A Developer Week teaser, building with Cloudflare, and a tribute to Dave Täht

Hello everyone and welcome to This Week in NET. It's the April 4th 2025 edition. We're already in April and a new Cloudflare Innovation Week is just around the corner. Developer Week is coming next week. We had a few weeks ago Security Week and now there's a new Innovation Week coming. So full of announcements. I'm your host João Tomé based in Lisbon, Portugal. Today is Friday. Very rainy Lisbon, Portugal to be honest. In this episode you'll also get from our developer at Educator Craig Dennis a run through of some of the great things you can do with our developers platform. And this is a very high level thing. It's more about making you understand that we have a developer tool. What you can do with that. Even if you're not a developer you get a sense of what you can do there. And this week we also honor someone that died this week. Dave Tatt. Dave was a real American network expert and Tom Strickx from our network team explains how he contributed to help make a better Internet. It was important to make smooth real time communication viable for everyone everywhere. So if you do video calls, if you use Wi-Fi or even Starlink, Dave did a real great contribution to all of those. And now without further ado, let's go for our Developer Week teaser. So you'll get what to expect for Developer Week with Ricky Robinette, our VP for Developer Relations. Hello Ricky, how are you? Good, how are you? I'm good, I'm good. For those who don't know, where are you based? I am based in Brooklyn, New York. So only five hours of difference from Lisbon right now. Yeah, not too bad. How excited are you for the week that is coming, Developer Week? I am so stoked. This is my third Developer Week. I actually just hit two years at Cloudflare and so I was lucky enough to join like three weeks before Developer Week and got to see it firsthand. And every year I've been here, they keep getting better. I love just getting new tools in the hands of developers around the world and seeing what they do with them almost immediately. So every Developer Week is so much joy. And almost so three Developer Weeks, that means that the amounts of announcements and differences from in those two years, it's not long, but it's already a lot in terms of Internet and developer realm in a sense, right? Yeah, yeah. You know, the first one for me, we were talking about AI, but it was the early days of a lot of that stuff. And now I feel like that the whole industry, especially with developers, is all in on AI and what's going on there. So that's been especially fun for me to watch. Can you guide us through, before we go into the what to expect perspective, through your role here at Cloudflare for those who don't know? Yeah, yeah. So yeah, I am Ricky. I lead up our Developer Relations team, which means myself and my team, it's our job to help inspire developers around the world of what's possible using our developer platform and empower them to be successful using our tools through technical content, whether that's on YouTube or on GitHub with different demos, and then really cultivate a community of developers building on Cloudflare. And we have such an incredible community. That is one of my favorite things. So if you're watching this and you're in the community already, thank you for being part of it. And my team has a privilege of getting to spend time with a lot of the folks building on Cloudflare every day. And for those who don't know, not only Cloudflare has for several years, since 2017, a developers platform, but there's over 3 million developers building on Cloudflare already, and also making use of not only the developer tools, but also the giant network, DDoS, the whole ecosystem, right? So it's already like a big community. It's not like a small community, right? Yeah, yeah. I honestly have been blown away by not only the scale of the community, but the passion and engagement of folks in the community. People aren't just using Cloudflare. They truly love using our platform and want to give feedback and engage with us. And it's such a cool place to be for that. To be honest, one of the things that's always surprised me in every developer week, or even before developer week, because even this week, we're continuing to do announcements related to developers, little changes, little improvements in different things. But one of the things that surprised me always looking at social media to feedback is how the feedback, amazing feedback on what are some of these tools are enabling people to do is getting more feedback, good feedback. And some people are really amazed what they can accomplish. And sometimes time-saving, making it easier, that really resonates with folks, especially in this AI age, right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You're stealing some of my talking points for what's coming up, so I love it. Sorry. Though, just in a nutshell, what can developers expect for developer week? And even those who are not developers, because of the AI tools, maybe they can give it a go in the developer realm. Yeah. And you touched on both these things, so I'm going to call back to what you said. First, if you're wondering what to expect, look at the past few weeks, because we've been shipping things that point towards some of what we're doing. And so a lot of what we've done with model context protocol, I think is amazing. If you don't know what that is, there's a great deep dive on our blog about it that you can check out, but it gives your AI tools the ability to gain really superpowers to do things they couldn't do before, whether that's interacting with an API or maybe accessing your own data that it wouldn't normally have access to. So yeah, look at what we've been doing and that's a little sneak peek, but broadly, especially if this is your first developer week and you haven't been on this journey with us yet, I like to think that there's going to be some great new products. There's going to be some new features of products we already have. You're and be ready for that next level of use. And then we're going to also share some great stories about you all that are building on our developer platform and let you be inspired by each other. In a sense, is there a topic you think is the main one for this specific week that we can share, like something that distinguish this week from potentially other developer weeks, other periods? Yeah. When I think about this developer week, I think the phrase that keeps coming to mind for me is developer experience and making it easier, faster for you to build, abstracting away infrastructure so you can focus on really building what you want. And so developer experience, I think is a huge theme for this year. And a quick story is I was meeting with a customer this week and we were teasing out some of the things that were coming next week, trying to get them excited. But it was funny because every time we tell them about something, they'd say, oh, but what we really wish is that you did this. And we were like, actually, that's coming too. And so a lot of things we've heard from customers of, I wish, I wish, you know, this product had this feature. I wish you all could help us with this are the things we're shipping next week. Yeah, those are, I guess that those are always coming. Also, the feedback is important, right? Even to improve products. Typically, even we had security week a few weeks ago. And one of the things I'm always surprised is our engineering teams, our teams are actually building stuff. They want feedback. They really need feedback even to improve the things that we need, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. None of this is getting built in a vacuum, which is really inspiring for me to see that it's driven by what customers are telling us. And so, you know, plug if you're seeing what you want this developer week, tell us what you want. And I would not be surprised if it comes next time. Exactly. And Dane Connect, our new CTO, he even asked this week on X for folks to give, hey, what do you want for develop week? A few, a few potentially already guessed some of the things that are coming with that. So there's a lot coming in a sense, right? Yeah, yeah, for sure. In terms of the typically an innovation week at Cloudflare, may that be developer week or other weeks, we try to dedicate a day of the week for a specific topic or product or depending on what it is. What can we share already regarding different use cases, different topics in each days? Yeah, yeah. You're trying to get the secrets out of me. I like it. So I'll run through a few of the days so you all know what to get excited about. So on Monday, it's really about AI and specifically about Cloudflare being the place where you build AI agents. So if you're building AI agents, you're going to have a lot of fun new stuff come to you on Monday that'll help with that. On Tuesday, it's about reducing the friction of deploying applications on Cloudflare. So a lot of the developer experience stuff I was touching on. On Wednesday, it's about being the platform for enterprise. So a lot of great features that are going to help you in your job building on our platform. And then Thursday is about data. And so we have such an amazing data and storage suite, and there's going to be a lot of updates around that. And then Friday is going to be a lot of updates around different programs and customers that you've heard about from us before and giving you some new stories around those. So that is as much as I've got permission to say. You're not going to get anything else out of me, but I think that will give you a little taste if you're wondering what to expect. That's a great taste already there. A lot to expect. Why not also try to give a picture for those who are hearing, maybe they work at a company, they're not a developer, or they just already did a few things, but not as a professional developer. What do you think, why not, with the coming week, they will potentially achieve or even they should try out that they were potentially not doing before? Yeah. I could talk all day about this topic. This is such a good question. I think that the ability to solve problems with code is getting more and more accessible to more people. And I think Cloudflare, selfishly biased, is the best place to do that. And we keep making it easier. And so I would say if you have problems in your job where you're like, I wonder if code could help me solve that. Now is a unique moment in time where you may be able to do that in a way you've never done that before. Whether that's using something like Cursor or Anthropic Artifacts or ChatGPT, we have this new Agents SDK that I'm really excited about. I talked about Model Context Protocol, MCP. All of that is stuff that I think is accessible in a way that hasn't been before. So I would encourage everyone to dip your toes in and you may be surprised how far you're able to get. Makes perfect sense. Any of the recent blog posts, you already mentioned a bit that related to developers that were published already that we potentially could mention as a this is already here type of thing? Yeah. We should definitely talk about, or at least people should go read, there's a great post on remote MCPs. And it's kind of about building them on Cloudflare, but it's actually a great technical look at why MCPs matter, what's possible with them, and then how Cloudflare can help. And I've probably said MCP like 50 times already in this call, but for me, it's the thing that has unlocked my brain in a new way. And every time I demo it and it clicks for someone, I see their eyes light up and the possibilities unfold. And so that is a great post that I think will get folks really excited. Makes perfect sense. And to be honest, just by checking my social media feed, I see MCP everywhere. So it's not like never too much to speak about that, but because you can really see that people are so excited about that in terms of what they can build. So that's really something to explore if you're into developing and building things specifically, right? Yeah, for sure. Oh, well, we already have a good sum up. Before we go, why not remembering folks that all of the blog posts will be available at blog.Cloudflare.com. And of course, we also have unhub.Cloudflare.com slash developer-week. You can explore there shows like this talking about developer week and also blog posts and also press releases. So all of that will be in that hub. So always good to remind folks that they can go there and just see content. And hopefully in a week's time, we'll be in London, both of us actually doing a recap of this exact same developer week. Yeah, yeah. In person, I can't wait to give you a IRL high five and celebrate the week. True. Anything we forgot that we should mention about developer week? The last thing I'll say is come hang with us in our Discord. So discord.Cloudflare.com. If you want to chat with us as the week's going, give us feedback or on our community in the forums at community .Cloudflare.com. And of course, we'll be all over social. But if you want a little more direct access, the forums and the Discord are where we'll be hanging. So yeah, we'd love to have you all join us. Makes perfect sense. And that's a good place, actually, for people to explore and get answers for questions they need. So definitely a good place to go. Yeah. So that's a wrap. Thank you, Ricky. Thank you. But there's a chance that you don't yet know about our developer platform, and that's totally fine if you haven't heard of it yet. I just wanted to warn you that we're going to get pretty noisy about it here in a bit because developer week is coming up. There are over three million developers already building on our platform, and we'd love for you to come build, too. Let's run through what we call the Cloudflare stack. So I've got this broken up into some categories. First of all, I want to talk about compute. You need your code. You need your code to run someplace. Workers are kind of like serverless functions, but they're JavaScript isolates. So very, very fast. No cold boot at all. Immediately on, globally distributed wherever your users are. As you know, Cloudflare does very good at doing stuff like that. We have full stack apps that you can do there with frameworks. We have queues. Oftentimes, you're going to want to be able to push that off to fan things out. So the queues are really great for that sort of thing. All native, primitive things that you can use to make your code better, like workflows. If you have this durable execution, you want something to go, you want it to sleep for a while. Maybe if it hits a bug, you want it to retry. You just kind of define these tasks, and they get done. Excellent stuff. And of course, what's an application if you don't have data to do that? So we have data. So we have a KV key value store. Very, very fast read all over the world. Immediately there, you should check it out. And we have R2, which we like to say stands for robust or reliable, but really it stands for whatever you want. And if you move that letter up to R, you move it up to S, you move the two up to three, you see that it's S3. It's S3 compatible object storage, except there is no egress fee. Yes. All right. So then we also have D1, which is database, globally distributed database, SQLite. Excellent. You need a database. There's one there for you. And if you already have a database, HyperDrive allows you to connect. We do all the connection pooling for you. We use the network for you. Really check it out because you get a URL, use your existing code, just swap it out. It's awesome. And durable objects are this amazing bell of the ball, in my personal opinion, where you can build this little actor model thing where you build an instance of this class and it goes out and it has really awesome real-time connectivity, which is becoming more important in the applications that we build. A unique instance that is addressable and you can get to it through real-time communications. Super powerful. And tune in here because there's some great stuff coming this week that will really let you play with this even more. You're going to see a lot of good solutions in this space. So we also have media, we have images. If you need to transform images or you need to resize or maybe do a face gravity, all sorts of cool image transformations available for you. We help you store them, help you get stuff out in the most fast, optimized way. Speaking of optimization, we also have stream, which allows you to stream live video to wherever you go. And speaking of streams, we're going to be streaming all of our talks about what's happening this week on Cloudflare Developers YouTube and at Cloudflare Devs on our Twitter handle there. So make sure you check both of those out. And we also have the ability to do some web RTC to do calls. So maybe you have a video and you want to share the video and the audio and you want to connect those two together. Lots of cool stuff happening in that space, especially around AI. And then we, of course, have AI models. We host AI models for you. We've got text generation, we have image generation, text embedding models, all sorts of things, any sort of tasks that you can think of there. We have a partnership with Huggy Face, so we are able to host open models for you. So you don't need to go and do that. And we do the scheduling and we sprinkle GPUs all over that network. So wherever your users may be, we're there with the models waiting for them. Awesome. We also have vectorized. So a vector database, very important in doing rag based applications. If you're trying to have your data and use that data, vectorized is a great use case for that. Gateway is awesome. If you're running these AI applications and you're worried about safety there, we have a guardrails thing there. If you're worried about how well it's doing, we have evals and we have a nice way of looking at how people are using your application, as well as tracking how many tokens. And it's not just for the models that we host, it's for all models. And if you want to do fallbacks and that sort of thing, that's a great place to go and use that. Check that out. If you know Cloudflare tools already, that's going to feel very familiar and very, very good. We also launched an agent's framework. So now if you want to build AI agents, which I'm sure that you do, your boss is probably like, hey, I want you to build an AI agent. Or if you are the boss, you're like, hey, you should. And this is a great way to do it. This sits on top of the powerful, durable object pattern. Lots of great stuff coming out every day about this stuff. I would love for you to get your hands on this and learn more about it. And of course, we are supporting, you probably heard this, the MCP, the Model Context Protocol, allowing all of APIs and tools that are out there to work across Internet in a standard way, right? A model context protocol. We've got lots of work that we're doing on there, allowing you to run your own remote server. But I'm done talking. I think it's time for you to just check out the rest of Dev Week. So again, we're streaming. Make sure that you follow Cloudflare Devs on Twitter and Cloudflare Developers on YouTube. So I hope you feel a little more in the know as we start announcing all the amazing new things during Developer Week. It's going to be a blast. We'll see you there. And now it's time for Tom Strix from our network team to honor Dave Tadd, an American engineer in the network space that really contributed to the Internet. So here's Tom. Hi, I'm Tom Strix. I'm a principal network engineer here at Cloudflare. I'm one of the folks that is responsible for the day-to-day maintenance and operations of the global network. And I'm also the head of Cloudflare Network, as well as any of the new products that we're developing that might be built on top of the network that we have. Dave was one of the original gangsters, right? That is probably the best way of describing him. He's been in the network industry for as long as I can remember. He started an ISP in 1993. And since then, he's always been active in the network industry as a whole in the network community. What most people within the industry know him for is the buffer bloat project. So Dave was passionate about access to the Internet, right? And making sure that as many people could get access to this amazing thing that is the Internet. And one of the things that he realized is that one of the biggest blockers to this is buffer bloat. Very quickly, what buffer bloat is, is excessive buffering within customer premise equipment or in consumer devices causes a significantly degraded Internet experience. And this was something that Dave was incredibly passionate about. And that's where he started with the buffer bloat project initially, you know, for education, making sure that people were aware that this was a problem, that this is something that he cared about. But also at the same time, he's a doer, right? So one of the things he did was build out fair queuing mechanisms within the Linux kernel. For those of you that for those of you that care about that, it's the FQ coddle implementation. That's one of the things that Dave contributed back, did that in the early 2000s, I think. So he's always been very passionate about buffer bloat and making sure that we can get the best things for it. And in the later years, in 2010, I think he started buffer bloat, the LibreQuos implementation, which in turn again, is to kind of enable more network vendors to build out this fair queuing strategy that allowed for better throughput, better performance in general. It's one of those things that is actively used, for example, in Starlink. Honestly, I think frankly, like Starlink would not have been the successor, is not the success without the contributions from Dave. Like we wouldn't, they wouldn't be here without all of those contributions that Dave has made. And yeah, that's why he's, you know, super important to the wider network industry and the wider network community. How should Dave be remembered? Celebrate him, right? He was this versatile human being, not just a network engineer, not just an open source contributor, even though those are, you know, incredibly important at the end of the day, the open source community thrives due to the contributions that its individuals make. But he was a musician, he was very heavily into like asteroids and things like that, anything space related. He thrived on community. He loved being at conferences and talking at length about Bufferbloat or any of the projects that he's passionate about. So yeah, I think genuinely like using the Internet by default is a celebration of his life and his work, because he has contributed so much to it. But just in general, yeah, like celebrate him that he's that he contributed and that he's been here. I think that's the thing he would appreciate the most is just kind of, you know, celebrate and use the things that he has contributed back, I think more than anything else. How does Dave's work represent the good things about science and technology? I think it's more about individuals contributing to something for the greater good, right? Not for their own betterment, but purely for the betterment of the wider community, actively contributing and researching something that they're passionate about, and then not just keeping it for themselves, but contributing it to a wider community that will very likely get significantly more advantage out of it than the person themselves. Just actively being passionate about this and then being passionate about fairness and access to things that are such a vital resource. He wasn't paid for this. This wasn't a thing that, you know, he did out of his own betterment. No, he did this because he cared. He did this because he was passionate about this as a whole. And I think that's kind of the really cool thing that we see within the wider open source community is that a lot of open source contributors do this not out of monetary gain or personal gain. They do this because they care more than anything else. It is purely that level of care, that level of passion about something, and then giving that back to the world is something to be admired, I think, more than anything else. And now it's time for recent news. We're not including new tariffs news here, so only Internet stuff. This week Blattery code breaker Betty Webb died at age 101. She was a decorated World War II code breaker who spent her youth deciphering enemy messages at Blattery Park. And why not celebrate her life? And because this week was also April the 1st, here at Pulver is not a fool's day, but a shipping day. So this week we had a treat regarding instant caching. In the past, it was on April the 1st that we launched, for example, our public DNS resolver quad one or 1.1.1.1. It was in 2018. So this week in our blog we mentioned that we now offer instant cache purging for everyone, making it faster to update content across the network in a sense. So it's a treat for those who use that type of tools and products. Also we had in our blog a developer deep dive called a steam locomotive from 1993 broke my yarn test. This is more about debugging a bizarre test failure in yarn. So if you're up to technical blogs, deep dives, cool ones, interesting ones, this is the blog post for you. We also announced, for example, Project Jengo for Sable final winners. This is all about the patent troll case that we won recently. If you want to learn more about Project Jengo and what are patent trolls and why we should combat them to avoid problems in terms of innovation, we have actually an episode here at This Week in Net with our legal team that you can find more about. But also worth mentioning, really important to mention to be honest, is our CDO John Graham-Cumming reflects on his evolving journey at the company from programmer to CDO and now he will be in the Cloudflare's board of directors stepping down as CDO and we have a new CDO, Dane Knecht. Dane Knecht has been in the company for several years. He was the head of ATI and he is now Cloudflare's new CDO. So congratulations John and thank you for all that you've done. Actually starting This Week in Net with me three years ago and also congratulations Dane for the new role. A lot to expect for future years there.