Transgender Day of Visibility

My name is Kas. I’m a Cloudflare employee and I wanted to share my story with you on International Transgender Day of Visibility.

I've been different for as long as I can remember. I've been the odd one out not just for the time I've spent in tech, but most of my life.

I'm transgender in that I am gender non-binary. I'm working with the word 'agender' right now, as it is the word that describes me best: I'm not a woman, or a man, just a human. I don't really have a gender, and I certainly don't identify with either binary label.

Being transgender in tech is difficult. There are many times where we have to work harder, smarter, and give up so much to stay afloat. Times where you have to weigh the benefits of correcting your pronouns against the title of the person who is to be corrected (are they a customer? Your bosses' bosses' boss?). Times where you don't know if you can even be 'out' with your coworkers, because you just don't know if, or how, they'll treat you differently, or fairly.

Being agender or outside the Continue reading

Solving Problems with Serverless – The Cloudflare LED Data Center Board, Part I

You know you have a cool job when your first project lets you bring your hobby into the office.

That’s what happened to me just a few short weeks ago when I joined Cloudflare. The task: to create a light-up version of our Data Center map – we’re talking more than a hundred LEDs tied to the deployment state of each and every Cloudflare data center. This map will be a part of our booths, so it has to be able to travel; meaning we have to consider physical shipping and the ability to update the data when the map is away from the office. And the fun part – we are debuting it at SF Developer Week in late February (I even get to give a talk about it!) That gave me one week of software time in our San Francisco office, and a little over two and a half in the Austin office with the physical materials.

So what does this have to do with Serverless? Well, let’s think about where and how this map will need to operate: This will be going to Continue reading