Ben Fathi: Why I Joined CloudFlare

I’m sure some of you are scratching your head right about now wondering why I would join an Internet security and optimization company. But, Ben, this is not even close to your passion: operating systems.

I had the same reaction when I first saw the CloudFlare website. I wasn’t even sure it made sense for me to go interview here. After taking a closer look, however, I realized that it would be the perfect new home for me. Take a look at this page for a brief introduction to what CloudFlare does and how we do it.

Interviewing at CloudFlare

If you know me, you know that I'm a sucker for distributed systems. I fall for a hard computer science problem every time. So, it shouldn’t be a surprise to you that CloudFlare’s John Graham-Cumming, had me at “hello” when he nonchalantly described one of the company's projects: a globally distributed key value store with sub-second consistency guarantees! Ho hum! No big deal.

As the interview process progressed, the team graciously spent several hours walking me through the architecture as well as future plans and product roadmaps. These discussions and email exchanges were frequently interrupted by my cries of protest: Continue reading