CloudFlare hiring Go programmers in London and San Francisco

Are you familiar with the Go programming language and looking for a job in San Francisco or London? Then think about applying to CloudFlare. We're looking for people with experience writing Go in both locations.

CC BY-SA 2.0 by Yuko Honda (cropped, resized)

CloudFlare uses Go extensively to build our service and we need to people to build and maintain those systems. We've written a complete DNS server in Go, our Railgun service is all Go and we're moving more and more systems to Go programs.

We've recently written about our open source Red October Go project for securing secrets, and open-sourced our CFSSL Go-based PKI package. Go is now making its way into our data pipeline and be used for processing huge amounts of data.

We even have a Go-specific section on our GitHub.

If you're interested in working in Go on a high-performance global network like CloudFlare, send us an email.

Not into Go? We're hiring for all sorts of other positions and technologies.

Experimenting with mozjpeg 2.0

One of the services that CloudFlare provides to paying customers is called Polish. Polish automatically recompresses images cached by CloudFlare to ensure that they are as small as possible and can be delivered to web browsers as quickly as possible.

We've recently rolled out a new version of Polish that uses updated techniques (and was completely rewritten from a collection of programs into a single executable written in Go). As part of that rewrite we looked at the performance of the recently released mozjpeg 2.0 project for JPEG compression.

To get a sense of its performance (both in terms of compression and in terms of CPU usage) when compared to libjpeg-turbo I randomly selected 10,000 JPEG images (totaling 2,564,135,285 bytes for an average image size of about 256KB) cached by CloudFlare and recompressed them using the jpegtran program provided by libjpeg-turbo 1.3.1 and mozjpeg 2.0. The exact command used in both cases was:

jpegtran -outfile out.jpg -optimise -copy none in.jpg

Of the 10,000 images in cache, mozjpeg 2.0 failed to make 691 of them any smaller compared with 3,471 for libjpeg-turbo. So mozjpeg 2.0 was significantly better at recompressing images.

On average Continue reading

Courage to change things

This was an internal email that I sent to the CloudFlare team about how we are not afraid to throw away old code. We thought it was worth sharing with a wider audience.

Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2014 10:24:21 +0100
Subject: Courage to change things
From: John Graham-Cumming
To: Everyone

Folks,

At the Q3 planning meeting I started by making some remarks about how much
code we are changing at CloudFlare. I understand that there were audio
problems and people may not have heard these clearly, so I'm just going to
reiterate them in writing.

One of the things that CloudFlare is being brave about is looking at old code
and deciding to rewrite it. Lots of companies live with legacy code and build
on it and it eventuallybecomes a maintenance nightmare and slows the company
down.

Over the last year we've made major strides in rewriting parts of our code
base so that they are faster, more maintainable, and easier to enhance. There
are many parts of the Q3 roadmap that include replacing old parts of our
stack. This is incredibly important as it enables us to be more agile and 
more stable in future.

We should feel good  Continue reading