Three Chapters at Cloudflare: Programmer to CTO to Board of Directors | Hacker News Reader

Three Chapters at Cloudflare: Programmer to CTO to Board of Directors

blog.cloudflare.com

148 pointsjgrahamc27 comments

All: we're going to bury this thread today, for unrelated (but legit) reasons. Sorry not to give a more satisfying explanation but it's not my place to do that this time.

That said, I totally missed this announcement in March and, since it never made HN's frontpage at the time, I imagine most of the community missed it too. Therefore I propose to arrange a repost when the time is right and we can have a HN party to celebrate jgrahamc. In the meantime, I guess, both belated and premature congratulations!

Thanks, dang. I asked for this to be deprioritized today because I love engaging here on HN and I am unable to because of a sudden personal emergency and I couldn't leave everyone hanging with my silence.

Congratulations John. Knowing you're on the board reassures me, given the amount of trust placed in Cloudflare by the internet at large.

Will your email still work when we have issues? I've used it with great success and gotten same-day fixes.

Kudos to JGC! <3

I've always loved reading his blog posts on his own site, and learning / using the wide variety of his projects (hello POPfile!, hello Make!) and interests (Analytical Engine!).

Thanks for your efforts to get the British Govt to apologize for their actions towards Alan Turing!

Well deserved promo, Sir!

Congrats on your non-retirement!

My personal Cloudflare pro/con list:

+ Keeps the web working at scale

+ Made me a lot of money in the stock market

- It's so very high-touch/sales-intensive. I want a tiered public price list that is universally adhered to. Otherwise there's always that nagging feeling that I'm getting screwed for not being aggressive enough, or something. I know I'm fighting an uphill battle here. See also this documentary about Jared Dunn/Ed Chambers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-CA2EW4Z_U

> Keeps the web working at scale

OTOH they also keep DDoS providers working at scale. Look for "stressers" or "booters" and check their DNS, 9 times out of 10 the attackers which Cloudflare offers to protect you from are themselves hiding behind Cloudflare.

This gets thrown around a bunch, but it always seemed like kind of an odd complaint to me? They're not actually pushing the DDoS traffic itself through cloudflare's network, or operating the botnet through it, are they? My assumption was that when people say this, they're referring to the webpage where you can buy the DDoS providers' services.

And for that, I mean, is it really a big deal that it's behind cloudflare? There are plenty of similar reverse proxy services, I assume they just used cloudflare because it's reliable and cheap (and as people in the business, they probably know that it's effective). Would it make a big difference if they didn't use a proxy- are people going to start ddosing the ddos providers?

> Would it make a big difference if they didn't use a proxy- are people going to start ddosing the ddos providers?

Well yeah, the DDoS providers are strongly incentivized to fire all of their spare capacity at each other to thin out the competition. It's just futile to do so when nearly every player in the game is fronted by one of the biggest DDoS mitigation services in the world, which consistently turns a blind eye.

Yes, the hosting policy seems to be a bit random and mostly based on what eastdakota/Matthew Prince decides. That's also a con/minus.

Somebody gotta sell shovels baby. And this feels unfair to expect a company to differentiate black vs white hats at scale, having tried to do the same at only an order or two of lower magnitude.

Hi John, do you think it would be a worthwhile completion of cloudflare’s mission to buy Google Chrome? And maybe also purchase the data pipeline?

Congrats John. Of all the roles in a company for a technical person I find member of the board to be the most complex.

Nice. If the helpdesk function still works, could you make the Cloudflare Stackoverflow captchas go away? Stackoverflow becomes unusable lately.

Aren't you taking credit for Lets-encrypt? 'doubling SSL /Universal SSL' . As I understand it, LETS-ENCRYPT was the one to democratize and liberate SSL from the commercial grip to the masses!! Right?? Maybe my knowledge base is flawed.

CF's "Universal SSL" allows you to proxy your site to a web server that only listens on port 80, not very common today but it was back then.

Where is Lee Lee Holloway now and how is he doing?

If you are not aware:

https://www.wired.com/story/lee-holloway-devastating-decline...

Hopefully he is at peace.

Wow. That's sad. Dementia is absolutely brutal on the family and friends.

From the linked Programmer blog [1]:

> It might seem lowly to be a Programmer, but in a world where so much is driven by computers there's nothing shameful in being the person who makes them go.

I find it interesting that in 2012 he thought the title of "Programmer" was shameful. In 2012 I was a somewhat recent grad and definitely more junior, at that time I thought programmers were the smartest folks at my company, exactly because they were "the [people] who make [computers] go".

[1] https://blog.jgc.org/2012/02/programmer.html

Perhaps we shouldn't celebrate a faceless mega-corporation (and their executives) that has the power to block individual people's (or rather their IP addresses') access to the Internet with no recourse to remedy the situation.

Anything new here besides what was announced in March?

Just having a big HN party I think :)

You also posted this at the time of announcement, back in March: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43497738

I wonder how this will impact the blog-driven engineering culture.

It never made HN's frontpage at the time so I'm delighted that he reposted it.

[flagged]

It isn't a dupe by HN standards because it didn't get significant attention last time round. (This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.)

In fact it didn't make the frontpage at all! and HN should definitely have a frontpage thread about this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com