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Comment by jimhi | Hacker News Reader

Fantastic use of workers!

I added the ability to do captcha submissions from my site and send alerts to slack myself. I opted not to go the worker route as I found the language a bit hard to use and I could get the same effect with just javascript pulling other dynamic javascript hosted elsewhere.

(You can see an example with the submission form at the bottom of this page: https://mrsteinberg.com/how-to-kill-your-startup-co-founder-...)

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> Fantastic use of workers!

Well, when you think of Workers as Nginx, Squid, Memcached as-a-service, the possibilities simply present themselves. It is absolutely appalling that AWS has Lambda@Edge (relatively, uber expensive) and CloudFront Functions (uber lame) positioned against Workers.

Full-stack week starting today, and it is very likely that Cloudflare launch Container support for Workers: https://blog.cloudflare.com/full-stack-week-2021/

Let's see if Adam Selipsky announces anything compelling at re:invent aloof from their Lightsail initiatives which are priced similar to Cloudflare (and cheap only if you're running toy products atop, but not any SaaS-like services).

Thanks! I'd like to explore adding debugging and warning alerts in the future. Right now it's kind of hard to tell if anything is broken, short of going through the registration process myself. If you're pulling javascript hosted somewhere else to your site, doesn't that expose your slack API key?

I should have explained more. The javascript is dynamically created and hosted on S3. The keys, etc are safely on a server that runs to generate the file. I built this around the time Cloudflare first released workers, their documentation seems much less confusing now.

I'm having a hard time understanding how a file hosted on S3 can send a request to Slack without exposing your API key. Can you elaborate on that?

EDIT: guessing by the delay in response, someone just told all of HN they exposed their API key?

My understanding is that they used cloud functions. Code is being executed on someone else's server, not the client, so the keys don't have to be shared with the client.

That would be the logical solution, but "The javascript is dynamically created and hosted on S3. The keys, etc are safely on a server that runs to generate the file" sounds a lot like they have a server where they build a .js file that is capable of querying Slack, then store that file on S3 for the website to pull whenever someone registers. In that case, the client is pulling a .js file that probably has the Slack API key in it.

> I opted not to go the worker route as I found the language a bit hard to use and I could get the same effect with just javascript pulling other dynamic javascript hosted elsewhere

I'm confused by this since the default language for Workers is javascript. Do you mean their api is confusing?

Same question.

I answered above - looking at their site it appears there is much more documentation. It was hard to wrap my head around what it was doing / the APIs when I wrote this

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