“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.”― Confucius

Don’t tell our CEO, Matthew Prince, but the first day I interviewed at Cloudflare I had a $9.00 phone in my pocket, a knock-off similar to a Nokia 5140, but the UI was all in Chinese characters—that phone was a fitting symbol for my technical prowess. At that time in my career I could send emails and use Google, but that was about the extent of my tech skill set. The only code I’d ever seen was in the Matrix, Apple computers confused me, and I was working as a philosophy lecturer at The University of California, Santa Cruz. So, you know, I was pretty much the ideal candidate for a deeply technical, Silicon Valley startup.

This was in 2013. I had just returned from two years of Peace Corps service in the far Southwest of China approaching the Himalayan plateau. That experience gave me the confidence to walk into Cloudflare’s office knowing that I would be good for the job despite the gaps in my knowledge. My early training in philosophy plus my Peace Corps service gave me a blueprint for learning and figuring things out when thrown into the deep end (it turns out that I love being thrown into the deep end and learning to swim).

I had no idea that this first meeting with Matthew would eventually lead me back to China, this time riding on the cloud of a fast-growing Silicon Valley tech giant.

Two years earlier, eighty Peace Corps Volunteers and myself landed in the capital of Sichuan province, Chengdu. The vast majority of us, myself included, spoke zero Mandarin and only knew about China from books and a few news snippets here and there. The Chinese staff members that greeted us at the Peace Corps China headquarters on the Sichuan University campus affectionately called us “baby pandas”, because we were cute and fairly incompetent in terms of operating in China.  

Our mission was to help China meet its need for trained men and women—specifically to teach college level students English and train qualified Teachers of English as a foreign language instructors (TEFL instructors). We were also there to promote a better understanding of Americans abroad, and to do our best to gain some understanding of China and its people.

Thus began two years of deep learning and profound personal growth.

When I think about the most important aspects of my time in China, there are three fundamentals that I come back to:

• The importance of learning the language and culture

• The importance of 关系 (guanxi) or personal connections and relationships

• The necessity of being resourceful

The most successful Peace Corps volunteers in my cohort were the ones that learned to speak Mandarin well, understood enough about Chinese culture to operate effectively in their schools and communities, had built important personal and professional relationships, and had figured out how to survive in Southwest China and be useful as English language resources and American cultural liaisons. There was a steep learning curve.

Peace Corps Service in China has four phases more or less. Phase one, Pre Service Training (PST), took place at Sichuan University. We were all living with Chinese host families, taking 8-9 hours of Mandarin class each day, learning about Chinese culture, and being trained as TEFL instructors. It is an intense period of learning against a backdrop of tremendous culture shock, jet lag, and general confusion of how to be an American in Southwest China.

After three months of well taught crash courses, I was sent out to the college where I would spend the next two years of my service. That first night, after I unpacked my bags and took a shower, the reality of my life decisions came crashing down. This was going to be *very* hard. I was alone with millions and millions of Chinese people in remote Sichuan. Phase two was about to begin.

This is Yibin (宜宾), the city I lived in for two years. A small city in China of just 5,000,000 people right on the Yangzi river. Photo taken from the countryside looking towards the center of town.

Getting familiar with the college where I was to spend two years was another steep learning curve. I was introduced to the colleagues I’d be teaching with as well as the school administrators, and, most importantly, I was introduced to my students. I got lucky, the English department at my school was small, and I only had 20-30 students in each of my classes. I met with them 4 times a week for two hours a day, so I had ample time to really get to know them and work with them one-on-one in the classroom, during office hours, and over spicy Sichuan dinners.

Me and a few of my top students.

That first year of service I studied Mandarin as if my life depended on it—because it sort of did. Few people, i.e. my students and colleagues, spoke English in rural Sichuan. As I was able to communicate better in Mandarin, my understanding of the culture grew and so did my relationships with folks at my school and community.

In an effort to understand more about the culture I was living in, I gave myself an education in Chinese philosophy starting with Confucius (孔子) and the Daoist like Laozi (老子) and Zhuangzi (庄子), and I also looked into Buddhism. Since the world’s wisdom traditions contain universal principles that transcend time and culture, these readings gave me subtle insights into the Chinese way of life. I learned that Confucianism is the invisible glue holding much of Chinese society together. And while Confucius spoke to Chinese society and how people ought to act, his contemporary, Laozi, considered the founder of Daoism, spoke to the Chinese soul via the Dao de Jing (道德经).

Apropos of philosophy, one beautiful Chinese proverb I found in my reading goes: “Only those who take leisurely what the rest of the world is concerned about, can be concerned about with the rest of the world takes leisurely”. A calligraphy artist at my school gifted me a piece of work expressing this:

I also learned early on in my service what my students needed: authentic opportunities to express themselves in English, understanding and encouragement, and a solid English text book that employed the latest pedagogical techniques for learning a foreign language. Since my Mandarin was slow going, my students had all sorts of authentic opportunities to speak to me in English. They ended up helping me translate a lot that first year as I navigated my life on campus. As for encouragement, I would often talk to them in my developing and broken Mandarin in front of the class. I messed up words and tones constantly, and they laughed (hard) and then kindly corrected me. In this way, I showed them that learning is all about making mistakes, and that it is fine to get it wrong as you begin. There is no other way to learn a language (or anything else). The last part, providing a solid textbook, would be more tricky.

I received enough training during PST to have some good ideas for teaching English as a foreign language, but I had no experience writing a language textbook. What I ended up doing was replicating the structure of the textbooks I was using to learn Mandarin: a dialogue which incorporates a few new vocab words, a list of those new vocab words, grammar practice using grammatical structures from the dialogue, and then photos of relevant objects or scenes that would allow students to use new vocabulary words to describe the photos using new words and structures. I would record these dialogues and then distribue the audio file to my students so they could hear my pronunciation.

We’d work with this dialogue, vocabulary, and grammar all week, then on Fridays I’d put them in a “language line”. Sort of like speed dating, but they would have to hold a conversation with their classmates around the topic of that week and use the new vocab words. I’d listen in and help guide them. Then at the end of class, we’d form a line and I’d ask each one of them a question individually that they had to answer before they could leave the classroom. This pushed each student into learning so that they could actually speak English confidently to a native English speaker. It was a rewarding project.

My mom sent Halloween candy for my students in October. They were *very* excited.

My students were super smart and diligent, and week after week their English level was going up. I was able to hold natural conversations with them while speaking slow, and my Mandarin was progressing to the point that I could clarify things in Mandarin to aid their English learning. And so I learned how to teach English.

I consider all of the second year of service phase three. It is in that second year that volunteers can do really great work. My language level was high enough to really communicate with my community and explore China more, I had a basic structure for teaching and kept honing it to fit the needs of my students, and I developed a lot of really important relationships with the administrators at my school and other wonderful folks in the area.

Phase four is the return to the US. Something that no one told me about Peace Corps service before I joined is that you actually sign up for three years, not two. And that the third year, the first year back home after service, would be the most challenging by far … readjusting to life in the US, starting up or continuing a career, feeling a million miles behind peers who cranked through two extra years in a work world. All of this while trying to work on one of the most important goals of the Peace Corps—Goal 3—helping Americans better understand China through my experiences. I’m doing this every chance I get. This blog is a part of fulfilling Goal 3.

Me and my good friend, 兵哥, goofing around in the Sichuan countryside after a long bike ride.

My service in China impacted me in profound ways. I have a love and respect for China that was born of close contact with the wonderful people, culture, philosophy, and language I was steeped in. And it gave me a clear experience of my ability to grow and change and acquire new skills swiftly. By the end of my time, I could confidently hold a conversation in Mandarin, I could read sections of Chinese newspapers, I had written an English text book for my students, and I made so many friends. All of that came from slow, diligent, hard work—and finding the necessary resources to get things done for my students in non-obvious ways. I had a clearly outlined experience of what diligence and time can do, and I knew deep in me is the potential to learn, adapt, and grow into almost anything.

Two years of remote Peace Corps work (which, despite being among millions of Chinese people, is often an isolating experience) gave me ample time to reflect on my life. While I find teaching deeply rewarding and I love the study of philosophy, I felt that I needed a different pool to swim in than academia. I thought that the private sector would likely offer the most opportunity, so when I came back to the US, I decided to move to San Francisco and aim for a job in tech. I figured that would be like plunging into the ocean, and I was keen to see where the global economic currents might take me.

In the first few weeks I was back in the US I set up 4-5 informational interviews each week. I spoke to people at Google and Square, folks working in event planning, in finance, in HR, in construction, etc. Then one of my colleagues at the university mentioned that their friend (Matthew) had a tech startup called “Cloudflare” and could maybe use some help writing stuff. I followed up right away.

Despite hours of Googling “What is a Cloudflare?”, I was utterly and completely out of my depth when Matthew explained to me what the company does. Before my interview with him, I had done my homework memorizing definitions for acronyms like CDN, DNS, DDoS, and API, but I didn’t really know what they were. The instructions I received before the interview were to learn a bit about how Cloudflare works, and “Don't wear a suit and tie”. This was a time in Cloudflare history when we had about 60 employees, about 30 data centers, and a bit of duct tape in the office pressing extension cords into the carpet.  

I was intimidated speaking to Matthew the first time. He is an amazingly accomplished and incredibly intelligent person. I checked out his LinkedIn profile, and I didn’t know anything about SPAM, law school, business school, being an entrepreneur, or how the Internet works. The folks in Peace Corps China always talked about being resourceful, so I looked for and found an opportunity to connect with him on a level that I could grasp. Matthew, who has unbelievable credentials and professional accolades, still has “Ski Instructor” on his LinkedIn profile somewhere between “Adjunct Professor of Law” and “Harvard Business School”:

I had just spent all of my time in China aiming to build relationships with my students and other people in my community that were from vastly different backgrounds and trying to find common ground from which to build rapport and trust. I thought, if someone this accomplished keeps their ski instructor experience on their resume, it must have a lot of meaning. I’m glad I followed that intuition because this topic led to a great conversation with Matthew about hometowns, ski trips, and ski equipment, which eventually lead to a conversation about surfing and surfboards, which is right in my wheelhouse. It turned out to be a great interview because we connected over things that we both found important. We found a piece of common ground that didn’t seem obvious at first---part of that being a deep curiosity for how and why things work. Looking back five years, I can say without reservation that finding a way to connect with Matthew that day has had a profoundly positive impact on the course of my life.

When it came time for me to interview with our co-founder, Michelle, she understood that I had a lot to learn about the company, and she took the time to draw out a simplified map of Cloudflare’s network on a yellow legal pad. She drew jagged, little clouds around the world and patiently explained what global caching is, how Anycast networking helps with DDoS attacks, and how DNS is like the phone book of the Internet. I was struck that such a highly intelligent person, HBS grad, co-founder of a major tech firm would take time out of their busy day to do this. I learned later that Michelle is always like this. She is amazing with names, stops to talk to folks in the office whenever she can, and sets a tone of respect, compassion, and understanding at the office. It is inspiring.

I then had a video interview with John Graham-Cumming, our CTO, who was in London. There was no getting away from tech with this interview. So I Googled everything I could about John. I read his book Geek Atlas, I watched his TED Talk, and I looked into his interest in Movie Code. I was ready for this interview. We talked about the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia, Alan Turing, and about the code in the Matrix (thank you, Neo!). John is a fascinating speaker and a legend in the technology space. He is also kind and patient, and he never made me feel silly for not grasping technical concepts right away.

After 6-7 interviews over the following weeks, the feedback I got was that I was a good culture fit, I was hard-working and smart, but I just didn’t have the technical knowledge to do the job. That feedback seemed spot on, but I wasn’t going to let that hold me back. I knew I could be useful to this company. I knew that if they gave me a shot and threw me into the deep end that I would learn to swim. I knew what I needed to do: learn the language and culture of Silicon Valley, make connections, and be resourceful.

I stood outside of the old Cloudflare office at 665 3rd St. in San Francisco, and I told myself that I have to get in that door. I didn’t know exactly what they are doing in there, but it seemed weird and interesting, and I wanted to be a part of it.

So I started learning. Another returned Peace Corps volunteer that I’d met in the Bay Area sat down with me one weekend and helped me build a simple website from the ground up. In the most basic HTML and CSS, we embedded a video we made about my China experience. On the site I made the background color orange to match the Cloudflare logo and wrote something like, “Check it out Matthew and Michelle, I’m learning how to write code!”, and I sent them the link.

In the following weeks, I sent more follow up emails to Matthew than felt polite. But it worked. Matthew, Michelle, and John took a huge risk on me, and I got an offer to be Cloudflare’s “Writer” (since that was really the only thing that made sense for an academic philosopher to do at a tech firm). They actually gave me business cards that read: Andrew A. Schafer - Writer.

When I accepted the offer via email, Matthew wrote back saying that getting up to speed with Cloudflare was “going to be like drinking from a fire hose”.

On day one, I sat down next to the folks on the Data Team and introduced myself. They all said a quick, polite “hi” and then put their head phones back on immediately and continued to write code. I didn’t learn for a long time that engineers DO NOT like to be interrupted when they are coding. This is a key feature of tech culture.

I spent part of my first week at Cloudflare watching a lot of YouTube videos by Eli the computer guy. He does a great job explaining DNS, the OSI model, basic networking, etc. He even has an older video about Cloudflare, which was super helpful (Thank you, Eli!).

Eli, The Computer Guy

At one point John Graham-Cumming walked past my desk and asked me why I was staring at that man in the orange shirt so much. I turned around and exclaimed, “John, did you know that the Internet has LED lasers that blink on and off BILLIONS of times per second?!” He calmly replied, “yes” and then went about his business. That fact made my mind melt. I had so much to learn.

One of the first things I worked on as Cloudflare’s Writer was some of the PR efforts surrounding Project Galileo, DDoS attack protection for at-risk public interest websites, which I’m still proud of. I worked with our legal team to draft up this blog post, which helped me to understand the implications and power of Cloudflare’s technology in real-world terms.

I worked with Nick Sullivan a whole bunch at the beginning also, which was mystifying. He is already a great writer and he was writing about such complex things. There were times where I was adding punctuation to sentences that made sense grammatically, but I didn’t understand their content. I learned a lot about encryption, and my tech vocabulary grew.

At one point I also helped John Graham-Cumming with a few blogs. John is a published author, so I didn’t really help him write anything, but I did help him bring his posts way down to my level. You can see my influence on this blog post about Shellshock. That day I learned the term “zero day vulnerability”.

In that blog John wrote: “Attackers will also use an ACE vulnerability to upload or run a program that gives them a simple way of controlling the targeted machine. This is often achieved by running a "shell". I read his draft and I asked him, “What is a shell?”. A question, I learned much later, that was highly embarrassing to ask at a tech office. But I didn’t know, and I wanted to know. So we clarified that, “A shell is a command-line where commands can be entered and executed” in the post just in case other tech noobs like myself were trying to follow along. I learned how to be a translator from tech-speak to normal English.

I even researched and wrote a few posts of my own, like this one about Raspberry Pi’s fronted by Cloudflare. I had no idea what a Raspberry Pi was before being asked to write this. Thankfully one of the folks on the Data Team had one and let me borrow it for a photo op. I learned about the inspiring philosophy behind Raspberry Pi and the vibrant community that uses them.

As the official Cloudflare Writer, I was proud of writing the copy for our dashboard. That project was an amazing way for me to get to know a lot of key members of the engineering team and have them teach me exactly how each feature worked. I wrote out what I understood, clarified some points with them, and then made a pull request to get the explanations into the code base for our dashboard.  

If you’ve ever used these help menus—you are welcome! (Note: lots of other Cloudflare team members have kept this updated and expanded.)

Eventually, I became an honorary member of the Data Team. It took some doing, but I learned Python the hard way, and I wrote a Python script that would print my name 100,000 times in the terminal. I crashed my machine when I tried to make it print my name 100,000,000,000,000 times. I learned something about code that day—it can break things.

I ran this code while sitting next to the person who had built Cloudflare’s original database. I did a victory dance when I crashed my laptop I was so proud of myself. That is sort of like me bragging about my backyard badminton skills next to Serena Williams.

I dipped my toes into the language of code, and started to speak that language with the engineers around me. This helped me to learn an important lesson about tech culture: the deeper your technical understanding the greater the respect you receive.

Eventually, I was ready for a new challenge at Cloudflare—talking to our clients.

The first thing I learned in a client facing role at Cloudflare is that Cloudflare is not a widget or a nice-to-have—it is mission critical technology for everyone that uses it. When something goes wrong people are very upset. The second thing I learned in a client facing role at Cloudflare is that the Internet is a fragile little teacup and it runs on human trust—which is astonishing. The combination of those two facts created ample opportunity for me to develop my listening and communication skills.

I started by rereading How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie and took special note of rule number four, which states, “Be A Good Listener”. I quickly graduated to the philosophy and practice of Nonviolent Communication, by Marshall B. Rosenberg. I ended up taking some NVC courses in San Francisco focused on listening skills in this style. I also took compassion meditation courses via Stanford a few years in a row, which had a profound impact on my ability to empathise with our clients.

While brushing up on and honing these interpersonal skills was helpful, what I learned in a lot of those early meetings with clients was that I need to understand Cloudflare’s technology better. It’s one thing to be able to talk about it, it’s a whole different thing to be able to understand it enough to solve real issues.

I decided to do the “homework” our Solutions Engineering team gives out to their hiring candidates. I had to learn command-line basics, create an origin web server on DigitalOcean, install Ubuntu, configure a firewall, install NGINX, create a simple website from HTML, add an image to that site, set up DNS, and then put Cloudflare in front of it.

I set up my first DNS record in Cloudflare to point to my origin server, and was like “OHHHHHHH SNAP! That is how DNS works! It maps my domain name to the IP address of my server!” Hands on learning makes all the difference.

And I learned that WWW is a subdomain of the apex!! What???

It wouldn't be a legit Cloudflare blog without more code, so here we go. I ended up writing (modifying) this amazing piece of code based on the NGINX HTML welcome page template:

Notice that I added an image:

I’m now a web developer! I’ve added yet another cat photo to the Internet. You are welcome world! (Note at the time of publishing my site is offline [I forgot to renew the domain—oopsy]).

Once I had my site up and running on Cloudflare, I learned how to make API calls to pull down the our Enterprise raw logs and use jq to sort them (jq, I learned, is “a lightweight and flexible command-line JSON processor”):

curl -H "X-Auth-Email: aschafer@cloudflare.com" -H "X-Auth-Key:
cc1e78b22222229b9d72643fbda69655579d" -H "Content-Type: application/json" 
"https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/zones/f5fb827cf31f628c1c0730bc4b0792d
d/logs/requests?start=0&count=1" | jq 'select(.clientRequest.uri == 
"/admin"), .client.ip'| sort | uniq -c | sort -r

(Note: This cURL command does not contain a real API key. I learned the hard way to NEVER include the API key when sharing a cURL.)

I was so proud. I could say things like, “pull down the raw logs and pipe them into jq” to my clients, and I actually knew what I was saying—my tech language skills were improving.

I then read “High Performance Browser Networking” by Ilya Grigorik. I didn't even understand what that title meant at first. I had to translate it into non-tech English. It turns out that, for example, Chrome is a high performance browser, which is a tool you use to navigate a network of computers, a.k.a. the Internet. So it is a guide book for building the most performant web apps within the limits of current browser and networking technology.

Grigorik’s philosophy resonates with me, “Good developers know how things work. Great developers know why things work.” Insert any other profession or art and the statement remains true.

It took me six months of reading on bus rides to work, but by the end I could say things like, WebSocket API, Subprotocol Negotiation, TLS OCSP Stapling, and TCP Head-of-Line Blocking. I learned from Grigorik that, “TCP provides the abstraction of a reliable network running over an unreliable channel, which includes basic packet error checking and correction, in-order delivery, retransmission of lost packets, as well as flow control, congestion control, and congestion avoidance designed to operate the network at the point of greatest efficiency. Combined, these features make TCP the preferred transport for most applications.” Who knew?

After putting so much work into learning what Cloudflare really does, I came to understand something fundamental about the tech world: the learning never stops. Never. The fire hose never turns off.  

When I started at Cloudflare we offered more domains and extra SSL cert hosting slots as our additional products. Now we have Workers and Access and Argo and Argo Tunnel and Spectrum and Load Balancing and Stream and a Mobile SDK, and the list keeps growing. And we all have to learn about all of this new technology as it gets released. It is amazing!

Over the last few years, I’ve learned the language of Silicon Valley, and more specifically, I can speak the language of Cloudflare fluently. That has made a huge difference in my career.

I’ve enjoyed a lot of successes at Cloudflare, but the one achievement I’m most proud of is creating the “Big Horse Award for Strong Work”.

The idea for this came directly from chapter 2 of How to Win Friends and Influence People: “Give honest and sincere appreciation”. I make it a point to tell the folks I work with that they are doing outstanding work every chance I get because the folks I work with really are doing outstanding work all the time, and they should know about it.

Maybe three years ago my best friend at Cloudflare sent me a message via HipChat that read something like: “Hey Big Horse, you check that Jira ticket yet?”. From that day forward I called everyone “Big Horse” on HipChat at all times, which I thought was hilarious and everyone else thought was weird or annoying.

Shortly after that, in an effort to step up my “Give honest and sincere appreciation” game, I started sending emails to the whole company pointing out the strong work our support team was doing in our Zendesk customer support tickets. Our support team is world-class, but since only a few teams in the office can access Zendesk, a lot of folks internally don’t see their amazing work. I decided to take screenshots of tickets that were particularly well-handled and share them. I’d titled these emails “Strong Work, Big Horse!”. I quickly learned that emailing the whole company “does not scale”.

This culminated at one of our all hands B.E.E.R. meetings, where I gave out a Big Horse Award to a few outstanding members of our Support team. I had this stunningly beautiful trophy made for the occasion:

We needed a logo, so I Googled “stupid horse drawings” and found an image. With a little editing via photo editor and PowerPoint, a meme was born:

Since then we’ve had all sorts of iterations of the Big Horse logo:

And we had paraphernalia made:

Our support team even spray painted “Big Horse” on the side of a building on 4th St in downtown San Francisco on a team outing:

We’ve issued a new Sparkle Lama award as well—since not everyone wants to be called a big horse:

Many Cloudflare team members have Big Horse and Sparkle Lama stickers on their laptops, and we’ve shipped those golden big horse trophies around the world to our London and Singapore offices. These symbols have become easy ways to let our teammates know that they are doing great work. It is a small thing, but it adds up and helps make Cloudflare a great place to work.

Just a few weeks ago this Tweet was pointed out to me:

"For a reason I don’t understand yet, members of the Cloudflare engineering team own over 2% of all active .horse domains in the world" > https://t.co/IhGW55Oi2h

— Neil Levine (@neilwlevine) February 22, 2019

Well, Neil, the reason for this is that a few engineers and myself had big plans of launching a website around the Big Horse Award, we bought big.horse and a few others, but we didn’t follow through—yet. Stay tuned.

The Big Horse and Sparkle Lama Awards are my contribution the tech culture I’ve been a student of these last few years.

Five years after those first conversations with Matthew, Michelle, and John, I’m headed back to China with Cloudflare!

We are expanding our presence in China, and I have the good fortune (幸福) to combine the skills I acquired in philosophy and in the Peace Corps with the skills I acquired in Silicon Valley. We will be onboarding new Chinese clients, hiring more team members, and building out partnerships with other Chinese tech firms. I’m incredibly lucky to be headed back to a country that I love and embark on a new adventure.

I have a whole new fire hose aimed at me, and I plan to drink deep. I’ve been taking Mandarin classes again, this time to learn words like encryption (加密), caching (缓存), and cloud software (云软件). I’ll be learning a whole new interpersonal skill set around working with clients in China and across Asia. And since the office is just starting, this project will be a new exercise in resourcefulness.

 life_journey = ["China", "Silicon Valley", "China"]
for x in life_journey
   print(x)

I had no idea how much opportunity lay before me when I walked in the door as “the writer”, and I am profoundly grateful that Cloudflare took a chance on me. I plan to throw myself into this project in China, to learn and grow and contribute, and to figure out the best way to translate “Strong Work, Big Horse” into Mandarin.

我非常开心回去中国帮助成立我们的北京分部！

Even though CloudFlare offsets most of the load to your website via caching and request filtering, a certain amount of traffic will still pass through to your host. Knowing the limits of your plan can help prevent a bottleneck from your hosting plan.

CloudFlare allows you to block IP address individually or IPs from entire regions. If you don’t want or need traffic from certain IPs or regions, you can block them using your Threat Control panel. This is useful for sites who know where their visitors usually come from.

Take action to prevent attacks to your site during peak season by configuring your firewall to only accept traffic from CloudFlare IP addresses during the holidays. If you only accept CloudFlare IPs, you can prevent attackers from getting to your original IP address and knocking your site offline.

CloudFlare operates as a reverse proxy to your site so all connections come from CloudFlare IPs, so restricting our IPs can cause issues for visitors trying to access your site. The list of our IP can be found here: https://www.cloudflare.com/ips

By default CloudFlare caches static content with our CDN; however, you can extend our caching by creating custom Page Rules. Under the Page Rules section of your account, you can set a pattern--either your entire website, or a section of your site--then turn on the “Cache everything” option. Creating a page rule and setting the Cache Everything option helps reduce the number of times CloudFlare has to hit your origin to download cacheable items.

Setting up a custom Page Rule like this is ideal if you have a campaign going on over the holiday season. With the Cache Everything option enabled, CloudFlare will be serving your entire site, taking the load off of your server completely, making you site as fast as possible.

Edge Cache Expire TTL and the Browser Cache Expire TTL allows you to determine how long we cache resources at our edge, and how long browsers will cache assets.

To ensure visitor’s IPs show in your back-end server logs you can install mod_cloudflare to restore original visitor IP back to server logs. Our IP addresses will show up in your logs unless you install the modification to make sure you are logging the visitors’ actual IP addresses.

Auto Minification is a method that helps your site send as little information as possible to increase performance. It works by taking JavaScript, CSS, and HTML and removing all comments and white spaces.

Rocket Loader is an asynchronous JavaScript loader. It ensures that individual scripts on your page won’t block other content from loading, loads third party scripts in the order they are ready, and bundles all script into a single request so multiple responses can be streamed---in short, it makes your page render much faster on any device.

At a high level, Rocket Loader works like this:

(Available for Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans)Mirage will determine which images are visible to the end user and send those first, then other images that are off the screen will be lazy loaded as needed. This feature is especially useful for sites that with many images like most ecommerce sites

For example: if your sites has a images of seventy different t-shirts for sale, rather than having the customer wait for all seventy images to load, Mirage quickly delivers the images immediately visible to the user, then loads the rest of the images as the customer scrolls down. By having the most important images load lightning fast, the end user’s experience is improved.

(Available for Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans)Polish recompresses images to make them as small as possible in order to increase site performance.

For example: You may have images on your site that are not optimally compressed. When CloudFlare puts those images into cache it will automatically recompress them making them smaller, and allowing them to be loaded as quickly as possible. CloudFlare can compress images in a lossless or lossy way.

If you want to make quick changes to your page and have your visitors see that change immediately, you can purge individual files from CloudFlare’s cache.

For example, if you are running a sale only for Black Friday, and you want new content displayed to your visitors, you can purge a single page so that CloudFlare will return to your origin server to fetch a new version of that page for our cache.

Please Note: if you purge your entire cache your origin will receive a flood of traffic until CloudFlare get all of your assets back into our cache.

Even if you don’t implement any of the suggestions above you are still ahead of the game by being on CloudFlare’s network. Since we have 28 data centers around the world, we bring your site close to your visitors. And since we run an Anycast network, visitors are automatically directed to the closest data center meaning that your site will be faster as the request travels over a shorter distance.

We wish you all the best this holiday season! Good luck!

For those of you that follow the CloudFlare blog, you’ll know that we try to be prolific. We have industry leaders like Matthew Prince, John Graham-Cumming, Nick Sullivan, and others publishing pieces weekly from the front lines of internet performance and security. We’re also big fans of open source software, which is used in almost everything we do.

A little over a year ago we watched as a brand new independent open source blogging platform called Ghost started making waves, raising over $300,000 on Kickstarter. A little later, we reached out to the team to see if CloudFlare could help make the lightning-fast Node.js platform even faster and more secure on the Ghost(Pro) hosted service.

In March, Ghost announced that their entire Pro network was powered by CloudFlare, and today we’re pleased to announce that the CloudFlare blog is now running on Ghost.

While things look largely the same, you’ll find new and improved RSS feeds as well as tag and author archives to allow you to browse through our backlog of content more easily. The biggest improvement by far, though, is in the writing tools which we now have available to us—meaning our team is going to have a much easier time bringing you more great content. Check out this dual-screen editing window:

Ghost has been picking up speed for the last year in the online publishing world, and it’s an open source, non-profit organization which we’re proud to support.

The Raspberry Pi was created with a simple mission in mind: change the way people interact with computers. This inexpensive, credit card-sized machine is encouraging people, especially kids, to start playing with computers, not on them.

When the first computers came out, basic programming skills were necessary. This was the age of the Amigas, BBC Micros, the Spectrum ZX, and Commodore 64s. The generation that grew up with these machines gained a fundamental understanding of how computers work.

Computers today are easy to use and require zero understanding of programming to operate. They’re also expensive, and wrapped in sleek cases. While aesthetically pleasing designs and user friendly interfaces make computers appealing and accessible to everyone, these advances create a barrier to understanding how computers work and what they are capable of doing. This isn’t necessarily a problem, but for those who really understand computers, it seems that our collective sense of the power of computing has been dulled.

Raspberry Pi marks the beginning of a conscious effort to return to computing fundamentals. Starting at about $25—case not included—it’s purposely designed to remove barriers to tinkering, reprograming, and, ultimately, to understanding how computers work. This return to fundamentals is rejuvenating the curiosity and creative spirit of computer hobbyists around the world.

The vibrant community of Raspberry Pi enthusiasts have found good use for an ARM processor, a GPU, a few ports, and an operating system (typically Linux-based) loaded onto an SD card. A quick Google search will return ideas for building your own Pi powered robots and helicopters, humidity and temperature sensors, voice activated coffee machines, and sophisticated home security systems—homemade cases encouraged.

Ok, maybe you don’t need a Lego wrapped, solar powered Raspberry Pi syncing your Christmas lights to techno music—most of us don’t. But there are a whole host of practical projects for Pi enthusiasts as well. One of our customers, Scott Schweitzer of Solarflare, turned his Pi into a web server.

It might seem crazy to host a website on an 8GB SD card since a small surge in traffic would knock the site offline. But with CloudFlare handing the load, speeding up the content, and keeping it secure, a Raspberry Pi is all Scott needed to host his sites. He started by testing one of his sites on his Pi-CloudFlare combo, and once he realized it worked, he called up his hosting provider to cancel his subscription. Now his Raspberry Pi sits in his closet using a trickle of energy, and CloudFlare provides the rest of the power.

Check out Scott’s project here.

Staying true to the Raspberry Pi mission, Scott provided resources for other members of the Pi community to use.

Ingredients

• 1 Raspberry Pi (the Model B + 512 MB is recommended)

• 1 RJ45 Cat45 cable

• 1 micro-USB power supply

• 1 SD card

Directions:

1. Follow these directions put together by ScottSchweitzer of Solarflare.

2. Open port 80 on your home router and map it directly to your Raspberry Pi. Click here to learn more.

3. Put CloudFlare in front of your Pi to protect it from vulnerabilities, and make your site fast and secure.

That's it! This is the simple way of doing it, but Scott took a more roundabout path. He originally set up his Pi as a security penetration test tool using Raspberry Pwn Release 0.2 which is Debian 7 based. You can see that build here. Scott then later added Apache2, but since he didn’t need PHP or MySQL he left those off.

Note: If you prefer Nginx, see these instructions for installing it on your Pi.

By the way, if you like hacking on Nginx running on ARM CPU’s CloudFlare is hiring.

CloudFlare’s mission is to make the powerful tools used by internet giants accessible to everyone. Scott Schweitzer’s Raspberry Pi web server project is a perfect example.

Thanks for sharing your story Scott!

The World Cup is, at once, exhilarating and agonizing, and not just for those lucky souls in Rio or Manaus, folks working from home, or anyone else sitting happily in front of a TV. I’m talking about the quiet victories and silent pains loyal fans everywhere experience week after week at their desks. The muffled “YES!” breathed through your teeth as you check the FIFA app update; or a soft sigh when a text from a friend informs you that, yep, unfortunately, Belgium managed to score in overtime; and all too many of us know the slow burning resentment that accompanies those howls wafting through an open window from a bar near by. Sure, from your desk you can see the score, you can read the updates, you know who is winning—but you need to see that goal! And the major sports networks won’t start showing replays for hours!

So, too, was Xavier Damman, co-founder of Storify, stuck at his desk during the World Cup. He felt our pain, but, unlike the rest of us, he also knew there was a solution. With a vision for innovation and disruption, Xavier spent a few long nights building Replaylastgoal.com. ReplayLastGoal is a Twitter bot that automatically records and posts—instantly—an animated gif of the most recent World Cup goal. By the time you get that phone alert, or start hearing those cheers from down the street, you can watch the goal yourself on Twitter via @ReplayLastGoal. I’ll say it for all the World Cup fanatics far from Brazil, out of reach of a TV, but still trying to follow the action from the office: Thank you.

Xavier thinks that automatic and instant generation of sports highlights is the way people will follow sports in the future. So what did he do? He open sourced his code, and kept the project not for profit. “Use my code!” Xavier exclaimed on the phone this afternoon, “FIFA! ESPN! use my code! Give your fans what they want: instant access to goal replays as they happen!” That’s the idea, and, to pour some sugar on top, Xavier wrote hooks for Hipchat, Slack, and Flowdock.

The World Cup is truly an international event, and Xavier created a simple solution to a global problem. ReplayLastGoal.com has changed the way those of us stuck in an office during the big game can participate in the glory.

It only took one server for Xavier to create and host ReplayLastGoal.com’s content, but, given the massive World Cup fan base, it wasn't scalable. At best, it would be great for a few friends to enjoy.

Sites like ReplayLastGoal.com are prone to downtime because, if they are massively popular, they see spikes in traffic, and those spikes can overwhelm a single server. You know this afternoon, as soon as Germany or Brazil score, thousands of people are going to want to see the replay, and ReplayLastGoal.com will get a flood of traffic.

That might be a problem if CloudFlare wasn't changing the game. But, in five minutes or less, Xavier put ReplayLastGoal.com on the CloudFlare network, letting us handle those traffic spikes. At the same time, we are able to distribute the content globally, bringing each goal closer to World Cup fans across the planet.

According to Xavier, "Developers have access to powerful tools that increase their productivity like never before. One developer in a garage can develop, in just a few nights, things that used to take months and months for a team to do. It’s companies like Cloudflare that make this possible. CloudFlare allowed me to focus on the core functionality of the app which is to automatically take a video clip and turn it into an animated GIF file. CloudFlare takes care of load balancing and distributes the content around the world through their CDN. I can rest easy because my server only has to be able to scale to serve one request."

Keeping ReplayLastGoal.com stable during spikes in traffic, and distributing its content globably is just one more way CloudFlare is changing the game to build a better web.

Lackey being hoisted onto Sealand in the North Sea circa 2000

I started using the Internet when I was young—in the early 1990s, before I was a teenager. I was drawn to security for two main reasons: First, I was interested in how individuals could stand up to large groups, even nation states, using mathematics. Also, learning about computer security meant I was able to subvert security systems, and this gave me access to things I wasn’t supposed to see. I never used my skills to harm anyone, I just thought it was fun to get an account on a supercomputer and things like that.

The best way to learn about computer security, as with most technology, is to get hands-on experience. Once you have some practical experience and have decided that you’re interested, then go back and learn the theory through formal education or certifications. If you use this approach, you have an intuitive understanding of how the different parts of the field are related and it is very powerful.

Probably one of the hardest problems for young people in this field is assessing how much you really know—once you understand the basics, you think you know everything, but there can be huge problems lurking just under the surface. I think it’s important to keep in mind that no matter how much you learn, there’s always something new—it’s a rapidly changing field. This fluidity means it is possible to become a relative expert on very specific things quite early in your career. The most important thing is to learn how to find information, perform experiments, and figure out how things work. Sometimes just being able to identify a problem by name is enough to solve it, since there’s a huge amount of academic, industrial, and hacker literature about most topics.

I’m very happy! My main interest in starting CryptoSeal was to get Trusted Computing technology into commercial use. At CryptoSeal, we were working on using that technology for a general cloud computing solution, key management, and overlay networks. These are all fairly sophisticated, difficult to use applications, and not really directly usable by end users. I wanted to change that.

I think CloudFlare has done an amazing job of bringing high-end anti-DDoS, caching, firewalling, and filtering technology to a huge number of users, and by working with CloudFlare to incorporate Trusted Computing technology, I get to accomplish everything I wanted to do with CryptoSeal.

Also, CloudFlare has a really amazing team—people with cryptographic and protocol expertise, great network engineers, peering specialists, and one of the best support teams in the tech industry—so I’m really excited to be working with them.

I was first attracted to CloudFlare because I was a customer for three years, and I was always impressed with their service. They are a great service for startups, and through my interactions as a customer, I got to know some of the team.

As I looked further into CloudFlare I realized that they are solving some really difficult problems, especially now that they are operating at Internet scale—5% of web requests. Sometimes projects at CloudFlare require actually fixing the underlying infrastructure of the Internet, and the company is willing—and able—to invest the resources to make that happen.

The three founders, Matthew, Lee, and Michelle, are actively involved, and they’ve created CloudFlare to be a flat organization without unneeded bureaucracy and process. As a company, it’s a great place to be -- the hiring bar is really high, so all of your coworkers are brilliant and hard-working. Everyone is focused on doing the right thing for CloudFlare’s users, and for the Internet as a whole. (If you’re interested, we’re hiring. Check out our openings here).

I’ve done a lot of different things. I worked on an early anonymous electronic cash system while living on a Caribbean island in the late 1990s. The electronic cash system didn’t work out, but we ended up building some useful cryptographic tools that we later used in other products.

My neighbors on the island, the folks who ran the “.ai” domain name, introduced me to Sean Hastings. After I left the Caribbean, Sean and I got together to figure out the best place to host content free of government interference, but we couldn’t find a country which would be good enough. At that point, we bought a book: “How to Start Your Own Country”, and soon after that we found this abandoned WW2 anti-aircraft fortress occupied by pirate radio people called Sealand in the North Sea. It was exciting, but the costs to provide service were really high: diesel fuel, helicopters, boats, etc. So I eventually left and moved back to the US.

For a couple years, I worked on cryptographic software for payment systems companies and RFID/NFC payments for credit cards. When the Iraq War started, and I got in touch with some Iraqi expats who needed help setting up Internet in Iraq after the US intervention. I flew into Iraq on a civilian flight, and spent six months working with them on satellite and wireless networking for a variety of military, government, and commercial customers. Then, as the country got more dangerous, I moved onto a US military base in Iraq and spent the next six years doing defense contracting, primarily building satellite, cellular, and wireless networks for a diverse set of customers in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, and elsewhere.

After enough close calls with explosions and helicopters, and missing the Bay Area, I moved back to work on a more “conventional” tech startup—CryptoSeal—which was also a great adventure.

Getting to focus on the parts of the company I really care about which are product and technology, and not having to constantly worry about administration, finance, etc. It’s more efficient, less stressful, and produces better results. Since CloudFlare has such a great team, I’m also really enjoying getting to learn from people across the company.