Making magic: Reimagining Developer Experience for the World of Serverless

Today I’m going to talk about TTFD, or time to first dopamine, and announce a huge improvement to the Workers development experience — wrangler dev.

This week we’ve talked about how Workers provides a step function improvement in the TTFB (time to first byte) of applications, by running lightweight isolates in over 200 cities around the world, free of cold starts. Today I’m going to talk about another metric, one that’s arguably even more important: TTFD, or time to first dopamine, and announce a huge improvement to the Workers development experience — wrangler dev, our edge-based development environment with all the perks of a local environment.

There’s nothing quite like the rush of getting your first few lines of code to work — no matter how many times you’ve done it before, there's something so magical about the computer understanding exactly what you wanted it to do and doing it!

This is the kind of magic I expected of “serverless”, and while it’s true that most serverless offerings today get you to that feeling faster than setting up a virtual server ever would, I still can’t help but be disappointed with how lackluster developing with most serverless platforms is today.

Some of my disappointment can be attributed to the leaky nature of the abstraction: the journey to getting you to the point of writing code is drawn out by forced decision making about servers (regions, memory allocation, etc). Servers, however, are not the only thing holding developers back from getting to the delightful magical feeling in the serverless world today.

The “serverless” experience on AWS Lambda today looks like this: between configuring the right access policy to invoke my own test application, and deciding whether an HTTP or REST API was better suited for my needs, 30 minutes had easily passed, and I still didn’t have a URL I could call to invoke my application. I did, however, spin up five different services, and was already worrying about cleaning them up lest I be charged for them.

That doesn’t feel like magic!

In building what we believe to be the serverless platform of the future — a promise that feels very magical — we wanted to bring back that magical feeling to every step of the development journey. If serverless is about empowering developers, then they should be empowered every step of the way: from proof of concept to MVP and beyond.

We’re excited to share with you today our approach to making our developer experience delightful — we recognize we still have plenty of room to continue to grow and innovate (and we can’t wait to tell you about everything we have currently in the works as well!), but we’re proud of all the progress we’ve made in making Workers the easiest development platform for developers to use.

Defining “developer experience”

To get us started, let’s look at what the journey of a developer entails. Today, we’ll be defining the user experience as the following four stages:

• Getting started: All the steps we have to take before putting in some keystrokes
• Iteration: Does my code do what I expect it to do? What do I need to do to get it there?
• Release: I’ve tested what I can -- time to hit the big red button!
• Observe: Is anything broken? And how do I fix it?

When approaching each stage of development, we wanted to reimagine the experience, the way that we’ve always wanted our development flow to work, and fix places along the way where existing platforms have let us down.

serverless week serverless wrangler developers cloudflare workers

Today, we’re excited to announce support for Python, Scala, Kotlin, Reason and Dart. You can build applications on Cloudflare Workers using your favorite language starting today. We initially launched Cloudflare Workers with support for JavaScript and languages that compile to WebAssembly, such as Rust, C, and C++. Since then, Cloudflare and the community have improved the usability of Typescript on Workers. But we haven't talked much about the many other popular languages that compile to JavaScript. Today, we’re excited to announce support for Python, Scala, Kotlin, Reason and Dart.

Cloudflare is a security company, and the heart of Workers is, in my view, a security project. Running code written by third parties is always a scary proposition, and the primary concern of the Workers team is to make that safe. Cloudflare is a security company, and the heart of Workers is, in my view, a security project. Running code written by third parties is always a scary proposition

This article covers A-Z about the mobile and web app development process and answers your question on how long does it take to develop/build an app.

For a developer, becoming a team leader can be a trap or open up opportunities for creating software. Two years ago, when I was a developer, ... by Oleg Sklyarov, Fullstack Developer at Skyeng company

Learn how to create a serverless guestbook using Cloudflare Workers. In this stream, Kristian walks through: * Creating a new Workers project * Deploying the Workers project to Cloudflare * Building a template with Alpine.js * Creating a submission form with HTML and JavaScript * Using Cloudflare KV to store guestbook submissions