After many announcements from Platform Week, we’re thrilled to make one more: our Spring Developer Challenge!

The theme for this challenge is building real-time, collaborative applications — one of the most exciting use-cases emerging in the Cloudflare ecosystem. This is an opportunity for developers to merge their ideas with our newly released features, earn recognition on our blog, and take home our best swag yet.

Here’s a list of our tools that will get you started:

• Workers can either be powerful middleware connecting your app to different APIs and an origin — or it can be the entire application itself. We recommend using Worktop, a popular framework for Workers, if you need TypeScript support, routing, and well-organized submodules. Worktop can also complement your existing app even if it already uses a framework,  such as Svelte.

• Cloudflare Pages makes it incredibly easy to deploy sites, which you can make into truly dynamic apps by putting a Worker in front or using the Pages Functions (beta).

• Durable Objects are great for collaborative apps because you can use websockets while coordinating state at the edge, seen in this chat demo. To help scale any load, we also recommend Durable Object Groups.

• Workers KV provides a global key-value data store that securely stores and quickly serves data across Cloudflare’s network. R2 allows you to store enormous amounts of data without trapping you with costly egress services.

Last year, our Developer Spotlight series highlighted how developers around the world built entire applications on Cloudflare. Our Discord server maintained that momentum with users demonstrating that any type of application can be built. Need a way to organize thousands of lines of JSON? JSON Hero, built with Remix and deployed with Workers, provides an incredibly readable UI for your JSON files. Trying to deploy a GraphQL server for your app that scales? helix-flare deploys a GraphQL server easily through Workers and uses Durable Objects to coordinate data.

We hope developers continue to explore the boundaries of what they can build on Cloudflare as our platform evolves. During our Summer Developer Challenge in 2021, we received over 1,200 submissions that revealed you can build almost any app imaginable with Workers, Pages, and the rest of the developer ecosystem. We sent out hundreds of swag boxes to participants, to show our appreciation. The ensuing unboxing videos on Twitter and YouTube thrilled our team.

This year’s Spring Developer Challenge is all about making real-time, collaborative apps such as chat rooms, games, web-based editing tools, or anything else in your imagination! Here are the rules:

This year’s Spring Developer Challenge is all about making real-time, collaborative apps such as chat rooms, games, web-based editing tools, or anything else in your imagination! Here are the rules:

• You must be at least 18 years old to participate

• You can work in teams of up to 10 people per submission

• The deadline to submit your repo is May 24 June 7

Enter the challenge by going to this site.

As you build your app, join our Discord if you or your team need any help. We will be enthusiastically reviewing submissions, promoting them on Twitter, and sending out swag boxes.

If you’re new to Cloudflare or have an exciting idea as a developer, this is your opportunity to see how far our platform has evolved and get rewarded for it!

Today we’re launching the Cloudflare Developer Expert Program: an initiative to support and recognize our VIP users who build with Workers, Pages, and the entire Cloudflare developer ecosystem.

A Cloudflare Developer Expert is an early adopter of new releases, a frequent participant in feedback sessions, and an evangelist for Cloudflare products made for the larger developer community.

But first, what are the benefits of becoming a Cloudflare Developer Expert?

• Early access to features (e.g., private betas)

• Admission to a private community of power users

• Routine calls with product managers, engineers, and developer advocates

• Sponsorships for OSS work

• Our best swag, of course

We have already sent invites to our first batch of power users, but if you’d like to join or want to nominate a developer, please fill out this form.

We ship very quickly at Cloudflare.

This is because we want feedback early in development, allowing users to challenge our assumptions and validate what we’re building. In the Workers team, this strategy has been very successful.

For example, we began beta testing custom builds for Wrangler (our CLI tool) that allow you to run any JavaScript bundler you want. This was a huge release because it introduced the ES Modules syntax for the first time in Workers, significantly increasing the number of usable JavaScript packages and libraries. To get feedback before public release, we opened a private Discord channel and invited around 50 users for testing.

We were blown away by the feedback.

Our users quickly discovered edge cases that weren’t working, such as needing support for Workers Unbound. This made it easy for us to prioritize what to fix before GA. We also discovered actionable steps to improve documentation.

“The Workers team wanted our input early on for such a big release, and it really shows how seriously they’re taking developer experience,” said James Ross, CTO of Nodecraft.

After seeing the success of this small group of users, we figured it was time to make this a regular part of development.

We threw together a list of users, sent NDAs, and opened a private Discord channel for one of our biggest releases of the year: running functions directly on Cloudflare Pages.

“We’re able to ship this feature more quickly and confidently because of feedback in our Discord,” said Nevi Shah, product manager for Cloudflare Pages. “Users let us know quickly what can be better and what features they need first.”

Back in April, we launched our first Developer Week with a central focus: how to get developers to build more on Cloudflare. This included exciting releases like Cloudflare Pages and the Durable Objects open beta.

Since then, after receiving so much feedback in our Discord and other channels, we learned developers either expect their code to automatically run on Cloudflare’s infrastructure (Cloudflare Pages), or, if it’s a new technology (such as Durable Objects) they want as much direct guidance as possible to reliably get up and running. We realized involving users earlier in development allowed us to support more happy paths.

And since developers like doing things their own way, we aim to support as many happy paths as possible on our platform.

“I started developing with Cloudflare Workers shortly after it was announced. Over that time, Cloudflare has only increased its emphasis on developer experience,” said David Barratt, staff software engineer at Drizly. “The Cloudflare Developer Expert Program has been a fantastic way to have a quick feedback loop between the developers who have a lot of experience using the platform and the developers building that platform.”

If you are a developer who deploys with Workers, Pages, and our other tools, we want you to apply! We’re hoping to review applicants with experience deploying to production with our developer tools.

And again, Cloudflare Developer Experts get special, special care from our team.

To apply for the Cloudflare Developer Expert Program, fill out this form.

We released Cloudflare Workers three years ago, making edge compute accessible to the masses with native support for the world’s most ubiquitous language — JavaScript.

The Workers platform has transformed so much since its launch. Developers can not only write sandboxed code at our edge, they can also store data at the edge with Workers KV and, more recently, coordinate state within our giant network using Durable Objects. Now, we’re excited to share our support of an 11 year old technology that’s still going strong: Node.js.

Node.js made a breakthrough by enabling developers to build both the frontend and the backend with a single language. It took JavaScript beyond the browser and into the server by using Chrome’s JavaScript engine, V8.

Workers is also built on V8 Isolates and empowers developers in a similar way by allowing you to create entire applications with only JavaScript — except your code runs across Cloudflare’s data centers in over 100 countries.

There is nothing more satisfying than importing a library and watching your code magically work out-of-the-box.

For over 20k packages, Workers supports this magic already: any Node.js package that uses webpack or another polyfill bundler runs within our environment today. You can get started with the greatest hits packages like node-jose for encryption, itty-router for routing, graphql for querying your API, and so much more.

And rather than finding out by trial and error, we made a catalogue of libraries that you can rely on. All you have to do is pick one and boom: it runs.

Once you select a package, you can use webpack to bundle it all up with our wrangler CLI and deploy onto Workers. Webpack is a module bundler that takes your JavaScript files, including third-party dependencies, and makes them usable in the browser.

For an example of bundling dependencies in action, see this example of getting started with Gatsby.

Using webpack can get you far, but that can cause the Worker to exceed the size limit quickly. Node.js was designed with the assumption that servers, unlike the client, are amenable to code bloat, resulting in an ecosystem of packages that are generous in size.

We plan to support raising the 1MB size limit for Workers soon, so users don’t have to worry about the size of their dependencies. Please share what you’re building in the Workers Unbound channel of our Discord if you’d like that limit raised.

But why stop there? We want to go even further and support the most important modules, even if they do rely on native code. Our approach will be to reimplement supported modules and polyfill package functionality directly into the Workers runtime. This doesn’t mean we’re shifting our runtime to run on Node.js. In fact, here are two important security and design reasons why we are not:

• Node.js was not designed to be a sandbox, which was made apparent by their vm module that says “do not use it to run untrusted code.”

• For proper sandboxing, Node.js would’ve forced us to build a container-based runtime that both doesn’t scale and isn’t as performant as Isolates. Without containers, we were able to design a system that has 0ms cold starts.

However, there are other ways we can be Node.js compatible without necessarily supporting the entire runtime. What’s up first? We’ll support Stripe.js SDK and Twilio Client JS SDK. We’ll also build support for the net module, so you can run popular database libraries.

But we want to hear from you! We created a leadership board for you to vote on which popular libraries/APIs matter the most. Are statistics packages your jam? Do you need an email utility? What about a templating engine? We want to hear directly from you.

We won’t stop until our users can import popular Node.js libraries seamlessly. This effort will be large-scale and ongoing for us, but we think it’s well worth it.

We’re excited to support developers as they build all types of applications. We look forward to hearing from you!

The Cloudflare Workers team is excited to announce the opening of our Discord channel! You can join right away by going here.

Through our Discord channel, you can now connect with the team to ask questions, show off what you’re building, and discuss the platform with other developers.

Sometimes you just need to talk to another human being. Our developer docs will always be the source of truth on the mechanics of Workers, but we want to provide quicker help if you need it.

Over the past three years, Cloudflare Workers evolved from an initial sandbox for enterprise customers writing edge code to a developer platform for creating new applications and systems.

“We bet our whole business on Workers and it paid off big time,” said Hamlet Batista, CEO of RankSense, a SEO automation platform. “We've been saving a lot of money on infrastructure costs and DevOps resources we no longer need.”

Our team is constantly surprised by the palette of use cases from those developing on Workers. For example, a developer in Belgium created a static Workers site that teaches an online tutorial in three different languages on how to make your own face mask, which earned the approval of the Belgian government.

Discord provides a medium that allows users to openly share their thoughts while maintaining anonymity. It’s also really fast — partially due to Discord’s use of Workers and Cloudflare’s network.

“Workers are in the path of virtually all Discord requests,” said Mark Smith, Director of Infrastructure at Discord. “We are longtime users of Workers and big fans of the power and flexibility they give us to continue building great things for our users.”

As we continue to build the ecosystem of developer tools, we’d love to hear what you’re building, whether it’s a personal site of your pet or an API gateway. Come say hi today.