# How fast is your CDN

Date: 7 March 2026

Summary: Static assets are all you need; build less.

Canonical HTML: https://irvyn.us/writing/why-this-site-is-small/

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. They are fetched through a same-origin Worker endpoint and then cached aggressively so the page stays cheap to serve.

The HTML page includes live sidecar cards for napkin-math and CloudPing data. Agents should use the static source text here and the linked endpoints only if live values are needed.



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.