Along with four other Cloudflare colleagues, I traveled to New Haven, CT last weekend to support 1,000+ college students from Yale and beyond at YHack hackathon.

Throughout the weekend-long event, student attendees were supported by mentors, workshops, entertaining performances, tons of food and caffeine breaks, and a lot of air-mattresses and sleeping bags. Their purpose was to create projects to solve real world problems and to learn and have fun in the process.

Cloudflare sponsored YHack. Our team of five wanted to support, educate, and positively impact the experience and learning of these college students. Here are some ways we engaged with students.

1. Mentoring

Our team of five mentors from three different teams and two different Cloudflare locations (San Francisco and Austin) was available at the Cloudflare table or via Slack for almost every hour of the event. There were a few hours in the early morning when all of us were asleep, I'm sure, but we were available to help otherwise.

2. Providing challenges

Cloudflare submitted two challenges to the student attendees, encouraging them to protect and improve the performance of their projects and/or create an opportunity for exposure to 6 million+ potential users of their apps.

Challenge 1: Put Cloudflare in front of your hackathon project

Challenge 2. Make a Cloudflare App

Prizes were awarded to all teams which completed these challenges. Cloudflare awarded a total of ten teams for completing the challenges. The team which was judged to have created the best Cloudflare app won free admission to Cloudflare's 2018 Internet Summit as well as several swag items and introductions to Cloudflare teams offering internships next summer.

3. Distributing swag & cookies

Over 3,000 swag items (t-shirts, laptop stickers, and laptop camera covers) were distributed to almost every attendee. When the Cloudflare team noticed student attendees were going without snacks after dinner, I made a trip to a local grocery store and bought hundreds of cookies to distribute as well. After about an hour, none remained.

4. Sponsoring

As with most any hackathon, costs for food, A/V, venue rental, and other expenses are considerable. Cloudflare decided to financially support YHack to help offset some of these costs and be sure student participants were able to attend, learn, and build meaningful projects without having to pay admission fees.

In groups of up to four, students teamed up to create projects. There was no set project theme, so students could focus on subject areas they were most passionate about. Judging criteria were "practical and useful", "polish", "technical difficulty", and "creativity" and several sponsors, such as Intuit, Cloudflare, JetBlue, and Yale's Poynter Fellowship in Journalism submitted suggested challenges for teams to work on.

I saw a lot of cool projects that could help college students save money on food or other expenses, projects that could help identify fake news sources, and apps that would work great on Cloudflare Apps.

There were dozens of great completed projects by the end of the Hackathon. I'd like to highlight a few great ones which used Cloudflare best.

Akrama Mirza, a second year student at University of Waterloo, created an app for Cloudflare Apps which allows a website owner to automatically generate a TL;DR summary of the content on their pages and place it anywhere on their site. This app could be used to give a TL;DR summary of a blog post, article, report, etc.

Read more about TL;DR on Akrama's Devpost page.

Other great projects which used Cloudflare

Of the completed projects which put Cloudflare in front of their projects, there were three I most wanted to feature.

"Bringing Wall Street to Main Street through an accessible trading and back-testing platform."

K2 is a comprehensive backtesting platform for currency data, specializing in cryptocurrency and offering users the opportunity to create trading algorithms and simulate them in real-time.

The K2 team sought to equalize the playing field by enabling the general public to develop and test trading strategies. Users may specify a trading interval, time frame, and currency symbol, and the K2 backend will visualize the cumulative returns and generate financial metrics.

Read more about K2 on the team's Devpost page or website.

Money Moves analyzes data about financial advisors and their attributes and uses machine's deep learning unsupervised algorithms to predict if certain financial advisors will most likely be beneficial or detrimental to an investor's financial standing. Ultimately, Money Moves will help investors select the best possible financial advisor in their region.

The Money Moves team liked that they could easily use Cloudflare to protect and improve the performance of their site. One of the team members, Muyiwa Olaniyan, already used Cloudflare to run his personal server at home, so the team decided to use Cloudflare, from the start.

Read more about Money Moves on the team's Devpost page or website.

"Smart Bitcoin Investing Chatbot"

When the Facebook messenger chatbot is asked when it is best to invest in Bitcoin, current market trends are observed and a Mad Invest's model predicts how likely it is for the price to go up or down. A conclusion as to when it would be a good time to invest or sell is drawn and delivered by message to users.

Moving forward, the team intends to improve their model's predictions by developing a way to analyze the Chinese market, which represents 70% of Bitcoin traffic.

When telling me about their experience using Cloudflare and how it saved them time, the team delivered my favorite quote from the whole weekend. “We spent half an hour setting up Let's Encrypt for the SSL and we realized we could just put Cloudflare in front of it.” Exactly.

Read more about Mad Invest on the team's Devpost page.

I was honored to be part of a team that supported so many awesome students in the development of their projects at YHack. I was pleased to hear many attendees had already heard of or used Cloudflare before and many teams interacted with Cloudflare to protect and improve the performance of their projects and develop new apps. I look forward to being involved many more events in 2018 as well.

Recently we launched an internal monthly Go Hack Night at our San Francisco office, open to anyone who works at Cloudflare regardless of their department or position. Anyone from newbie programmers to our most experienced Go engineers are encouraged to attend, and experienced engineers are asked to throw on a mentor badge and help guide colleagues with installing and learning Go.

We had over 30 attendees at our inaugural Go Hack Night, and our survey reveals some great stats:

• 26% of attendees were completely new to programming

• 61% of attendees were experienced in other languages but new to Go

• Every attendee said they learned something!

We actively encourage an inclusive learning culture and we're super excited to make the Go programming language more accessible to our entire company.

If you're interested in working with Go and helping to build a better Internet, we're hiring!

P.S. if you're attending the 2017 Grace Hopper Celebration this week, stop by the Cloudflare booth to say hello!

CC BY 2.0 image by Marie-Claire Camp

In February of this year, the Internet Society hosted the TRON (TLS 1.3 Ready Or Not) workshop. The main goal of TRON was to gather feedback from developers and academics about the security of TLS 1.3. The conclusion of the workshop was that TLS 1.3 was, unfortunately, not ready yet.

One of the reasons it was deemed not yet ready was that there needed to be more real-world testing of independently written implementations. There were some implementations of the core protocol, but nobody had put together a full browser-to-server test. And some of the more exciting new features like PSK-based resumption (which brings improved forward secrecy to session tickets) and 0-RTT (which reduces latency for resumed connections) were still unimplemented.

The latest IETF Hackathon held two days before IETF 95 provided the kind of focused and collaborative environment that is conducive for working through implementation and interoperability without distraction. In Buenos Aires, I was joined by key members of the Mozilla team (Eric Rescorla, Richard Barnes and Martin Thompson) as well as some other great people who joined the team on the dates of the Hackathon. We had two main stacks to work with: NSS, the cryptography library that powers Firefox; and Mint, a Go based implementation created by Richard Barnes that I had set up on tls13.cloudflare.com.

The goals were:

• Finish integration with Firefox so we can do an HTTPS request

• Demonstrate Firefox->CloudFlare interoperability (with tls13.cloudflare.com)

• Resumption-PSK between NSS and Mint

• 0-RTT between NSS and Mint

• 0-RTT in Firefox

We also had a stretch goal of getting 0-RTT working between Firefox and CloudFlare’s test site.

Getting TLS 1.3 integrated in Firefox took until late Saturday night (we continued in the hotel bar after the Hackathon room closed), but after fighting through segmentation faults, C++11 lambda issues, and obtaining a trusted certificate through Let’s Encrypt, we were able to see a glorious “Hi there!” with a lock icon in Firefox. By the end of the Hackathon on Sunday, we were able to browse the TLS 1.3 specification on tls13.cloudflare.com with PSK-based session resumption in Firefox.

Although we were not able to get 0-RTT working between Firefox and CloudFlare in time for the demo (we were so very close), the Hackathon was deemed a success and we were given the “Best Achievement” award. It was great experience and proved invaluable for understanding how TLS 1.3 will work in practice. I’d like to thank the IETF for hosting this event and Huawei for sponsoring it.

The work at this Hackathon and the subsequent meetings at IETF 95 have helped solidify the core features of TLS 1.3. In the coming months, the remaining issues will be discussed on the TLS Working Group mailing list with the hope that a final draft can be completed soon after IETF 96 in Berlin.

This originally appeared as a guest blog on the IETF web site. CloudFlare is grateful to the IETF for allowing its republication here.

At the hackathon we’ll be focusing on implementing the latest draft of TLS 1.3 and testing interoperability between existing implementations written in C, Go, OCaml, JavaScript and F*. If you have experience with network programming and cryptography, come hack on the latest and greatest protocol and help find problems before it is finalized. If you’re planning on attending, add your name to the Hackathon wiki. If you can’t make it, but implementing cryptographic protocols is your cup of tea, apply to join the CloudFlare team!

We’re very excited about TLS 1.3, which brings both security and performance improvements to HTTPS. In fact, if you have a client that speaks TLS 1.3 draft 10, you can read this blog on our TLS 1.3 mirror: tls13.cloudflare.com.

We hope to see you there!

Gopher Gala is a chance to showcase your skills and compete against the best Go developers from around the world.

While the hackathon is distributed globally, CloudFlare is welcoming teams to use our new office space in SOMA this Saturday and Sunday from 9am-5pm. There will be food, drinks, and plenty of space to spread out and work with your teammates. Some of CloudFlare’s top Go developers will be participating as well.

If you’d like to sign up for the event, you can do so here: http://www.meetup.com/Women-Who-Go/events/227017435/

So, come join Women Who Go and CloudFlare and build something in a weekend:

WhenJanuary 23rd: 9am-5pmJanuary 24th: 9am-5pm

WhereCloudFlare Headquarters101 Townsend StreetSan Francisco, CA 94107

(Registration is required)

Since its June introduction as a CloudFlare App, Apture's contextual search service has been popular. Thousands of CloudFlare customers installed the app.

In November, we heard that Apture was shutting down their service, as part of their acquisition by Google. Good for them, but we thought immediately "What can we do for CloudFlare site owners?"

Our first instinct was to look around for a replacement service, or more than one, but no obvious alternative emerged. And Apture's deadline for turning the service off was set to Tuesday, December 20.

What to do?

Three folks on the CloudFlare team -- Ram, Chris, and Kevin -- decided they could make something similar and useful, given a little bit of time. Offered a single day, as a mini-hackathon, the enthusiastic trio agreed. Our positive experience with larger hackathons helped set the model and expectations.

On December 7, Ram, Chris and Kevin closed the door of a conference room and ignored the rest of the team. They started with pastries and coffee. A clean whiteboard was quickly filled.

Later in the day, brief interruptions were tolerated for delivery of burritos and Red Bull.

The team combined several technologies, internal and external, to deliver a simple, polished experience. Free APIs from Bing and DuckDuckGo were explored and put to use. CloudFlareJS as a JavaScript loader made performance straightforward.

Many additional ideas were discussed, but 12 hours isn't much time. The team decided on delivering the core functions of web search, definitions, and (a nice touch) incorporating the "read aloud" benefits of Pronounce, an existing CloudFlare app.

It was a long day, but ultimately successful for Ram, Chris, and Kevin. And for CloudFlare customers.

Highlight is a one-click install on your CloudFlare-powered site. Highlight gives your site visitors contextual web search and definitions -- and no one needs to leave your site.

Visitors select a word or phrase, and a quiet tooltip appears, inviting them to seek more info or simply listen to the word or phrase read out loud.

CloudFlare customers looking to replace Apture simply need to turn on Highlight.

Not yet a CloudFlare customer? Take five minutes and sign up for CloudFlare. And then use CloudFlare Apps to install Highlight as a worthy replacement to Apture.

Early Saturday afternoon, hundreds of hackers filled tables in a cavernous building in San Francisco, staking out their power cords and testing the Internet connection. This was the start of TechCrunch Disrupt's 2011 SF hackathon. CloudFlare jumped in to sponsor pizza and a $1,000 prize for the best CloudFlare App created during the hackathon.

Eight members of the CloudFlare team were there during the event to support hackers, answer questions about our new developers site, and hand out pizza.

CloudFlare pizza plate

After watching 130 one minute presentations, CloudFlare couldn't stop smiling at one demonstration.

A team from Hungary decided to think small, with an elegant game played only in the 16x16 pixel space commonly occupied by the favicon, the tiny image in a browser tab. Among an audience of their developer peers, the game from the United Task team earned applause, laughs and some gasps for their original name, which abbreviated "FAvorite Game icon."

CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince was pleased to hand over the big money (literally) and name this hack as the winner of CloudFlare's $1,000 cash prize.

Quickly, the team turned their hack into a new CloudFlare App, available for free to all CloudFlare site owners. The App, named Favris, turns your favicon into a small tribute to the world's favorite block game.

[

](https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/favris)

We first met the United Task team after they presented their hack. Since Sunday, we've had a chance to welcome three members of their team to the CloudFlare office, and asked Hagyma a few questions.

While doing serious stuff, we sometimes have crazy things in mind. One of us Gabor was reading about html canvas, and told us about it. Shortly we knew, we have something for the HACKATHON!

We mostly worked against each other, we set in front of just one laptop and shouting at whoever was typing. One of us [Kescke] was unable to come to TCD, he was probably the most effective from overseas.

It took more than we thought, but thank God, we didn't have to present before noon on Sunday. :)

We are a webapp dev company from Budapest, Hungary. We did many things for clients, and decided to go on with some of our ideas as a startup. Since we don't have experience, we wanted to see how things are going in the valley.

Install Favris on your CloudFlare-powered site today, for free.

CloudFlare launched about a year ago at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. It's been a pretty incredible year, and it all began at that conference. We're big fans of TechCrunch (even if we lost the competition to a service that reads Wikipedia aloud) and so we wanted to do something to support them this year.

I'm excited to announce that CloudFlare will have a big presence at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon. First, we're providing the pizza for dinner on Saturday night. As the plates we had printed up for the event read:

GET /pizza 200 OKPUT /pizza?location=mouth 202 ACCEPTEDGET /pizza 410 GONE

Second, we're giving a $1,000 cash prize for the Hackathon hacker who creates the best CloudFlare App. I'm helping judge the competition on Sunday and many folks from CloudFlare's engineering team will be on hand throughout the 24 hours of the event helping hackers build on top of CloudFlare's platform. We're providing an API framework to create new apps as well as the globally distributed infrastructure on which to deploy them so they're super fast.

CloudFlare has already made it one-click simple to add some of the leading web apps to any CloudFlare website. Current apps include mainstream services like Google Analytics, Smartling, Clicky, and VigLink. But we're also proud of the fact that we support smaller app developers like Erik Rothoff Andersson who created the fun game Browser Blaster and now receives a check every month from the CloudFlare users who have installed his game. We're excited to now make it easy for any developer to easily develop, deploy, and get paid for their work from the more than 100,000 websites that have signed up for CloudFlare. While one app will win the $1,000 prize, we're hoping that we can find a bunch of new app developers who we can add to the CloudFlare Apps Marketplace.

If you're going to be in the San Francisco area and you want to participate in the Hackathon, you can find details and register on the TechCrunch Disrupt website. Information for developers is available for all, not just this weekend's hackers.

P.S. - Yes, we really did print up a giant check and will hand it over on Sunday to the winner.