5 ms·

Ben Fathi: Why I Joined CloudFlare

26 points by jgrahamc 11y ago

joshdotai 11y ago
Awesome!
wylie 11y ago
I think I missed the context on who Ben Fathi is. Can anyone fill me in?
- jgrahamc 11y ago
  https://www.linkedin.com/pub/ben-fathi/3/950/b32 https://www.linkedin.com/pub/ben-fathi/3/950/b32
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
dfc 11y ago
Come on cloudflare, that is pretty weak, the CF posts are normally informative and well written. It seems like a third of the way through you just gave up and stopped pretending that any of it was actually about Ben.
- loginusername 11y ago
  Cloudflare posts to HN should be in the same category as post about YC companies that are hiring. Ads. No voting. It is difficult to believe that CF does not have a "special relationship" with YC, give PG's close ties to Project Honeypot, the precursor to Cloudflare. Nothing wrong with that. And one could argue even the "informative and well-written" posts are always done with a purpose: recruit developers. These blog posts almost always read like a PR piece described in PG's "Submarine" essay. Again, that's fine. But they also get promoted to the first page on HN with uncanny efficiency.
  - jgrahamc 11y ago
    Sorry to break this to you. CloudFlare posts get upvoted on HN because people like them, not because of any special relationship. Was PG involved with Project Honeypot? I wasn't aware of that. But yes, recruiting is a very important reason why we write very detailed, useful and informative blog posts and open source a large amount of code.
    - dfc 11y ago
      You do normally write very detailed, useful and informative posts. With all due respect that is not what we have in front of us today. I will be honest, after finishing "the article" I have no idea why Mr. Fathi joined cloudflare; nothing in the article sounds like the genuine thoughts or emotions of an actual employee and using his name for such a thinly veiled advertisement sort of dehumanizes him. When you imagine the candidates that you want to attract and hire do you think that they will believe that these are Ben's actual words?
      - rdl 11y ago
        Is there a set of questions you'd particularly like to see answered? I'd be happy to ask Ben and maybe there could be a followup, or just post them here. (I do agree this post was pretty light on content. I think it's because he and everyone else is busy. Bio Q&A posts are second to funding announcements in inherent boringness, though -- so you could also just wait until there's a more substantive post about e.g. the new KV store or luajit optimizations or something from engineering -- although there's also generally a desire to have the individual engineers who worked on a project post about it, rather than the head of engineering.)
yeukhon 11y ago
So is he joining as CTO or some level of director/SVP/VP? He seems pretty technical
- __john 11y ago
  Head of Engineering https://twitter.com/jgrahamc/status/658608552328626176 https://twitter.com/jgrahamc/status/658608552328626176
repomies691 11y ago
"It's all out there today – and it’s already processing more than five percent of all web requests. " 5% of internet traffic is going through this centralized party? And it is growing? That sounds fucking scary to me. I hope in the future some tools develop which allow evading the DDOS attacks in some more decentralized way, without relying on trusted party. Of course that is going to be difficult (impossible?), if you want the data to be encrypted.
nraynaud 11y ago
I feel a bit sorry that Cloudflare, the epitome of scrappy and smart now has 200 employees, and is doing some kind of googlesque project.
- jgrahamc 11y ago
  What the distributed KV store? We need that to provide our service.
  - nraynaud 11y ago
    Sorry, that was looking like a new product sold as is. Did I also misunderstand the headcount inflation?
    - jgrahamc 11y ago
      Nope. We're not selling that as a service. We need to replicate configuration very fast around the world (e.g. a DNS change) and so we are building a new KV store since we've looked at the others out there (and what we are using today) and have decided a new thing is needed. I'm not sure what you mean by "headcount inflation". CloudFlare is profitable and needs a lot of people.

26 points by jgrahamc 11y ago

joshdotai 11y ago

Awesome!

wylie 11y ago

I think I missed the context on who Ben Fathi is. Can anyone fill me in?

jgrahamc 11y ago
https://www.linkedin.com/pub/ben-fathi/3/950/b32 https://www.linkedin.com/pub/ben-fathi/3/950/b32
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

dfc 11y ago

Come on cloudflare, that is pretty weak, the CF posts are normally informative and well written. It seems like a third of the way through you just gave up and stopped pretending that any of it was actually about Ben.

loginusername 11y ago
Cloudflare posts to HN should be in the same category as post about YC companies that are hiring. Ads. No voting. It is difficult to believe that CF does not have a "special relationship" with YC, give PG's close ties to Project Honeypot, the precursor to Cloudflare. Nothing wrong with that. And one could argue even the "informative and well-written" posts are always done with a purpose: recruit developers. These blog posts almost always read like a PR piece described in PG's "Submarine" essay. Again, that's fine. But they also get promoted to the first page on HN with uncanny efficiency.
- jgrahamc 11y ago
  Sorry to break this to you. CloudFlare posts get upvoted on HN because people like them, not because of any special relationship. Was PG involved with Project Honeypot? I wasn't aware of that. But yes, recruiting is a very important reason why we write very detailed, useful and informative blog posts and open source a large amount of code.
  - dfc 11y ago
    You do normally write very detailed, useful and informative posts. With all due respect that is not what we have in front of us today. I will be honest, after finishing "the article" I have no idea why Mr. Fathi joined cloudflare; nothing in the article sounds like the genuine thoughts or emotions of an actual employee and using his name for such a thinly veiled advertisement sort of dehumanizes him. When you imagine the candidates that you want to attract and hire do you think that they will believe that these are Ben's actual words?
    - rdl 11y ago
      Is there a set of questions you'd particularly like to see answered? I'd be happy to ask Ben and maybe there could be a followup, or just post them here. (I do agree this post was pretty light on content. I think it's because he and everyone else is busy. Bio Q&A posts are second to funding announcements in inherent boringness, though -- so you could also just wait until there's a more substantive post about e.g. the new KV store or luajit optimizations or something from engineering -- although there's also generally a desire to have the individual engineers who worked on a project post about it, rather than the head of engineering.)

yeukhon 11y ago

So is he joining as CTO or some level of director/SVP/VP? He seems pretty technical

__john 11y ago
Head of Engineering https://twitter.com/jgrahamc/status/658608552328626176 https://twitter.com/jgrahamc/status/658608552328626176

repomies691 11y ago

"It's all out there today – and it’s already processing more than five percent of all web requests. " 5% of internet traffic is going through this centralized party? And it is growing? That sounds fucking scary to me. I hope in the future some tools develop which allow evading the DDOS attacks in some more decentralized way, without relying on trusted party. Of course that is going to be difficult (impossible?), if you want the data to be encrypted.

nraynaud 11y ago

I feel a bit sorry that Cloudflare, the epitome of scrappy and smart now has 200 employees, and is doing some kind of googlesque project.

jgrahamc 11y ago
What the distributed KV store? We need that to provide our service.
- nraynaud 11y ago
  Sorry, that was looking like a new product sold as is. Did I also misunderstand the headcount inflation?
  - jgrahamc 11y ago
    Nope. We're not selling that as a service. We need to replicate configuration very fast around the world (e.g. a DNS change) and so we are building a new KV store since we've looked at the others out there (and what we are using today) and have decided a new thing is needed. I'm not sure what you mean by "headcount inflation". CloudFlare is profitable and needs a lot of people.