I'm Joining CloudFlare

It's obviously not just Klabnik. In fact, when we did Starfighter a few years back, I think Patrick did one of these posts as well. But: like every other post about Starfighter on HN while we were working on it, the whole thing was pretty uncomfortable. It's an experience I'd prefer not to repeat.

There are lots of excellent people taking all sorts of jobs at all sorts of places, and, unless those jobs involve, I don't know, mechanizing payday loans to squeeze poor people or hacking the phones of people the government of Bahrain doesn't like, nobody needs to justify them. Some of these posts seem like they might be good examples of content actually better delivered in a tweet.

It's possible that I just don't think Cloud Flare has earned the spotlight Klabnik is giving here. Who knows. But I felt the same way when Yegge announced his job at Grab --- just, "why am I reading this?" I'm sometimes reminded of the way Anthony Bourdain described the trailing years of Mario Batali's tenure at Food TV (Batali was a "lion" but not in a good way). Like: did you want to write this, or did Cloud Flare reallllllly want you to write this?

Rust is also hedging its bets on WA, and it's looking like Rust might be the language of the future web on the server and client (thanks for all the fish Javascript). CF investing in Rust is mutually beneficial. Rust is still new, agile, and will let people write safe code, which is going to be critical when running modules in the end user's browser.

Hope they let Steve spend a lot of his time continuing to make Rust great, and hopefully Steve will encourage the other Rustacians at CF to make Rust better for the rest of us.

> Were people really record-scratching over his totally reasonable decision to take a good-paying job at a big company?

I actually anticipated a few people being confused because of a few reasons. It seems like, so far at least, nobody has actually been confused. It happens. But I've experienced a lot of that previously; so like, moving from "writing documentation" to "product manager" and "everything is MIT/Apache2.0 licensed" to "a closed source platform" can look like big changes from the outside.

And really, I have wanted to write this bit about edge compute for a while, this is just a good excuse to finally publish the piece. I've been talking to CloudFlare for a few months, and it felt slightly odd to write it before I told the world "hey I may have some bias here." Now that I've made my decision and that bias is clear, that helps further discussion.