if anyone wants to see my conversation with Trey, he has actually an amazing story of how we started at Cloudflare back in 2012 if I'm not mistaken.

But it involves the FBI, but not in a very odd way. But to that point, so you started doing that, like contacting customers in terms of engineering, helping them out.

How was that evolution? And how was Cloudflare in those days? Did you felt already like a culture, the culture that we now talk so many times about?

How was Cloudflare at that time?

Yeah, I would say in some ways it wasn't very different, which I think people would find very surprising, because you'd expect a 300 person company to be vastly different from a 3000 person company.

But I think a lot of people have, especially the joined around the time that I joined, I think I'm stuck around very much for that reason that it's retained kind of that culture and essence.

And I one of the things that was memorable to me from that time is I think, the scrappiness and the spirit of, you know, whatever it is, you can go figure it out.

And so for me, I was trying to figure out, you know, how can I bring value.

And since I had just started as a solutions engineer, and before that, I was doing software engineering.

Actually, one of the interesting things was, you know, we were at this phase where we were starting to finally onboard some really, really large customers.

And so all of these customers had very specific configurations that they needed, right?

It wasn't enough to just set a page rule on an entire URL and cache everything, right?

They wanted to cache something, but only if this header was present, and only in this geography, but then if it's mobile, then don't cache it.

And the way that we handled that at the time was something that we called edge side code, which was basically, you know, someone who's a full time engineer, Cloudflare would go and deploy some custom logic as a part of our edge that would define the behavior for that customer, which obviously wasn't sustainable.

And at the time, our fix for that was, okay, I'm a solutions engineer, and I've written code in the past.

So let me go figure out how to do this. And I can bring value to my team, and also take some of the burden off of engineering.

And so that was kind of what I ended up helping out with.

And I really appreciated that from the first day that I joined, I could go, like, at the time, the third floor was sales, and the second floor was engineering, I could go down to the second floor and bug an engineer that, you know, was working on literally the depths of, you know, Cloudflare's cache and be like, hey, help me figure out how to run my tests.

And they were super kind and open to it. And that was something that was really exciting to me.

Do you miss those times? So we had a pandemic, now everyone is doing remote work or flexible work.

Actually, Cloudflare is bigger. So we have people in different time zones.

Also, that's also plays a role. Do you feel that this virtual surrounding also lacks something in terms of being like in the same building and just reaching out?

Or depends on the situation? I think it definitely depends.

I think if you'd asked me at the time, in the same way that I think you'd ask Michelle and Matthew at the time, could Cloudflare ever be remote, I think I would have had a really tough time picturing it.

And I think there were some really great things about being in the office.

But the thing that I've been kind of amazed by was that when everyone went home, and we were forced to work from home, you know, I thought to myself, wow, I feel extremely lucky that I was able to start at Cloudflare at a time when we were in the office and form these connections and build relationships with people that I think otherwise would be really difficult.

But what I found very admirable was that my peers and colleagues that started effectively remotely were able to still form these, you know, as deep or as meaningful connections with their coworkers remotely.

And I thought that that was really interesting and impressive.

And I remember there were a few folks on my team that joined over the course of the pandemic.

And, you know, we would talk every single day over video.

And eventually we did meet in person. And it was kind of strange how not strange it was, if it makes sense.

Like, it was like, oh, of course, I know you so well.

So I think there are some things that are, of course, a bit more challenging.

And I think even if you've had, you know, an interaction with someone in passing in the hallway, maybe a chat over coffee, then it does make it easier when you have a work ask for them that's maybe a bit out of left field to go, hey, can I bother you with this?

And I think it can be pretty intimidating to find someone that you maybe have never seen, have never spoken to, and just ping them over chat with an ask.

So I think that those are some of the things that are a bit more challenging.

But one of the things that have been really impressed by is how much team spirit and, you know, collaboration there's still very much is.

I agree. And there's value in reaching out, I think, even using chat.

So I was surprised by that, too. In terms of you becoming, at some point, the product manager of Workers, how that played out.

And Workers was starting.

So Workers was like in the beginning, 2017, I think, Workers was when Workers was launched.

How was that process of becoming a product manager of such an important product for so many developers that use the Workers platform?

So I mentioned before that we had this really unsustainable process for making all of these customizations for customers, right?

And I think we recognized very quickly that that wasn't really sustainable and not something we'd be able to do.

And that was around the time that Kenton, who's the lead architect on Workers, joined.

And he and John Derncoming, our CTO, and Dane and a few other folks met up in London and tried to figure out, how do we enable customers to service themselves in this way and write their own code?

And what's going to be the technology that powers that?

And that was kind of how Workers came about. And since I was working with a lot of the customers that needed edge side code, and then was trying to move them over to Workers, I was already interacting with a lot of the top Workers customers.

And so a lot of feature requests and things like that were going through me.

And I remember very well, actually, when the first iteration of Workers became available.

And there's the little web editor, and you're able to write a little script, and you can run the little update button, and you instantly have a Worker running somewhere on the edge.

And as a software engineer myself previously, it completely blew my mind.

Because I actually remembered in my first job, I arrived there, and I was like, OK, I'm a software engineer, I know how to write code.

But then someone asked me to deploy something and get Nginx stood up, and get a web server actually running to run my code, such that when someone hits a web client, it connected to that server.

And I realized, I was like, is my degree useless?

They didn't teach me any of this in school. I was so intimidated by all of it.

And so the fact that I could actually just write code, and I don't know, it got deployed to Cloudflare's network, and I could hit a URL.

It just felt all so magical to me that from the moment that I touched it, I was like, this is the coolest thing I've ever used.

This is definitely the future. I want to be a part of this team.

I want to work on this. And I went to Jen Taylor, who was our head of products, and I was like, please, let me work on this.

And thankfully, she agreed. So that's been a really exciting journey.

For sure, for sure. And in a sense, first, let me share here my screen.

I found this blog post you wrote about building a serverless Slack bot using Cloudflare Worker back from 2018.

So the Worker's platform was already available.

This is like a very specific use case for that, right?

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I think that was when Worker's was slowly taking off, and we're trying to experiment with things and figure out what can you build on it.

And it turned out, you know, even before we released storage products like KV or R2, there was already so much that you could because, you know, people have this concept of running things.

And this is the reason that we try not to use the word edge is because we find it quite limiting, right?

Because people think of it as a proxy.

But even in 2018, you could write basically what was an entire serverless application on our platform.

Exactly. Let me show you your first blog post that is back from 2018 too, from back when we had a blog post about every data center we had.

So it was the Tel Aviv one, an important one for you, right? Because you grew up there.

Yeah, that was an exciting one. And this is back when I think I was still an SE.

And so people, you know, Kloffler, as you know, has such a blog writing culture, and people are always encouraging you to write blog posts.

And I kept thinking, you know, I don't know what I would write a blog post about.

And so when we were announcing the Tel Aviv data center, I got really excited about it because I was like, oh, finally something I can write about.

You scrolled by the way past the picture of what is actually my absolute favorite falafel place.

Every time I go back there, I go to visit it. 10 out of 10 recommend. Seems good, to be honest.

Really good. Now we don't do blog posts for each and every one of those data centers.

Because we've done so many. So many, so many. Exactly. Although last year, I remember Guam, we promoted Guam, sometimes because it's a different spot, for sure.

In terms of that experience of building workers, do you have highlights, favorite moments of that experience?

After that also. Of building workers?

Sure, sure. And that period. Yeah, I think it was really interesting, like I said, first of all, to kind of go through migrating a lot of customers to workers and having them realize, wow, I can actually update this entirely myself.

And it just magically scales and have these customers realize, okay, if I can rewrite a header, but I can write it in code, then what else can I do?

And I think what became clear very, very quickly was that the opportunity was so much bigger than letting customers just modify the way that our offerings worked, but it would allow them to actually write applications of their own.

And so we started thinking about, and I remember one of the first, we started speaking at and presenting at different serverless meetups or conferences.

And I remember I was presenting at one of those, and I was giving a workshop.

I was telling everyone who was attending, I was very excited about it.

I was like, there's this thing called workers, you can deploy an entirely serverless application that's going to be deployed directly to, at the time, 175 data centers, whatever.

Now we're at like 275.

And I was like, and you can go and test it out right now, and we're going to build our first Slack bot, and let's all do it together.

And then I realized, wait a second, for us to be able to move forward with this, we have to, all of these people have to go and purchase a domain, because you had to have a zone on Cloudflare in order to be able to deploy a worker.

I was like, oh no, this is, and this was before we had a registrar also, right?

So you have to go to a different provider, change your name, servers, go through this whole rigmarole.

And that was when a really big lightbulb went off in my head of, okay, we need to find a way for customers to be able to deploy this a bit differently.

And so, that was when we announced workers.dev, which gives you a workers.dev URL that you can deploy things to.

And I remember a very exciting moment was when we released that, as well as Wrangler, our CLI for workers.

That was a blog post. Yes, this was the original one when we let people decide what, and claim which subdomains they wanted.

And then there was also a follow-up one called Just Write Code, I think, where we announced the Wrangler CLI, as well.

Let me see if I can find it. A lot of the blog posts you write are in different languages, which is good in terms of exposure, right?

I know, so many announcements. I think you just scrolled past it, it was just before worker site.

There it is. This one, yeah. Yeah, so this is an exciting day for us, because we had someone presenting at, making a huge announcement at JSConf, which had thousands of developers there, and we released the blog post at the same time, and we released the Wrangler, the workers CLI, and we released workers.dev, and we released a free tier for workers, which has actually been really important in terms of independent developers, you know, when you want to try something out, and you just want to write a couple lines of code and figure out how something works, you're not ready to put down a credit card yet, right?

We all like to play around with things before we commit to them, and so I remember this was a really exciting day.

For sure, and do you feel like it's a bit of a history, Cloudflare history, because it was when an important product was launched, but even for some of the customers and some of those using the Internet at that time, it made a real world difference for them, right?

Do you feel like an history element to it?

Yeah, definitely. I feel like, you know, there's so much of, you go into the dashboard now, and there's so much that's changed, and there are so many new products and experiences that we've built out, and, you know, I was talking before about optimizing the path to deploying your first worker and not requiring to have a zone, but now we even have pages that make things even simpler, but it's cool to kind of see the evolution of things, and I think that's one of the cool things about having been at Cloudflare for a while is you kind of see the decisions that you made, you know, or investments that you made four years ago come to fruition and everything else that's been able to come of that later.

In fact, this is the Cloudflare pages now generally available from 2021, also a blog post.

Interesting how there's history in the blog posts, right?

It goes about our blog and how it works, how it tries to be not only announcing products, being technical.

Yes, absolutely. Any good story related to the blog, like something you wrote that had an impact, or what do you think in general of the blog and writing for the blog?

Because you write a lot of blog posts, there's a lot of products, of course.

I remember, actually, the one that we were looking at before, the Just Write Code one, I was really stressed out about it, and I remember I was so worried about what am I going to write, and I sat down with James Allworth, and he was like, I think you know what to write, and I was like, no, I don't, you know, this is such a big announcement, I'm going to mess it up, and he was like, Rita, why did you get so excited about workers?

Because I told him, you know, the same story that I told you of being a software engineer and trying to figure all of these things out and thinking that they were so hard, and then trying workers for the first time, that being a completely different experience, and he was like, you should write about that, and it was actually kind of intimidating to write about that, because I think especially, I think something that a lot of us experience in general in tech is a bit of imposter syndrome, you know, and so sometimes I thought back to that experience, and I thought maybe, you know, I was just dumb, and that's why I couldn't figure it out, it wasn't actually hard, and I was a bit hesitant to sharing that, but I feel like I've had actually quite a few people tell me, you know, I really related to that blog post, and I found it really useful, and you know, I think especially considering the community that we're trying to serve, and the opportunity I think with workers is that I think it opens up compute to so many more people, because the barrier to entry becomes much lower, right, the prerequisite to knowledge is now you need to know how to code, not you need to know how to code, and also know how to be an SRE, so I think this one stands out to me as a blog post that I feel like has been interesting to revisit.

I relate, I help a lot of blog, and you too, you help a lot of blog authors writing their own things, and just sometimes finding the right story sometimes is a little personal, but sometimes it's just putting yourself in the shoes of those using the product, how can that have an influence in their lives, in the way they work, if they save time is really important for them, so I think storytelling, even in a technical blog post, is important for people to relate in a sense.

Yeah, I completely agree, and like I said, I think it can be kind of scary to be a bit more personal, especially, you know, the Cloudflare blog is so known for deep technical dives, and I think that's content that's really, really good, and I think that the way that actually the Cloudflare blog has managed to make really, really deep technical subjects accessible to so many more people is by breaking them down, and making them relatable, and having really great metaphors or personal stories that people can relate to as they read them.

Makes sense, makes sense. I have two questions before we go for you.

First, what's the main thing about Cloudflare that most people don't realize, but they should?

Oh, that's so interesting. I mean, I think if you are talking about the vast, vast majority of people, I would say probably most people don't realize just how much Cloudflare does, and I think the way that I see that play out is working specifically on our developer platform, you know, I'll still encounter people to whom, you know, maybe they're familiar with Cloudflare, but they're familiar with Cloudflare for more of our traditional services, right, like DNS, like DDoS, and so when you start telling them, like, did you know you could deploy your whole application to Cloudflare, their mind is a little bit blown, and then I like to, you know, tell them about our Zero Trust Suite, I'm like, this is so much better than whatever VPN you're using, or even 1 .1, right?

There's so much breadth in what we do, and so I think that's just something that's hard for the majority of people to wrap their mind around.

And actually, before the last one, what does now your role as Senior Director of Product does?

What is your role right now in terms of what you do, what you oversight?

That's a really great question. So currently, so just to be a bit more specific, I'm a Senior Director of Product under Workers, our developer platform, and so I'm responsible for a few things currently.

The first is our developer experience teams, which include our developer productivity team and pages, and basically, the mission kind of being making sure that whatever products we're building for developers have, you know, everything from docs, the best user experience possible, the best developer experience possible, and have, you know, every single obstacle taken out of the way.

And so developer experience is one part of it, and then another part of it is compute.

So making sure that we're building the building blocks of what developers need in order to be able to build their application, whether that's WebSockets, or ability to connect to databases, or the ability to maybe run more compute through something like Unbound, maybe the ability to trigger workers on a certain schedule.

And so those are some of the things. And then I also run our DevRel team, which is really great.

So if you see, you know, things like blog posts, conference talks, if you are in our community Discord, which shout out to our developer community manager, Veronica, I work with all of those teams.

And yeah, kind of helps that the, you know, some of thinking around the product to help drive some of that direction.

I really like that, because it in a sense, is an ecosystem by itself, is the product, of course, but is the big community.

I think our Discord channel already has like 15,000 people.

20,000. 20,000. So I'm not up to date.

20,000 is a big number of developers, like, being there, participating, which is amazing.

So it's like, in a sense, it's Cloudflare, but it's an area of Cloudflare.

It's already its own ecosystem, in a sense, which is kind of amazing.

Yes. And I think one of the really exciting things about working on a developer product, and one of the things that our PMs especially really love, is that you are so much closer to the customer.

Like, if someone is, you know, as a PM, I'm wondering, okay, you know, we can take this approach, or this other approach, or even as an engineer, right?

If you're writing an API, and you're like, you know, you could specify a variable this way, or this other way, you can raise a question in the Discord, and within minutes, have a bunch of answers around what people prefer.

And having that constant feedback loop, and having that feedback loop really close to us, really helps us build great products for developers.

The Discord channel helps there, for sure. The relationship is pretty much, the feedback is pretty much almost immediate, which I find great.

Last but not least, any tips for anyone hoping to join Cloudflare?

I think, to state the obvious, read the blog.

There's a wealth of information in there. I think, go and play around with our products.

As someone who interviews a lot of people, talking to someone who's actually used our products, and maybe comes to us even with insights on, you know, I use this, and I really wish I had this feature.

It helps us understand, you know, that you actually understand the value that we're providing to customers, and how we can provide additional value.

And I would say, if you want to really take things a step further, go write your own blog posts.

I guarantee I think, as someone who works on our developer team, our developer products, I mean, we see, I think, almost every blog post that's written about workers of pages, and I used it in this particular way, or if you're building a tool or a library, and we literally, every time, the first thought is, should we hire this person?

So, I think, getting involved in that way, I would say, that's my tip. Because it's the beginning of the year, anything that we can just entice people, in terms of what's coming for the workers platform this year, not specifically products, but in general, what can we say to where the platform is going?

I think we, just a few areas that I think we're always focused on.

The first is, always ensuring that the developer experience is as good as possible.

And we like to think that we're best of class today, but that's never good enough.

And so, I'm looking forward to sharing some of the big developer experience improvements that we have coming.

I think observability is going to be a pretty big theme for us. And I think that's a really big part of developer experience, right, is making sure that you can not only write the code, but also that when things go wrong, you're able to understand what's happening and where and dive into it.

And quickly. And quickly.

And quickly. Giving developers access to, one of the constant areas of growth for us is giving developers access to more tools.

We want you to bring as much of the full stack to us as possible, right?

And so, last year, or a couple of years ago now, we announced R2.

Last year, we announced D1. And so, continuing to kind of build out those building blocks, I think those are all really important directions.

And then, yeah, continuing to see the community grow and would definitely encourage anyone to join it, whether on Discord or interacting with us on Twitter.

I promise, we're very welcoming. And we have, exactly, we have the specific developers call center a Twitter account.

So, anyone can follow that one, too.

Thank you. This was great. Hope you liked it. Thank you, Rita. I hope everyone else liked it.

Thank you, Joao. Thank you. Bye-bye. Have a good day. Bye. And that's a wrap.

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We Are Cloudflare
Meet all the people who make up the Cloudflare team from all offices, all teams, all levels, in as many languages as possible.
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