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While it is interesting that they achieved a technical feat, is there any reason for this article to be here? It teaches us nothing apart from the fact that Clo

While it is interesting that they achieved a technical feat, is there any reason for this article to be here? It teaches us nothing apart from the fact that Cloudflare did a thing.

jgrahamc 4y ago
At the simplest level the answer is... someone posted this to HN and other users upvoted it enough for it to reach the front page. We write things up for one main reason: find new employees. We want people to know what sorts of things we work on. So we try to explain them in a lot of detail. A secondary reason is that it's sometimes helpful to learn how someone else solved a problem. Real world examples can be helpful and sometimes more helpful than abstract discussions.
- rektide 4y ago
  I was quite there with you, until you said: > We write things up for one main reason: find new employees. JFC, vomit in my shirt, gross. What kind of Ayn Randian misery world do you live in? I think a lot of people write things because they think it's interesting & worth discussing & has merit. It doesn't necessarily have to be for self or corporate gain. It's ok if people just want to help other people, want to share? No? Yes? Is it so objectionable that we have a broader human cause, that we want people to do well & know more & understand better? Do we have to reduce everything to the utmost petty corporatistic parasitism? Or just more broadly: can we not ascribe motive so quickly, with such cocky self-assurity? (Especially to such incredibly vulgar/short ends?) Let's leave some possibility of intent open, yeah, please?
  - nindalf 4y ago
    You think the person you’re replying to is slandering Cloudflare by saying they write blog posts primarily to build their brand among potential hires. I don’t think he’s slandering Cloudflare. I think he’s captured their intent well. I say this because jgrahamc is the CTO of Cloudflare. He has been for years.
    - rektide 4y ago
      Very very good point & I didn't know that.. But I'm still not sure that actually really matches employee's motivations for writing these things.
      - jgrahamc 4y ago
        See my comment above. I agree about employee motivations. I was talking about Cloudflare’s motivation to have the blog and spend all the effort on it.
  - syntheticcorp 4y ago
    The commenter you’re replying to is CTO of Cloudflare, so I’d say they likely know why the company makes these blog posts.
  - jgrahamc 4y ago
    I haven’t read any Ayn Rand so I’m not totally sure what that means but, as I said, the main reason Cloudflare has a blog like that is to attract new employees. Of course, there are all sorts of others reasons such as giving our employees the satisfaction of having their work made public, helping them write better, hopefully making potential customers think we are cool and want to buy stuff, getting feedback from the outside world (I particularluly love the “why didn’t they do X” type comments because sometimes we learn something useful) and so on.
capableweb 4y ago
That's basically what all technical blogs from corporations does. I suppose they imagine we'd learn something it. I concur with the other commentator, bit disappointing it's not OSS, guess they are afraid of helping the competition. I did expect a "and you can give it a try here" section in the end.
- jgrahamc 4y ago
  We're not afraid of helping the competition. Example: we open sourced the entire runtime for Cloudflare Workers! https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd Open sourcing something has a cost and we mostly only open source things like stand-alone libraries. We also mostly open source things that are fairly mature because it's hard to manage software that's rapidly changing internally and handle PRs from outside.
  - luizfelberti 4y ago
    You did mention on your Pingora post months ago that that would be open-sourced eventually though. Is that still the case? Is Oxy entirely separate from those plans?
- tayo42 4y ago
  What kind of corporate but tech stuff do people find interesting? Curious, im looking to write more to practice but idk exactly what kind of stuff people are interested or what level of technical information they want too. Interested in anyones answers
BaculumMeumEst 4y ago
Because of one word, and I think you know which it is.
wmf 4y ago
It provides "validation" (as the kids say) to Rust, Tokio, and Hyper. Whether they need additional validation at this point is debatable though.
sophacles 4y ago
You're on a site with "news" in its name. The word news can be defined as "information about things people did".

While it is interesting that they achieved a technical feat, is there any reason for this article to be here? It teaches us nothing apart from the fact that Cloudflare did a thing.

jgrahamc 4y ago

At the simplest level the answer is... someone posted this to HN and other users upvoted it enough for it to reach the front page. We write things up for one main reason: find new employees. We want people to know what sorts of things we work on. So we try to explain them in a lot of detail. A secondary reason is that it's sometimes helpful to learn how someone else solved a problem. Real world examples can be helpful and sometimes more helpful than abstract discussions.

rektide 4y ago
I was quite there with you, until you said: > We write things up for one main reason: find new employees. JFC, vomit in my shirt, gross. What kind of Ayn Randian misery world do you live in? I think a lot of people write things because they think it's interesting & worth discussing & has merit. It doesn't necessarily have to be for self or corporate gain. It's ok if people just want to help other people, want to share? No? Yes? Is it so objectionable that we have a broader human cause, that we want people to do well & know more & understand better? Do we have to reduce everything to the utmost petty corporatistic parasitism? Or just more broadly: can we not ascribe motive so quickly, with such cocky self-assurity? (Especially to such incredibly vulgar/short ends?) Let's leave some possibility of intent open, yeah, please?
- nindalf 4y ago
  You think the person you’re replying to is slandering Cloudflare by saying they write blog posts primarily to build their brand among potential hires. I don’t think he’s slandering Cloudflare. I think he’s captured their intent well. I say this because jgrahamc is the CTO of Cloudflare. He has been for years.
  - rektide 4y ago
    Very very good point & I didn't know that.. But I'm still not sure that actually really matches employee's motivations for writing these things.
    - jgrahamc 4y ago
      See my comment above. I agree about employee motivations. I was talking about Cloudflare’s motivation to have the blog and spend all the effort on it.
- syntheticcorp 4y ago
  The commenter you’re replying to is CTO of Cloudflare, so I’d say they likely know why the company makes these blog posts.
- jgrahamc 4y ago
  I haven’t read any Ayn Rand so I’m not totally sure what that means but, as I said, the main reason Cloudflare has a blog like that is to attract new employees. Of course, there are all sorts of others reasons such as giving our employees the satisfaction of having their work made public, helping them write better, hopefully making potential customers think we are cool and want to buy stuff, getting feedback from the outside world (I particularluly love the “why didn’t they do X” type comments because sometimes we learn something useful) and so on.

capableweb 4y ago

That's basically what all technical blogs from corporations does. I suppose they imagine we'd learn something it. I concur with the other commentator, bit disappointing it's not OSS, guess they are afraid of helping the competition. I did expect a "and you can give it a try here" section in the end.

jgrahamc 4y ago
We're not afraid of helping the competition. Example: we open sourced the entire runtime for Cloudflare Workers! https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd Open sourcing something has a cost and we mostly only open source things like stand-alone libraries. We also mostly open source things that are fairly mature because it's hard to manage software that's rapidly changing internally and handle PRs from outside.
- luizfelberti 4y ago
  You did mention on your Pingora post months ago that that would be open-sourced eventually though. Is that still the case? Is Oxy entirely separate from those plans?
tayo42 4y ago
What kind of corporate but tech stuff do people find interesting? Curious, im looking to write more to practice but idk exactly what kind of stuff people are interested or what level of technical information they want too. Interested in anyones answers

BaculumMeumEst 4y ago

Because of one word, and I think you know which it is.

wmf 4y ago

It provides "validation" (as the kids say) to Rust, Tokio, and Hyper. Whether they need additional validation at this point is debatable though.

sophacles 4y ago

You're on a site with "news" in its name. The word news can be defined as "information about things people did".