Writing
How fast is your CDN
Static assets are all you need; build less.
In the days where it is so easy to build things, its nice to build less. Sometimes there is software that comes along that makes you realise how slow and bloated the internet is becomming. Some notable examples are Zed, Linear, Planetscale, Turbopuffer etc (not just their websites) - They all do something but its clear they care about the product and it's performance. Unlike many other examples.
I think this pattern will become more common, engineers can now build by just asking a few questions and sending off some prompts - systems they have no business in building and often don't match the problems and use-case.
The skill now in software engineering isn't just deep technical knowledge, but also understanding what to add to the product to deliever value and what NOT to build.
Things that I think about:
These are sidecar references rather than core page payload. They load after the page renders, but they mirror the kind of throughput, latency, and region-to-region tradeoffs we should all think about. Also this tech is absurd, Im using the internets global security provider to scrape two sites (cloudflare normally prevents people from scraping now they help you do it....) It might break or they might sunset the product but for now its really cool.
Napkin math Pulled from the latest sirupsen/napkin-math data through a same-origin Worker endpoint. When Browser Rendering is available on Cloudflare it uses that native scrape path; otherwise it falls back to a direct source fetch.
Loading the current upstream numbers table.
CloudPing Europe Pulled from CloudPing data, filtered to European AWS regions only, and shown as p50 plus p99 for the current 1 day window. When Browser Rendering is available on Cloudflare it scrapes from the site context; otherwise it falls back to the public latency endpoint.
Loading the Europe-only latency matrix.
On /edge, you can inspect what Cloudflare sees about the current request: colo, protocol, TLS, ASN, ISP, and whatever else is available on that connection. I find it pretty cool that this is exposed easily, it also helps if you are curious about your ISP or routing.