Andrew Fitch
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Andrew Fitch
How Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) can change an organization
Employee resource groups (ERGs) are important to a company’s success. They foster community and a sense of belonging, help drive organizational change, and improve the overall quality of an organization’s culture. Most importantly, they help organizations become more diverse, equitable, and inclusive. I’d love to share the history of ERGs at Cloudflare, as well as how they function and help influence the company.
The history of ERGs at Cloudflare
When I joined Cloudflare in 2017, one of the first things I did was search “LGBTQ” in our company chat. A chat room of a dozen or so employees titled “LGBT at Cloudflare'' popped up. There was evidence of some historic chatter in the room, and it was clear some employees had gathered for drinks after work before. I immediately introduced myself to the group, and asked if they would be okay with me setting up a meet & greet event. We booked a conference room, ordered lunch, found an article to discuss, introduced ourselves, and collectively decided we wanted to continue hosting such events. In our second meeting, we decided we should make things official by deciding on a name. This was the birth of Proudflare, our employee resource group Continue reading
What’s it like to come out as LGBTQIA+ at work?
Today is the 31st Anniversary of National Coming Out Day. I wanted to highlight the importance of this day, share coming out resources, and publish some stories of what it's like to come out in the workplace.
About National Coming Out Day
Thirty-one years ago, on the anniversary of the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, we first observed National Coming Out Day as a reminder that one of our most basic tools is the power of coming out. One out of every two Americans has someone close to them who is gay or lesbian. For transgender people, that number is only one in 10.
Coming out - whether it is as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer - STILL MATTERS. When people know someone who is LGBTQ, they are far more likely to support equality under the law. Beyond that, our stories can be powerful to each other.
Each year on October 11th, National Coming Out Day continues to promote a safe world for LGBTQ individuals to live truthfully and openly. Every person who speaks up changes more hearts and minds, and creates new advocates for equality.
For more on coming out, visit HRC's Coming Out Continue reading
Learn more about Workers Sites at Austin & San Francisco Meetups
Last Friday, at the end of Cloudflare’s 9th birthday week, we announced Workers Sites.
Now, using the Wrangler CLI, you can deploy entire websites directly to the Cloudflare Network using Cloudflare Workers and Workers KV. If you can statically generate the assets for your site, think create-react-app, Jekyll, or even the WP2Static plugin, you can deploy it to our global network, which spans 194 cities in more than 90 countries.
If you’d like to learn more about how it was built, you can read more about this in the technical blog post. Additionally, I wanted to give you an opportunity to meet with some of the developers who contributed to this product and hear directly from them about their process, potential use cases, and what it took to build.
Check out these events. If you’re based in Austin or San Francisco (more cities coming soon!), join us on-site. If you’re based somewhere else, you can watch the recording of the events afterwards.
Growing Dev Platforms at Scale & Deploying Static Websites
Talk 1: Inspiring with Content: How to Grow Developer Platforms at Scale
Serverless platforms like Cloudflare Workers provide benefits like scalability, high performance, and lower costs. However, Continue reading
Join Cloudflare & Yandex at our Moscow meetup! Присоединяйтесь к митапу в Москве!
Are you based in Moscow? Cloudflare is partnering with Yandex to produce a meetup this month in Yandex's Moscow headquarters. We would love to invite you to join us to learn about the newest in the Internet industry. You'll join Cloudflare's users, stakeholders from the tech community, and Engineers and Product Managers from both Cloudflare and Yandex.
Cloudflare Moscow Meetup
Tuesday, May 30, 2019: 18:00 - 22:00
Location: Yandex - Ulitsa L'va Tolstogo, 16, Moskva, Russia, 119021
Talks will include "Performance and scalability at Cloudflare”, "Security at Yandex Cloud", and "Edge computing".
Speakers will include Evgeny Sidorov, Information Security Engineer at Yandex, Ivan Babrou, Performance Engineer at Cloudflare, Alex Cruz Farmer, Product Manager for Firewall at Cloudflare, and Olga Skobeleva, Solutions Engineer at Cloudflare.
Agenda:
18:00 - 19:00 - Registration and welcome cocktail
19:00 - 19:10 - Cloudflare overview
19:10 - 19:40 - Performance and scalability at Cloudflare
19:40 - 20:10 - Security at Yandex Cloud
20:10 - 20:40 - Cloudflare security solutions and industry security trends
20:40 - 21:10 - Edge computing
Q&A
The talks will be followed by food, drinks, and networking.
View Event Details & Register Here »
We'll Continue reading
We want to host your technical meetup at Cloudflare London
Cloudflare recently moved to County Hall, the building just behind the London Eye. We have a very large event space which we would love to open up to the developer community. If you organize a technical meetup, we'd love to host you. If you attend technical meetups, please share this post with the meetup organizers.
About the space
Our event space is large enough to hold up to 280 attendees, but can also be used for a small group as well. There is a large entry way for people coming into our 6th floor lobby where check-in may be managed. Once inside the event space, you will see a large, open kitchen area which can be used to set up event food and beverages. Beyond that is Cloudflare's all-hands space, which may be used for your events.
We have several gender-neutral toilets for your guests' use as well.
Lobby
You may welcome your guests here. The event space is just to the left of this spot.
Event space
This space may be used for talks, workshops, or large panels. We can rearrange seating, based on the format of your meetup.
Food & Continue reading
Join us for 5 serverless events in SF Bay Area this week
Developer Week Bay Area is happening this week and Cloudflare engineers and developer relations team members are delivering several talks around the Bay. Join us in San Francisco and Oakland for the following talks. We’ll hope to see you soon.
WebAssembly on the Server, npm & genomics tools @ Cloudflare
We've partnered with the WebAssembly SF meetup group to curate three talks from Zack Bloom of Cloudflare, Laurie Voss of npm, and Robert Aboukhalil of Invitae.
Event Type: Meetup
Location: Cloudflare HQ, San Francisco, CA
Date: February 20, 2019
View Event Details & Register Here »
Serverless: An Inside Look
Cloudflare engineers are delivering three serverless talks in downtown Oakland: How Workers Work, Security: the Serverless Future, and Building a Serverless World (Map) with IoT and Workers.
Event Type: Meetup
Location: At My Sphere, Oakland, CA
Date: February 21, 2019
View Event Details & Register Here »
Developer Week Bay Area
Cloudflare will be at Developer Week Bay Area. Be sure to check out Single-Process Serverless, Building an Iot World (Map) with Serverless, and Make Your Existing Application Serverless talks.
Event Type: Conference
Location: Oakland Convention Center, Oakland, CA
Date: February 20-24, 2019
How Serverless Platforms are Changing to Enable New Applications (video)
Serverless technology is still in its infancy, and some people are unsure about where it’s headed. Join Zack Bloom, Director of Product for Product Strategy at Cloudflare, on a journey to explore the serverless future where developers “just write code,” pay for exactly what they use, and completely forget about where code runs; then see why current platforms won't be able to get developers all the way there.
The talk below was originally presented and recorded at Serverless Computing London in November 2018. If you’d like to join us in person to talk about serverless, we’ll be announcing 2019 event locations throughout the year on the docs page.
About the talk
Many of the technical challenges of serverless (cold-start time, memory overhead, and CPU context switching) are solved by a new architecture which translates technology developed for web browsers onto the server. Learn about how serverless platforms built using isolates are helping to expand the kinds of applications built using serverless.
About the speaker
Zack Bloom helps build the future of the Internet as the Director of Product for Product Strategy at Cloudflare. He was a co-founder of Eager, an Continue reading
Real World Serverless: Serverless Use Cases and Best Practices
Cloudflare Workers has had a very busy 2018. Throughout the year, Workers moved from beta to general availability, continued to expand its footprint as Cloudflare grew to 155 locations, and added new features and services to help developers create increasingly advanced applications.
To cap off 2018 we decided hit the road (and then head to the airport) with our Real World Serverless event series in San Francisco, Austin, London, Singapore, Sydney, and Melbourne. It was a great time sharing serverless application development insights we’ve discovered over the past year as well as demonstrating how to build applications with new services like our key value store, Cloudflare Workers KV.
Below is a recording from our Singapore Real World Serverless event. It included three talks about Serverless technology featuring Tim Obezuk, Stanley Tan, and Remy Guercio from Cloudflare. They spoke about the fundamentals of serverless technology, twelve factors of serverless application development, and achieving no ops at scale with network-based serverless.
If you’d like to join us in person to talk about serverless, we’ll be announcing 2019 event locations starting in the new year.
About the talks
Fundamentals of Serverless Technology - Tim Obezuk (0:00-13:56)
Tim explores the anatomy of Continue reading
Working out Backend Knots and Building Routers (Austin Real World Serverless Video Recap)
I work in Developer Relations at Cloudflare and I'm fortunate to have top-notch developers around me who are willing to share their knowledge with the greater developer community. I produced a series of events this autumn called Real World Serverless at multiple locations around the world and I want to share the recorded videos from these events.
Our Austin Real World Serverless event (in partnership with the ATX Serverless User Group Meetup) included two talks about Serverless technology featuring Victoria Bernard and Preston Pham from Cloudflare. They spoke about working out backend knots with Workers and building a router for the great good.
About the talks
Working out Backend Knots with Workers - Victoria Bernard (0:00-15:19)
Cloudflare Workers is a platform the makes serverless development and deployment easier than ever. A worker is a script running between your clients' browsers and your site's origin that can intercept requests. Victoria went over some popular use cases of how proxy workers can dramatically improve a site's performance and add functionality that would normally require toying with complicated back-end services.
Build a Router for Great Good - Preston Pham (15:20-33:53)
Serverless computing is great, but requires routing or some kind of API Continue reading
Happy National Coming Out Day: Stories from Proudflare
Today is the 30th Anniversary of National Coming Out Day. We wanted to share some coming out stories from members of Proudflare and draw attention to resources the Human Rights Campaign provides to those who are thinking about coming out or wish to be supportive of those who come out to them.
About National Coming Out Day
On October 11, 1987, about 500,000 people marched on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. This was the second demonstration of this type in the capital and it resulted in the formation of several LGBTQ organizations.
In the late 1980s, the LGBTQ community recognized that they often reacted defensively to anti LGBTQIA+ actions and the community came up with the idea of a national day for celebrating coming out. The anniversary of the 1987 march was chosen as that national day.
Each year on October 11th, National Coming Out Day continues to promote a safe world for LGBTQ individuals to live truthfully and openly.
Source: https://www.hrc.org/resources/the-history-of-coming-out
Coming out stories from Proudflare
Here are seven examples of the coming out stories that surfaced from a company-wide awareness campaign. I hope you’ll enjoy reading these and will find inspiration in them. Let’s Continue reading
Real World Serverless: The Video
We held our second Real World Serverless event in London last week and filmed the four talks about Serverless technology to share with you here, on the Cloudflare blog. Check out the recording, featuring Henry Heinemann, Sevki Hasirci, and Stephen Pinkerton from Cloudflare and Paddy Sherry from gambling.com Group.
For details of our other upcoming Real World Serverless events in Austin, Singapore, Sydney, and Melbourne, scroll to the bottom.
Video transcript:
Moderator: Okay, welcome to Cloudflare, everybody. I'm so pleased that you're here. This is the second event of our real world serverless event series. We had our first one in San Francisco just last week, and we were so excited to fly over here, both me and Jade and some other Cloudflare employees, and tap into this community here, because this is our second largest office.
We also frankly, love coming here to London to visit and engage with the developer community here. Let me hand this over to Jade and she'll speak a little bit about Cloudflare, and then we'll get started with speaker number one.
[applause]
Jade: Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cloudflare. It's on, okay cool. How many of you know Continue reading
JAMstack podcast episode: Listen to Cloudflare’s Kenton Varda speak about originless code
JAMstack Radio is a show all about the JAMstack, a new way to build fast & secure apps or websites. In the most recent episode, the host, Brian Douglas, met with Kenton Varda, tech lead for Cloudflare Workers and author of Sandstorm.io to discuss some of the infinite uses for running code at the edge.
Listen to what Kenton had to say about serverless technology in this twenty two minute podcast here:
Here's the transcript of the podcast as well:
Brian Douglas: Welcome to another installment of JAMstack Radio. In the room I've got Kenton Varda from Cloudflare.
Kenton Varda: Thanks for having me.
Brian: Thanks for coming all the way across San Francisco to chat with me in person. I'm curious who Kenton is, but I'm also curious what Cloudflare is. Can you answer both questions? Let's start with, "Who is Kenton?"
Kenton: I'm an engineer. I'm the architect of Cloudflare Workers. In a past life I worked for Google for several years. I was once known as the "protocol buffers guy," I was the one who open sourced that. And I founded a company called Sandstorm that was later acquired by Cloudflare.
Brian: I'm Continue reading
Introducing Real World Serverless – Practical advice on how to use Cloudflare Workers
We’re getting the best minds on serverless technology from Cloudflare together to lead a series of talks on practical use cases for Cloudflare Workers. Join any of these six global talks for stories of how companies and developers are using serverless in the real world.
San Francisco - London - Austin - Singapore - Sydney - Melbourne
Want a Real World Serverless event in your city? Interested in sharing your stories and experience deploying serverless apps in production? Email [email protected] and let’s put something together.
Check out the event details and register through the Eventbrite links below.
Real World Serverless - San Francisco
Sept 11th, 2018, 6:00pm-9:00pm
In partnership with Serverless Meetup
Location: Heavybit - 325 9th St, San Francisco, CA 94103
View Event Details & Register Here »
Real World Serverless - London
Sept 18th, 2018, 6:00pm-9:00pm
Location: Cloudflare London - 25 Lavington St, Second floor SE1 0NZ London
View Event Details & Register Here »
Real World Serverless - Austin
October 2nd, 2018, 6:00pm-9:00pm
In partnership with ATX Serverless Meetup
Location: Downtown Austin
Introducing Proudflare, Cloudflare’s LGBTQIA+ Group
With Pride month now in our collective rearview mirror for 2018, I wanted to share what some of us have been up to at Cloudflare. We're so proud that, in the last 8 months, we've formed a LGBTQIA+ Employee Resource Group (ERG) called Proudflare. We've launched chapters and monthly activities in each of our primary locations: San Francisco, London, Singapore, and Austin. This month, we came out in force! We transformed our company's social profiles, wrapped our HQ building in rainbow window decals, highlighted several non-profits we support, and threw a heck of an inaugural Pride Celebration.
We’re a very young group — just 8 months old — but we have big plans. Check out some of our activities and future plans, follow us on social media, and consider starting an ERG at your company too.
The History of Proudflare
On my first day at Cloudflare in October, 2017, I logged into Hipchat and searched LGBTQ. Fortunately for me, there was a "LGBT at Cloudflare" chat room already created, and I started establishing connections right away. I found that there had been a couple of informal group outings, but there was no regular activity, sharing of resources, nor an official Continue reading
Boston, London, & NY developers: We can’t wait to meet you
Photo by Patrick Tomasso / Unsplash
Are you based in Boston, London, or New York? There's a lot going on this month from the London Internet Summit to Developer Week New York and additional meetups in Boston and New York. Drop by our events and connect with the Cloudflare community.
Event #1 (Boston): UX, Integrations, & Developer Experience: A Panel feat. Drift & Cloudflare
Photo by The Opte Project / Originally from the English Wikipedia; description page is/was here.]
Tuesday, June 12: 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Location: Drift - 222 Berkley St, 6th Floor Boston, MA 02116
Join us at Drift HQ for a panel discussion on user experience, developer experience, and integration, featuring Elias Torres from Drift and Connor Peshek and Ollie Hsieh from Cloudflare.
The panelists will speak about their experiences developing user-facing applications, best practices they learned in the process, the integration of the Drift app and the Cloudflare Apps platform, and future platform features.
View Event Details & Register Here »
Event #2 (London): Cloudflare Internet Summit
Photo by Luca Micheli / Unsplash
Thursday, June 14: 9:00 am - 6:00 pm
Location: The Tobacco Dock - Wapping Ln, Continue reading
The Rise of Edge Compute: The Video
At the end of March, Kenton Varda, tech lead and architect for Cloudflare Workers, traveled to London and led a talk about the Rise of Edge Compute where he laid out our vision for the future of the Internet as a platform.
Several of those who were unable to attend on-site asked for us to produce a recording. Well, we've completed the audio edits, so here it is!
Visit the Workers category on Cloudflare's community forum to learn more about Workers and share questions, answers, and ideas with other developers.
Copenhagen & London developers, join us for five events this May
Photo by Nick Karvounis / Unsplash
Are you based in Copenhagen or London? Drop by one or all of these five events.
Ross Guarino and Terin Stock, both Systems Engineers at Cloudflare are traveling to Europe to lead Go and Kubernetes talks in Copenhagen. They'll then join Junade Ali and lead talks on their use of Go, Kubernetes, and Cloudflare’s Mobile SDK at Cloudflare's London office.
My Developer Relations teammates and I are visiting these cities over the next two weeks to produce these events with Ross, Terin, and Junade. We’d love to meet you and invite you along.
Our trip will begin with two meetups and a conference talk in Copenhagen.
Event #1 (Copenhagen): 6 Cloud Native Talks, 1 Evening: Special KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU Meetup
Tuesday, 1 May: 17:00-21:00
Location: Trifork Copenhagen - Borgergade 24B, 1300 København K
How to extend your Kubernetes cluster
A brief introduction to controllers, webhooks and CRDs. Ross and Terin will talk about how Cloudflare’s internal platform builds on Kubernetes.
Speakers: Ross Guarino and Terin Stock
View Event Details & Register Here »
Event #2 (Copenhagen): Gopher Meetup At Falcon.io: Building Go With Bazel & Internationalization in Go
London & Barcelona developers, we want to meet you this week
Are you based in London or Barcelona? Drop by the Cloudflare London office to meet Kenton Varda, lead architect of Cloudflare Workers, front end developers Marta Bondyra and David Sancho from Typeform, or drop by the Typeform office in Barcelona to hear from Jason Harmon, Typeform’s Chief Platform Officer. My Developer Relations teammates and I are visiting these cities over the next two weeks. We’d love to meet you and invite you to the three events we’re hosting.
Our first stop is the Cloudflare London office. Developers from our Cloudflare Apps partner, Typeform, are leading a talk on Tuesday, March 27th. The lead architect of Cloudflare Workers, Kenton Varda, is going to lead a follow-up talk about edge computing on Wednesday, March 28th.
Event #1: Building for a tech audience: Great dev lessons for adventurous makers
Tuesday, March 27th: 18:00-20:00
Location: Cloudflare London - 25 Lavington St, Second floor | SE1 0NZ London
Creating software from scratch, although fun, can be time consuming and expensive. Marta and David, both developers at Typeform, will tell you why their teams built tools to make the lives of developers a little easier and what they learned along the way.
Highlights from Cloudflare’s Weekend at YHack
Along with four other Cloudflare colleagues, I traveled to New Haven, CT last weekend to support 1,000+ college students from Yale and beyond at YHack hackathon.
Throughout the weekend-long event, student attendees were supported by mentors, workshops, entertaining performances, tons of food and caffeine breaks, and a lot of air-mattresses and sleeping bags. Their purpose was to create projects to solve real world problems and to learn and have fun in the process.
How Cloudflare contributed
Cloudflare sponsored YHack. Our team of five wanted to support, educate, and positively impact the experience and learning of these college students. Here are some ways we engaged with students.
1. Mentoring
Our team of five mentors from three different teams and two different Cloudflare locations (San Francisco and Austin) was available at the Cloudflare table or via Slack for almost every hour of the event. There were a few hours in the early morning when all of us were asleep, I'm sure, but we were available to help otherwise.
2. Providing challenges
Cloudflare submitted two challenges to the student attendees, encouraging them to protect and improve the performance of their projects and/or create an opportunity for exposure to 6 million+ potential users of Continue reading
Highlights from Cloudflare’s Weekend at YHack
Along with four other Cloudflare colleagues, I traveled to New Haven, CT last weekend to support 1,000+ college students from Yale and beyond at YHack hackathon.
Throughout the weekend-long event, student attendees were supported by mentors, workshops, entertaining performances, tons of food and caffeine breaks, and a lot of air-mattresses and sleeping bags. Their purpose was to create projects to solve real world problems and to learn and have fun in the process.
How Cloudflare contributed
Cloudflare sponsored YHack. Our team of five wanted to support, educate, and positively impact the experience and learning of these college students. Here are some ways we engaged with students.
1. Mentoring
Our team of five mentors from three different teams and two different Cloudflare locations (San Francisco and Austin) was available at the Cloudflare table or via Slack for almost every hour of the event. There were a few hours in the early morning when all of us were asleep, I'm sure, but we were available to help otherwise.
2. Providing challenges
Cloudflare submitted two challenges to the student attendees, encouraging them to protect and improve the performance of their projects and/or create an opportunity for exposure to 6 million+ potential users of Continue reading