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I'm a lead engineer on the Cloudflare Apps team and I'd love to answer any questions. Cloudflare has been working on building apps into our platform for over si

I'm a lead engineer on the Cloudflare Apps team and I'd love to answer any questions. Cloudflare has been working on building apps into our platform for over six years, and I've personally been working on this codebase for over three (1200 days exactly today in fact). The initial goal of Apps is to make it possible for everyone to use all the tools technical people find and use on Github and npm everyday. Our long term goal is to make it possible for developers to make a living building tools which make the web better. As an engineer myself, the moment I will personally enjoy the most is when a developer makes $1MM on the store meaning it has truly changed their lives. That will be when this experiment is proven a success and we can't wait! UPDATE: I found a visualization that Teffen Ellis on our team made of every commit throughout the history of the project: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6EsMIhQjoQYT2pmS05hU1RuUTQ/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6EsMIhQjoQYT2pmS05hU1RuUTQ...

qiqing 9y ago
Hey Zack, two questions: 1) What were the interesting technical challenges of evolving the Eager codebase and integrating with Cloudflare since the acquisition? 2) What has surprised you so far in the feedback about developer experience?
- zackbloom 9y ago
  If anyone doesn't know Eager was the company Adam Schwartz and I founded in 2014 which became the current version of Cloudflare Apps. The challenges are probably pretty obvious, you have to take this codebase and application which were meant to live on its own and conform it to the way another system works. In the process you have to adapt your deployment, auth, style, etc. to work in this alternative reality. At times it can seem like you spend months working just to get back to the feature set you started with. At others you get to see the vision of an integration you sketched on a whiteboard six months ago become reality and you're blown away that this crazy idea could ever actually work. The definition of 'you' also changed a lot in that process, we went from being a small team to getting support and assistance from dozens of passionate people. It's a very different world where your resources can scale to your vision, instead of having to compromise what you want to build at every turn. Particularly when you work at a company with as sweeping a vision as Cloudflare, you also get a chance to expand your vision itself. At Eager it was a romantic dream to think we would get on a hundred thousand sites. With our launch today we reach six million. The idea of a $100mm apps fund, or having 60 apps in the store before we even launched, were not things which startup-Eager could have pulled off. My biggest surprise is gonna be a little silly but it's it's when someone builds a really great app without any help or guidance. As much work as you put into the API or docs it's always a little shocking when someone builds something from scratch on the platform you work on every day, and it works well, out of the box.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
mwfj 9y ago
Hi Zack, This headline made me think that Cloudflare had finally done what I first assumed Akamai did back in the noughties, before I learned they didn't really have magic tech. :/ Anyway: here's some indirect feedback. It doesn't really apply to your project (which I'm sure will be super useful to other people). I would expect Cloudflare to take the lead in... let's call it widely-distributed-computation. All I want is my code running on your nodes all around the world with an end-to-end ping that is less than 10 ms to the average client.
- jgrahamc 9y ago
  All I want is my code running on your nodes all around the world with an end-to-end ping that is less than 10 ms to the average client. Interesting idea. jgc AT cloudflare to tell me more.
  - dsl 9y ago
    Akamai Edge Compute is what they are asking for. As someone who tried building this for the unwashed masses, wait until you have something along the lines of Google Spanner. Developers see amazing gains from edge compute because ZOMG LATENCY, then actually flesh out their apps and start making uncached database calls back to AWS anyway. EDIT: Yes they lack pricing transparency. Akamai is expensive. As I pointed out, in real world experience less than 5% of the developers I talked to actually could lower response times by moving closer to the client. It's something everyone thinks they need, but the devil is in the implementation details. Akamai hand holds you a lot for your money.
    - johansch 9y ago
      Akamai Edge Compute appears to be a "talk to us for pricing, and we'll then attempt to extract the maximum amount of money that we think you'll be able to pay" kind of deal. No thanks.
      - dsl 9y ago
        If you really want this now, shoot me an email (in profile) and i'll hook you up.
lugg 9y ago
Hey Zack, this is awesome, what's the timeframe for approval right now? I'm guessing you guys have lots of code review todo! Anything we can do to help speed the process up? Specific types of unit tests maybe? Also, a couple of suggestions: More complicated installer options are a sort of want of mine. It would be nice if I could drop down to custom functions to make the install process more dynamic and user friendly dependent on input. Also, slight pet peeve, the slider input option seems to have no way of displaying the slider value to the user.

qiqing 9y ago

Hey Zack, two questions: 1) What were the interesting technical challenges of evolving the Eager codebase and integrating with Cloudflare since the acquisition? 2) What has surprised you so far in the feedback about developer experience?

zackbloom 9y ago
If anyone doesn't know Eager was the company Adam Schwartz and I founded in 2014 which became the current version of Cloudflare Apps. The challenges are probably pretty obvious, you have to take this codebase and application which were meant to live on its own and conform it to the way another system works. In the process you have to adapt your deployment, auth, style, etc. to work in this alternative reality. At times it can seem like you spend months working just to get back to the feature set you started with. At others you get to see the vision of an integration you sketched on a whiteboard six months ago become reality and you're blown away that this crazy idea could ever actually work. The definition of 'you' also changed a lot in that process, we went from being a small team to getting support and assistance from dozens of passionate people. It's a very different world where your resources can scale to your vision, instead of having to compromise what you want to build at every turn. Particularly when you work at a company with as sweeping a vision as Cloudflare, you also get a chance to expand your vision itself. At Eager it was a romantic dream to think we would get on a hundred thousand sites. With our launch today we reach six million. The idea of a $100mm apps fund, or having 60 apps in the store before we even launched, were not things which startup-Eager could have pulled off. My biggest surprise is gonna be a little silly but it's it's when someone builds a really great app without any help or guidance. As much work as you put into the API or docs it's always a little shocking when someone builds something from scratch on the platform you work on every day, and it works well, out of the box.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

mwfj 9y ago

Hi Zack, This headline made me think that Cloudflare had finally done what I first assumed Akamai did back in the noughties, before I learned they didn't really have magic tech. :/ Anyway: here's some indirect feedback. It doesn't really apply to your project (which I'm sure will be super useful to other people). I would expect Cloudflare to take the lead in... let's call it widely-distributed-computation. All I want is my code running on your nodes all around the world with an end-to-end ping that is less than 10 ms to the average client.

jgrahamc 9y ago
All I want is my code running on your nodes all around the world with an end-to-end ping that is less than 10 ms to the average client. Interesting idea. jgc AT cloudflare to tell me more.
- dsl 9y ago
  Akamai Edge Compute is what they are asking for. As someone who tried building this for the unwashed masses, wait until you have something along the lines of Google Spanner. Developers see amazing gains from edge compute because ZOMG LATENCY, then actually flesh out their apps and start making uncached database calls back to AWS anyway. EDIT: Yes they lack pricing transparency. Akamai is expensive. As I pointed out, in real world experience less than 5% of the developers I talked to actually could lower response times by moving closer to the client. It's something everyone thinks they need, but the devil is in the implementation details. Akamai hand holds you a lot for your money.
  - johansch 9y ago
    Akamai Edge Compute appears to be a "talk to us for pricing, and we'll then attempt to extract the maximum amount of money that we think you'll be able to pay" kind of deal. No thanks.
    - dsl 9y ago
      If you really want this now, shoot me an email (in profile) and i'll hook you up.

lugg 9y ago

Hey Zack, this is awesome, what's the timeframe for approval right now? I'm guessing you guys have lots of code review todo! Anything we can do to help speed the process up? Specific types of unit tests maybe? Also, a couple of suggestions: More complicated installer options are a sort of want of mine. It would be nice if I could drop down to custom functions to make the install process more dynamic and user friendly dependent on input. Also, slight pet peeve, the slider input option seems to have no way of displaying the slider value to the user.