If you are still awake there’s really one final question that you might want to know the answer to: What does the CTO do? The reality is that it means different things in different companies. But I can tell you a little about what I do.
Helping To Build Cloudflare, Part 5: People: Finding, Nurturing and Learning to Let Go
So, let me talk a bit about people. Software is made by people. Sometimes individuals but more likely by teams. I’ve talked earlier about some aspects of our architecture and our frequent rewrites but it’s people that make all that work.
Helping To Build Cloudflare, Part 4: Public Engagement
We don’t believe that any of our software, not a single line of code, provides us with a long-term advantage. We could, today, open source every single line of code at Cloudflare and we don’t believe we’d be hurt by it.
Helping To Build Cloudflare, Part 3: Audacity, Diversity and Change
After Cloudbleed, lots of things changed. We started to move away from memory-unsafe languages like C and C++ (there’s a lot more Go and Rust now). And every SIGABRT or crash on any machine results in an email to me and a message to the team responsible.
Helping To Build Cloudflare, Part 2: The Most Difficult Two Weeks
It’s always best to speak plainly and honestly about the situation you are in. Or as Matthew Prince likes to put it “Panic Early”. Long ago I started a company in Silicon Valley which had the most beautiful code.