Cloudflare Developer Summer Challenge

There are a lot of experiences we have all grown to miss over the last year and a half. After hearing from our community, two of the top experiences they miss are collaborating with peers, and getting Cloudflare swag. Perhaps even in the reverse order! In-person events like conferences were once a key channel to satisfy both these interests, however today’s remote world makes that much harder. But does it have to?

Today, we are excited to introduce the Cloudflare Developer Summer Challenge. We will be rewarding 300 participants with boxes of our most popular swag, while enabling collaboration with other participants through our Workers Discord channel.

To participate, you have to build a project that uses Cloudflare Workers and at least one other product in our rapidly expanding developer platform. We will judge submissions and award swag boxes to those with the most innovative projects, limited to one box per person. The Challenge will be open for submissions between today, and closing November 1, 2021. See a full list of terms and conditions here.

Cloudflare’s developer platform offers all the building blocks to create end-to-end applications with products across compute, storage, and frontend services. To successfully participate in the Cloudflare Developer Summer Challenge, you need to build a project with at least two of the following products in the Cloudflare developer platform. Bonus points for using more! These products include:

• Cloudflare Workers: an edge-based serverless computing platform where you can deploy code automatically worldwide, with speed, security, and scale baked in.

• Workers KV: a global low-latency key value data store for exceptionally high read volumes, making it possible to build highly dynamic APIs and websites which respond as quickly as a cached static file would.

• Durable Objects: a storage platform providing low-latency coordination and consistent storage at the edge, enabling stateful serverless use cases.

• Cloudflare Pages: a Jamstack web development platform to collaborate on and deploy high performance sites quickly across the world.

Submissions will be based on three criteria:

• The first criteria is to meet the basic requirements of the challenge. This includes using at least two products in the platform, and submitting the live link of your project and your code repository. You must submit before November 1, 2021.

• The second criteria we will judge is around innovation. Projects that are unique and useful to users will be more likely to win the swag boxes.

• The third criteria is based on the breadth of the Cloudflare platform you use. The more products you integrate, the better!

Step 1: Get Started: You can get started with the developer platform by visiting the Cloudflare Workers Quickstart Guide, and reviewing the Workers KV and/or Durable Objects documentation. To host your frontend site on Cloudflare Pages, you can visit the Pages Quickstart Guide.

Step 2: Build your Project: If you would like inspiration, you can view our tutorials, and examples. You can also view our Built With Workers page. If you want to try and build something more advanced, you can see some additional examples below.

Step 3: Share your Project: Successful submission includes a link to your live project, and a link to your code repository. We also encourage you to share your work, or pictures of you unboxing/ using your swag by tagging @CloudflareDev on Twitter with the hashtag #CloudflareSummerChallenge.

Optional: Engage with the Community To promote collaboration and interaction with peers, we will have a dedicated channel in the Cloudflare Workers Discord server. For those who want to, you can learn what others are building, share your project, or join Q&A sessions if you have questions or need help getting started. You can also meet developers participating around the world.

The Cloudflare developer platform is ideal for a wide range of use cases – from augmenting existing applications to building entirely new ones without needing to maintain underlying infrastructure. Essentially, you write the code, and we handle the rest. Running on the Cloudflare edge network, applications scale automatically and run worldwide within seconds of users.

Cloudflare Workers’ high performance and edge network make it well-suited for building APIs. It is also a great companion to your frontend applications on Cloudflare Pages. You can use Workers as the backend, and build your frontend with frameworks such as React, Gatsby, Hugo, Svelte, and more — and then deploy your site onto Pages.

You can easily begin building a serverless API for your frontend by creating a new Workers project with the Wrangler CLI:

‘wrangler generate serverless-api https://github.com/cloudflare/worker-typescript-template’

To complete this type of project, you can follow the rest of the steps outlined in our Pages documentation.

Combining Cloudflare Workers, Durable Objects, and WebSockets makes a powerful platform for managing state at the edge. Running on Cloudflare’s global network enables exceptionally low latency, so users can interact instantly worldwide. Examples of interactive applications can range from chat rooms to multiplayer video games.

To build interactive video games, you can integrate with popular tools such as Unity and WebGL using an authoritative client model (we have an example of how to achieve this). You do not even need expertise in building video games. Following this example above, the client can run a compiled game directly in the browser with WebAssembly. The server, running on Cloudflare Workers, can be interacted with via WebSockets, and uses Durable Objects to manage game state.

Whether you are building a small e-commerce app or an online ordering site with millions of requests per month, your users can experience exceptional performance and reliability with Cloudflare’s developer platform.

At a small scale, you can instantly personalize a user's e-commerce experience by setting up A/B testing, performing localization, or providing geo-specific targeting, such as local currency or exchange rates. You can see the linked code samples to quickly get started.

Integration with Workers KV and other third party tools can also streamline the development process. Instead of having to build out an entire database for your application, you can use Workers KV to store product information such as product ID, name, description, price, etc. Outside the Workers platform, you can integrate with popular tools such as Stripe or Shopify. To learn more about how to build an e-commerce application with Workers, Workers KV, and Stripe, you can read this blog post on building an e-commerce experience.

At a larger scale, we have customers building their entire online ordering site on Workers and Pages. Dig, a popular American restaurant chain with nearly 50 locations nationwide, decided to run their ordering site on Cloudflare’s developer platform. They needed high performance and reliability as traffic spiked during the pandemic. The team used a headless React application that is entirely hosted on Cloudflare Pages. Javascript calls an underlying API to get and handle dynamic ordering logic. You can learn more about their story in this case study.

We have heard from our community, and we want to help bring back some of their favorite pre-pandemic experiences: collaboration and swag. The Cloudflare Developer Summer Challenge is meant to do just that. While the last year and a half has transformed the way we all live, it has also been a period of significant expansion of the Cloudflare developer platform. With new products across compute, storage, and frontend services, you now have all the building blocks to quickly create powerful applications end-to-end on our edge network. We hope you enjoy the experience (and the swag!). We cannot wait to see what you build!