How We Design Features for Wrangler, the Cloudflare Workers CLI

The most recent update to Wrangler, version 1.3.1, introduces important new features for developers building Cloudflare Workers — from built-in deployment environments to first class support for Workers KV. Wrangler is Cloudflare’s first officially supported CLI. Branching into this field of software has been a novel experience for us engineers and product folks on the Cloudflare Workers team.

As part of the 1.3.1 release, the folks on the Workers Developer Experience team dove into the thought process that goes into building out features for a CLI and thinking like users. Because while we wish building a CLI were as easy as our teammate Avery tweeted...

… it brings design challenges that many of us have never encountered. To overcome these challenges successfully requires deep empathy for users across the entire team, as well as the ability to address ambiguous questions related to how developers write Workers.

Wrangler, meet Workers KV

Our new KV functionality introduced a host of new features, from creating KV Continue reading

Writing an API at the Edge with Workers and Cloud Firestore

We’re super stoked about bringing you Workers.dev, and we’re even more stoked at every opportunity we have to dogfood Workers. Using what we create keeps us tuned in to the developer experience, which takes a good deal of guesswork out of drawing our roadmaps.

Our goal with Workers.dev is to provide a way to deploy JavaScript code to our network of 165 data centers without requiring developers to register a domain with Cloudflare first. While we gear up for general availability, we wanted to provide users an opportunity to reserve their favorite subdomain in a fair and consistent way, so we built a system to allow visitors to reserve a subdomain where their Workers will live once Workers.dev is released. This is the story of how we wrote the system backing that submission process.

Requirements

Of course, we always want to use the best tool for the job, so designing the Workers that would back Workers.dev started with an inventory of constraints and user experience expectations:

Constraints

1. We want to limit reservations to one per email address. It’s no fun if someone writes a bot to claim every good Workers subdomain in ten seconds; they Continue reading