How Cloudflare ruined the Internet

JohnnyDoe said:

Here we go again. Zoom is down, among others.

I tend to believe that the dependency and centralization is so obvious and clearly enormously dangerous we will see corporations building their own infrastructure and moving away from cloud services in general... it's not just about convenience and definitely not about money (time of could services being cheaper is probably gone)

void said:

it's not just about convenience and definitely not about money (time of could services being cheaper is probably gone)

I recommend an interesting view of DHH

Watch on YouTube

- maybe it's a specific situation but quite eloquently put - actually I recommend this whole interview (not just to software developers or IT guys)

I follow DHH since the old Rails days pre-2010... so this hits a nerve. I liked him as he's one of the few silicon valley nerds that still have man hobbies (racing with cars etc), a wife, some kids etc...
today we could say he was only one of the few that didn't go totally woke. And he openly had the courage to fight against the wokeism, DEI etc... and I appreciate him for that.
I am happy with a lot of things DHH says... especially about code, websites/apps, his KISS principles on coding, monolith apps, not following trends (the random new js framework) etc

But take what he says about life/politics with a grain of salt... as he did some major turnarounds in his life.

When he started talking about politics, he lost so many points in my view.
(by san francisco standards he was always better than many of his colleagues for sure but still...)

It doesn't show in that video, but you can find easily others clips and posts about what I am talking about.
He's been for a good part of his life very confused or too optimistic about the human species.
He thought there could be a system with EU full-welfare/mindset and USA drive for entrepreneurship... and he was pushing hard to turn USA into that!

DHH loved Denmark’s high-tax, high-welfare model: universal healthcare, free college, strong safety net, paid by 50%+ marginal rates he said he'd fine with.
(he said he would be fine with it... but still lives and built his businesses in the USA, 0 tax paid to Denmark as today...)
He lived most of his adult life in luxury in the USA (Hansson moved from Denmark to Chicago, Illinois, U.S. in November 2005, now lives in a nice villa in Malibu, California),
paying relatively low taxes (compared to EU), enjoying huge freedom (at his wealth level),
yet he kept having these dreams of Europe as a perfect place… a place, i say, where he could never have built his company nor his wealth.
And his supercars and his very expensive hobbies would be taxed to death...
He praised the European welfare state while trashing the American capitalism that made him rich, but only after he’s cashed out.
I can’t stand people who shit in the same bowl they ate from.
He should literally kiss the american soil every day literally.
The guy had too much money and comfort, and he hadn't lived in Europe for way too long, when he was making those declarations...
If he really believed Denmark was so special, he should've renounced his USA citizenship, moved all of his money, all of his businesses and his supercars back to Denmark.

Truth is, since he lived in USA his whole adult life, and just hopped to Europe every now and then as a tourist, while keeping his fortune safely locked up in American vaults, he didn't have the whole picture.
Like I said, he’s spot-on and sensible on many topics, but when it comes to politics he doesn’t know jack shit.
His ego is quite big, he lost contact with the real world many years ago. He should've enjoyed what he had and not try to ruin the environment that made him rich.
He’s been for years just another Californian champagne socialist type sunbathing in his multi-million-dollar villa, enjoying the ocean view... thinking socialism will fix all the issues in the world.
He got bored, and thought he could fix all the world issues… as long as it’s not paid for with his money.
The classic guy preaching from high, while staying perfectly safe.

He briefly tried to live in EU (three years on and off) during covid. Obliviously I am pretty sure his wealth was shielded during those years...
and even with that, he quickly got back to USA 🤣:
world.hey.com/dhh/back-to-america-7e878fa2

I appreciate him for trying... albeit from a quite comfortable position, and I like to see that truth hit him straight in the face...
After that stint in EU, he became based again, maybe even more than before 🤣:

"The point is that the Danes understand that they can’t both have a safe, open society where young children can be out alone at night, take the metro by themselves, and enjoy the play parks by themselves, if they also allow druggies, vagrants, beggars, and the mentally ill to roam the streets on their own accord. A strong civil society relies invariably on strong norms that are judiciously enforced by both customs and cops."
"But don’t you for a second think this unity isn’t contingent on the homogeneity of ethnicity, values, norms, and perhaps even religion. And if you sit over here, in America, pining for those Danish benefits, you should have the intellectual honesty to wrestle with whether you’d be able to stomach a society built on the same compromises and obligations. I rather doubt that most arm-chair social revolutionaries could or would."
[...]
"You can contrast this political reality with Sweden, which otherwise shares a lot of similarities with the Danes in terms of welfare-state design. They went with an open-door policy on immigration for far longer, ended up taking many more (about 3x Denmark), and are now in a world of hurt with the highest gun-murder rate in all of Europe, along with an overall crime rate 50% greater than Denmark."
world.hey.com/dhh/the-reality-of-the-danish-…ale-78069fbf

It is true that "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times"
The guy enjoyed good times in USA... got bored as his life was so great (without realizing it..), so tried to fix the world with some armchair socialism... just to realize by moving there (denmark) that it's fucked well beyond repair... and socialism wasn't the cure, but the disease!
Came back to the USA and now he's looking and talking almost as the same "right wing guy" he despised in his blog rants some years before...
what a turnaround!

now quietly supporting trump too (🤣), still as a long term liberal doesn't have the balls to write it openly instead he's writing "i'm optimistic" and "got faith"....
while criticizing EU hard this time after his denmark experience 🤣
"This is far more an article of faith than of analysis, mind you. I can also well imagine Europe sticking with Eurocrat thinking, spinning its wheels with grand but empty proclamations, issuing scorning but impotent admonishments of America, and doubling down on the regulatory black hole."
world.hey.com/dhh/mega-a0f62cd4

Guess what he's doing now to help danes???? hand picking startup foudners and relocating them to the USA. 🤣
Too easy, why don't invest your money in Denmark and try to save the ship by paying your taxes there? 🤣
world.hey.com/dhh/workfeed-goes-to-america-84b381d9

~~~
His sugar coated views translated into his software, sadly. He got so niche, so fixated with "beauty", with elitism, with absolutes, that he lost touch with real business world even there.
Sometimes he say his way of doing things is easier and better... maybe it just for him, as he's 20 years into it, deeply invested and he cannot/doesn't want to think outside of the box anymore.
Rails can be the best framework in the world, and ruby the most elegant language... but if I were to use rails today I would not find a single decent employee, unless you're ready to pay the premium for the handful of super senior devs that are so deep into it that ask 400k+...
Nobody uses Rails anymore as he doesn't listen other people requests/needs.
"His way is the best way", of course.
It's true that github, shopify etc still run some rails in their system... (it would be a pain to rewrite totally from scratch, so they slowly rewrite part of it), but there are no new major websites/apps using it.
The ship sailed towards javascript long time ago. There is a crazy shortage of rails employees. There are virtually zero junior engineers to hire worldwide...

Also in the meantime Laravel came out, pretty much "copied" rails principles (kiss, batteries included) and tried to adapt those to PHP.
PHP syntax is ugly compared to ruby. It's old, still running a good part of the internet, but slowly got many updates into the language. The difference is that, albeit being an old dinosaur of a language, in the last years it started opening a bit and accepting (cloning, copying, "stealing") the good ideas from other languages/frameworks.
So more people got into Laravel than Rails now. It does the work, and there's millions of cheap PHP employees you can quickly train on it...
and plenty of huge companies using it. Now it became what Rails was in 2010: a batteries included framework for one-man startups/mvps that can scale up to corporate levels.

Not that all of this will matter in the next years... AI can almost do it all these days.

They must learn from Nokia story, be flexible and adapt always.
0% doubt USA is a place where you can find great opportunities, just have the right mindset and the skills required (human behaviors number 1).

I agree with the concept of centralization, it's bad. But there is also a reason of why it became that popular/big, and mainly it's because their CDN is so big that it outperforms any competitor. You can have your website hosted in South Africa, and if you rely on the CF cache system, even if someone visits your site from Tokyo, it will load incredibly fast (yes there are other CDN providers to make your site load fast using their cache BUT they are way more expensive and do not have the same server coverage of CF, outside of Akamai, CF has basically the most coverage).

For the protection part, it's annoying for people that don't know how to set it up properly, they use their default settings which sometimes may include their 5s challenge, but if you know what you're doing you can set CF at minimal settings and show 5s challenge only when under attack, and then just abuse their cache infrastructure for free basically. (That is the main pro of CF, it's free). The other part of their protection is that it's genuinely good nowadays, it's very hard to bypass their 5s challenge with DDoS attacks, especially compared to the alternatives out there that are (in my opinion) at least 5 times worst.

There was a good product out there, it was called "Stackpath" back then, but they closed unfortunately due to financial issues, it was really promising though!

I am not defending CF for everything now, I am just saying that they developed a great product. But if you really need a CDN for your website because you want it to run fast everywhere, you could build your own CDN system as well, just buy servers in the US, Latin American, Africa, EU, Australia and points in Asia and then you are pretty much covered worldwide, your site will load quickly everywhere but that has a cost + requires a setup using HAProxy, nginx etc.

Even if you built your own CDN, now you have a fast website but then as soon as you get a serious DDoS attack (which is very rare in most cases I would say though, obviously not everybody gets DDoS attacks like that), you will regret not having CF or Akamai protections 😂