long $NET these guys don’t quit
(not financial advice)
Me and a band of plucky misfits (@maks_mak_0 and a few others), codename the Alertocats 🙀, have started rebuilding Cloudflare's whole notifications and alerting experience.
First up: a brand new UI. Find it in the dash at Observability → Alerts 👇
sometimes i hear skeptics call Cloudflare a single point of failure, and while to some extent that could be the reality, its quickly becoming the single point of fix...
a 'single' conduit to (and from) your site opens up lots of interesting opportunities for analysing and understanding the ever evolving landscape that is traffic on the web.
Cloudflare's security platform, combined with its developer platform opens up near endless possibilities for adapting, in realtime to whats next.
(WAF is a stop gap, not an alternative to patching)
Always have enjoyed CTFs. So I Asked the team to build one for the php2shell CVEs.
Stock PHP 8.5.11 behind our WAF with default rules. Find a way around and read /flag and report to earn bounty.
REMINDER - WAF buys you time. It isn't bulletproof. Upgrade your PHP.
blog.cloudflare.com/php-ctf
my agents use FounderMail to manage and respond to FounderMails support inbox (and my own)
but its not only good for support, during development of new features or new project, i just tell my coding agent to use the Admin MCP, create itself an email account and test its changes via real user accounts.
agents having mail isn't just about helping humans, its to allow them to have their own identity, that they can use internally or across the web whilst keeping it visible to me, via an interface thats familiar to me (MacOS and iOS apps coming soon btw)
Agent native email means saying goodbye to copy and paste...
Let your agents read mail where you write your code. Monitoring, fixing and responding to support inboxes has never been so easy!
With granular access controls, give your agents access to the inboxes you choose.
- Admin MCP: Manage your handles@, dynamic routing and mailboxes
- Inbox MCP: Granular access to any inboxes or handles, scope permissions to read, write and manage
parasocial relationships are a hell of a drug
thats not to take away from the mans achievements but i do sometimes think the admiration that some people get publicly can actually paradoxically shade their actual prowess
what i think i mean is that expectation and reality are in my experience anyway, usually at least somewhat mismatched... but that goes both ways (the good way and the bad)
its my whole problem with the social 'following' paradigm, especially where it overlays with real skill, things that require actual mastery
its so easy to conflate credibility with the consensus of credibility, clearly in this case it is deserved but its dangerously easy to get wrong and i think what my point is is that, conceptually, the fact it exists leaves it open to interpretation
on the flip side im a big believer in giving people their flowers, i love celebrating people, its such an important part of life, friends, family, strangers... maybe its the scale that makes it weird, maybe its the perception mismatch or the information decay along the way...
i personally had a strange, unsettling feeling when I saw Sunil was leaving Cloudflare and i have 0 personal connection to him. maybe its our innate disdain for change and uncertainty, maybe theere's something to it?
maybe i just need to go to bed...
how we interact with software is changing, when i first build FounderMail it didn't have a UI...
with agents taking on more and more of our daily tasks its tempting to remove our input all together but for now im settling on building products agent first.
i see agent first as an evolution to the mobile first revolution we had back when i still had some sort of concept of time, everything is moving so fast now.
give your agents this url and let me know what they think!
It was important to us that FounderMail was agent first from the get go
While you can use both the admin console and inbox app as you would with any other mail provider
FounderMail is intentionally MCP first
- Admin MCP: onboarding, domain configuration, mailbox and dynamic routing
- Mailbox MCP: used to give individual agents granular, configurable access to one or more mailboxes.
all my project use Cloudflare Email to send application level mail but this left me with a problem...
meet FounderMail.
when you launch a project it usually needs apex email, for support, legal, personal, contact, postmaster?? etc
for one project, a Google Workspace account worked fine, but its was inflexible, annoying to set up and while i could connect my agents over API, it ultimately wasn't built for the AI era. (you pay per seat!)
i wanted something flexible, dynamic and agent first (Claude's made me lazy). i wanted to be able to let my agents have their own handles, share my handles or share handles with each other. i also wanted to continue sending email via my Cloudflare account to keep the DNS nice and sensible and fast (plus its basically free).
i looked at a bunch of open source projects but with all the above, and my side projects, start ups and digital agency all running from different CF accounts, i didn't find anything that ticked all the boxes. FounderMail was born.
ultimately this was built for me and ive been using it for ages but i figured, im probably not the only person in this situation so why not turn it into a start up of its own.
let me know what you think, give it a try, maybe it solves your problem as well.
foundermail.app
I mean you don’t NEED anything… the thing people don’t seem to get about Cloudflare’s developer platform is the value comes from all of the stuff you DONT NEED to do when building on it.
you don't need tanstack start + cloudflare + d1 anymore
- tanstack start or vinext -> datastar
- workers -> literally any vps in the entire world
- d1 -> serialized sqlite
- better auth on d1 -> same, on sqlite
- r2 -> r2
- durable objects -> compressed SSE
- kv -> sqlite, inmem or not
- queues + cron triggers -> durable workflows with DBOS
and ++++
use any programming language, not only js
but protect this with cloudflare, yes, 100%
'be more ambitious'
i regularly get laughed at by a fellow engineer friend of mine for saying;
'i could literally build anything, now i want to build something that really matters'
but i genuinely (within reason) believe that to be true. i like this talk not because of what @mattzcarey @thomas_ankcorn and @dillon_mulroy built (ive used it since closed beta, its good) but HOW it was built. its not just vibe coding, its modern, agentic software engineering, that's so exciting.
be more ambitious isnt just blah blah conference speak, i really believe it to be something every engineer should be embracing.
0 surprise to me that 1 of the 2 questions there was time for was about 'writing code is dead'. Over the last 15+ years ive watched how intimately intertwined writing software and being good at solving problems can be with an engineers ego (not a dirty word), sense of self and purpose. its obvious that the perceived ripping away of one of the core parts of the role would be a tricky transition for a lot of people. i think we have to be sensitive of that and try our best to encourage the industry to embrace the change with cautious optimism, for the collective good of the industry.
it really is such an interesting time to be alive.
my lighting talk from cloudflare connect on building artifacts in 3 weeks is up!
youtu.be/D_tnYlZe5t8?is=LDkb…
coming from doing C# and PHP where i dont htink monorepos make as much sense, it took some convincing when i picked up TypeScript a couple of yeas ago, to actually see the value (to the extent of doing multi and migrating it to mono, twice).
now ive speed run multiple HUGE TS projects in monos, i still see the value BUT
last week i took a stab at Cloudflare's multi agent github replacement project, knocked out 1 million lines of code in the 4 days i had to think about and build the thing. i dogfooded my solution on my solution, as soon as it was possible. i realised while i had actually solved parts of the problem (the solution is legitimately nice to use and faster than big merge queues), id not gone deep enough (obviously, you only spent 4 days you idiot). ive spent the the last week with some threads i still want to tug on.
about an hour ago i was thinking 'i think monorepos might actually be the problem, but im not sure just going multi is the answer either'
we have to be prepared to shatter any and all existing paradigms at every level of the software lifecycle if we are going to get 'this' right, that doesnt mean re inventing the wheel but at least being prepared to make it out of different stuff.
im going to tug on those threads as soon as possible. couple of projects to a launch then im on it
some times i read posts like this and remember not everyone is building on Cloudflare, crazy.
(no they dont pay me)
Agents that run for hours can't afford to lose their place.
Standard Agents gives every conversation its own Durable Object and database. At Cloudflare Connect, co-founder and CTO @jpschroeder shows how it works:
- One database per conversation, because agents reread their full history on every step
- Alarms kick off long work, and a watchdog object tracks progress so agents keep running for hours
- A live demo where every attendee who scanned in got their own expense agent
Gee, Brain, what are we gonna do tonight? The same thing we do every night, Pinky, try to take over the world!
i spent $250 on Cloudflare Clef and Clairic so you dont have to (but you should)
for those of you that didnt follow my Durable Edgelings experiment during Cloudflare Connect, this is what happened.
this was such a fun showcase of the primatives on the Developer Platform... what should i build next?! (other than my 2 day jobs and 390 WIP projects)
read the full report druableedgelings dot com
















