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Comment by burntcaramel | Hacker News Reader

It’s quite frustrating as a Cloudflare fan to read many of their blog posts and just not understand what they are promoting.

This post is an example, where I’m a developer, I just want to get to the concrete nuts and bolts. But we start off at a very high level, the problem often sounds a bit generic, and then it zooms into an example I just don’t get, I don’t have anything to compare it to or a concrete, real world example.

I don’t know if the Cloudflare blog has an editor, but I feel it needs one. There’s a lot of posts and I feel I have to trawl through to find the nuggets. The actual work that is produced is great, I just often don’t get how it is told through the blog.

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This thread by Kenton Varda (one of the engineers on the Workers platform) explains it in different terms: https://twitter.com/KentonVarda/status/1524033314448891905

Put really concisely: you want to add serverless functions to your own SaaS platform. This is how you do it.

Expanded: Imagine (e.g.) a first-party Slack or Discord "Functions" offering, or a CRM tool (e.g. "Notion Functions") that allows you to consume + handle events directly as a user. Don't need to ask your users to sign up for, configure, maintain, (etc) $SERVERLESS_PLATFORM on their own, outside of your product. Give them an editor, do your own pre/post hooks, and plumb through relevant metadata that they can consume in their functions out-of-the-box.

(Disclaimer: work at Cloudflare, not on Workers, feedback on blog content is helpful)

Thank you, that tweet thread was really helpful. “Functions as a Service as a Service” maps it into familiar language I use today. Whereas “making every application on the Internet more programmable” sounds unrealistic (every application) and is pretty vague.

The latter is like an aspirational goal that the team has, which is fine if that’s what motivates you, but as a customer it’s not what motivates me. What motivates me is the problems I have.

“Making every application on the Internet more programmable” is actually a bit off-putting because it reminds me of the aggression of Microsoft and their "A computer on every desk and in every home." Bill Gates wrote it in internal memos. It’s not the words they used in their marketing campaigns.

My pithy advice for the blog would be: Keep the motivational quote on the team’s wall and in the team’s memo, and find out what customers have on their wall and are writing in their memos.

Glad that this sort of feedback on the blog is welcome, because it could be really good. Information architecture with the strange categories is another thing that’s confusing btw.

I agree with this post, I didn't really understand it. Eventually I read the Shopify example, which helps a little bit: let Shopify's users create their own programmable storefronts.

It reminds me a little bit of Stripe Connect. I need more examples.

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