Ben Fathi: Why I Joined CloudFlare | Hacker News Reader

Ben Fathi: Why I Joined CloudFlare

blog.cloudflare.com

26 pointsjgrahamc15 comments

Come on cloudflare, that is pretty weak, the CF posts are normally informative and well written. It seems like a third of the way through you just gave up and stopped pretending that any of it was actually about Ben.

Cloudflare posts to HN should be in the same category as post about YC companies that are hiring. Ads. No voting.

It is difficult to believe that CF does not have a "special relationship" with YC, give PG's close ties to Project Honeypot, the precursor to Cloudflare. Nothing wrong with that.

And one could argue even the "informative and well-written" posts are always done with a purpose: recruit developers. These blog posts almost always read like a PR piece described in PG's "Submarine" essay. Again, that's fine.

But they also get promoted to the first page on HN with uncanny efficiency.

Sorry to break this to you. CloudFlare posts get upvoted on HN because people like them, not because of any special relationship.

Was PG involved with Project Honeypot? I wasn't aware of that.

But yes, recruiting is a very important reason why we write very detailed, useful and informative blog posts and open source a large amount of code.

You do normally write very detailed, useful and informative posts. With all due respect that is not what we have in front of us today. I will be honest, after finishing "the article" I have no idea why Mr. Fathi joined cloudflare; nothing in the article sounds like the genuine thoughts or emotions of an actual employee and using his name for such a thinly veiled advertisement sort of dehumanizes him.

When you imagine the candidates that you want to attract and hire do you think that they will believe that these are Ben's actual words?

Is there a set of questions you'd particularly like to see answered? I'd be happy to ask Ben and maybe there could be a followup, or just post them here.

(I do agree this post was pretty light on content. I think it's because he and everyone else is busy. Bio Q&A posts are second to funding announcements in inherent boringness, though -- so you could also just wait until there's a more substantive post about e.g. the new KV store or luajit optimizations or something from engineering -- although there's also generally a desire to have the individual engineers who worked on a project post about it, rather than the head of engineering.)

I think I missed the context on who Ben Fathi is. Can anyone fill me in?

https://www.linkedin.com/pub/ben-fathi/3/950/b32

"It's all out there today – and it’s already processing more than five percent of all web requests. "

5% of internet traffic is going through this centralized party? And it is growing? That sounds fucking scary to me.

I hope in the future some tools develop which allow evading the DDOS attacks in some more decentralized way, without relying on trusted party. Of course that is going to be difficult (impossible?), if you want the data to be encrypted.

So is he joining as CTO or some level of director/SVP/VP? He seems pretty technical

Head of Engineering

https://twitter.com/jgrahamc/status/658608552328626176

I feel a bit sorry that Cloudflare, the epitome of scrappy and smart now has 200 employees, and is doing some kind of googlesque project.

What the distributed KV store? We need that to provide our service.

Sorry, that was looking like a new product sold as is. Did I also misunderstand the headcount inflation?

Nope. We're not selling that as a service. We need to replicate configuration very fast around the world (e.g. a DNS change) and so we are building a new KV store since we've looked at the others out there (and what we are using today) and have decided a new thing is needed.

I'm not sure what you mean by "headcount inflation". CloudFlare is profitable and needs a lot of people.

Awesome!

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