sorry to hear that's been your experience. i actually joined through an acquisition about a year ago and one of the main things we've been focused on is the dashboard and overall dx.
sadly "hostile ux" is a phrase i've heard more than once and we're working hard to improve. if you're open to it, would love to hear more about the issues you've be running into
The dashboard UX has improved a lot lately but one thing that drives me absolutely nuts is that I get rate limited all the time using it.
For example, I had to recently change an env var we had on a handful of apps and opened them all into new tabs and made the changes and about half way through I started getting rate limited. This has happened to me many times and I've reported it to support and in Discord but it still happens.
One other big complaint is support is non-existent. We sent many support emails (on business plans) and I'm pretty sure we've never gotten a reply. Same for posting in Discord. It's pretty disheartening to build your business on Cloudflare and have no confidence support will help you when you need it.
yeah you should definitely not be getting rate limited, sorry this is annoying you're not the first to report i will dig in.
as far as support, i know there is a huge effort going on right now to improve response time and support in general, also I'm not as active in discord as I ought to be there's just so much noise, feel free to ping me on there directly if I can help brandon/@ygwyg. can't promise it'll be an instant response but I will respond
You really think an individual employee trying to help a customer when they likely have little impact on org wide issues like how customer support is run is tarpitting? Seems a bit uncharitable
You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become Akamai.
The reason everyone came running when Cloudflare first started was obviously the "burn VC money to gain marketshare" but it was also the sheer simplicity. They had one product and a handful of features.
Until someone on the business side takes a step back and says "when I mouse over 'Products' on the homepage, why the fuck is there a 'See All Products' link" it will be impossible to have a usable customer experience. Start killing things and making them features.
Good meeting, appreciate the engagement, added new action items "add yet another way to do AI in Workers, say something about long schedule agentic driven" and "go to market with new unrelated Web Application Firewall product".
Thank you for saying this and being willing to listen.
The worst one I saw is the load balancer config UX/DX. I use CF's load balancer product for clients and so have to do a lot of setup and teardown back-and-forth. Everything related to setting up load balancers is split across multiple screens and/or "wizards" that are extremely confusing.
A lot of the error messages you get are generic at best and so you waste a ton of time clicking between pages and tabs just to set up some pools and attach them to a load balancer.
There's also some inconsistency between how things are labeled, so one thing can have two names and you have to hold that in your head while you move around the UI.
I managed a large enterprise CF account from 2018-2023. Hundreds of load balancers. The UI changed out from under us 3 times, with some big problems being fixed, but introducing new ones. I gave bold feedback directly to the leaders responsible for this, with helpful suggestions on how to make it better.
I was really glad when they fixed the old one that had a big "X" that would delete your load balancer without a warning dialog. But I was not happy that the load balancers got increasingly complex, with settings hidden at multiple layers that you had to independently configure.
Load balancing IS complex, but this is their core business, and in many other places such as DNS, Cloudflare put a lot more thought into making it simple and intuitive to use.
Getting this stuff right takes lots of strong leadership and long-term decision making with determination and wisdom to provide the best experience for customers. Unfortunately I am not confident that is how the business is operating, especially with strong talent being let go or leaving due to lack of fostering of a healthy working environment.
The one I saw most recently was working with an SRE coworker. Data in what looks like a table, in this case a subdomain/IP address, that overflows the cell gets cut off with no ability to actually view it. I almost had him just edit the CSS in Chrome, but he figured out a different workaround.
I don't even know where to start. I want to host a static site and it's a closed beta so password protection would be nice.
Let's see, first menu item Compute. Hrm, HTML isn't compute, oh it's there ok. Add Application, HTML isn't an application but ok. 95% of the page and on top are fields for adding a worker. The static page option is a little link at the bottom. Linked it to my repo. Oops wrong repo can I change it, oh, no. Ok delete and set it up all over again. Zero trust. Asked for some field, couldn't determine if it was a root domain, subdomain, URL. Ask the built in AI. It says hrm it's not in the docs, idk. Figure out how to add Cloudflare as an auth provider, link it to the static page. Team member says they can't login even though they're a Super Admin. Ah, I have to add their email manually or say all users of the account, otherwise by default Super Admins are locked out of authenticating via Zero Trust CF.
At one point I asked the AI for a copy of my email related DNS records it froze for 15 min while it output in a single textarea line char by char an extremely long key. Maybe that one's on me, but since the AI was frozen and couldn't be interrupted maybe not.
These are just the parts I remember off the top of my head. Most of us work in this field and should be sympathetic to the fact that designing a dashboard for this much data density isn't trivial. But that's tempered by CF deciding it's the gatekeeper for a web that’s supposed to be decentralized and spending a zillion dollars on engineering.
I'm also very biased towards Cloudflare (I work there), but I have to say it did make launching this really easy. Workers + Hono for the APIs, R2 for the images, D1 for database with the option to migrate to Hyperdrive if you outgrow it.
Browsers can take standards position on CommonMark extensions and decide on a baseline that goes into the W3C spec? It will just converge on the lowest common denominator and that’s good enough for the vast majority of content reading usecases.
> I’ve been asking for browser-native markdown support for years now. A clean web is not that far, if browsers support more than just HTML.
You can always do the markdown -> DOM conversion on the client. Sure, there's a bit of latency there, but it means easier deployment (no build step involving pandoc or similar).
Browser-native markdown support would be better though; you'd get ability to do proper contenteditable divs with bold, italic, etc done via markdown
To get broad support from the server side, you’ll need to showcase high browser support. We need Wordpress and Wikipedia and Ghost to support this, and that won’t happen without native browser support.
> We need Wordpress and Wikipedia and Ghost to support this, and that won’t happen without native browser support.
It can. Unlikely but possible. A good first step would be to have a well-written web component to be used like this: `<markdown>...</markdown>`, with no support at all for a build-step. The .js file implementing this should be included directly in the `<head>`.
If that gets traction (unlikely, but possible) then the standards would sooner or later introduce a tag native to the browser that does the same thing.
Happy to answer any questions, super excited to be part of the team and help make Cloudflare's developer experience better. Not just bells-and-whistles ;)
That was a rough read, not really sure I understood the authors point. It was kind of all over the place, bad because AI, bad because not really open-source, bad because doge...
Only thing I really left with was the author doesn't like the word gum. Seems like a hit piece on Sahil? Pretty sure the open-source part of Gumroad has been in the works for a while.
Right. Somewhat burred the lede. My take was that the value that services like Gumroad can bring is precisely the value-add they provide over what a create could do themselves. So if the CEO has chosen to essentially automate the entire business by replacing staff with AI, then what value-add is left exactly?
Better then to watch out for middlemen that "extract value rather than add it" and empower creators to host things themselves. Thought that was a nice observation.
Ironically, I always thought that was somewhat the point of Gumroad (short of self-hosting). Are they on to enshittification Stage II?
Hi I'm one of the founders of Outerbase, just want to clarify a few things, seems like you might have some wrong information on Outerbase.
Big fan of Mathesar by the way!
1. We have a incredibly powerful CRUD editor on our table, in fact you can drag and drop and select multiple columns & rows, I haven't seen many other DB editors support this.
2. We allow you to pick foreign key constraints from a dropdown as well.
Maybe the US will break up, and then some parts of the US will join Canada.
As big as the political problems the US has been having in recent years are, I don't think that's likely to happen in the short-to-medium term. But, if these problems just keep on getting worse, then eventually it may become a very real possibility.
Peter Zeihan makes the case in one of his books for why Alberta should leave Canada and join the US. I’m not Canadian or American and have no dog in the fight, but it’s interesting reading.
While Alberta is often called “the Texas of Canada” there is not a single Albert a that would give up their healthcare to join the US. In many meaningful ways their standard of living would plummet overnight - healthcare, education, safety, violent crime, life expectancy, etc.
I think it's reasonable to presume that any territory added to a country will become the average of that country over time.
So the better question is actually why is the average American such a violent criminal compared to the average Canadian? Answer that and you will have answered your question.
Likely lack of healthcare (desperation), lack of affordable education, debt, need to fill for-profit prisons, corporate lobbying to make regular people's lives worse, etc. etc.
> Violent crime in the US is not evenly distributed.
Neither is it in Canada.
If you want to cherry pick the "best" of the US and leave out the worst from any comparisons, you'd have to do that for whatever country you're comparing it to.
> what would send all the criminality to that province?
Nothing would "send" criminality there, over time any place joining the USA would become the USA, and by definition it would become the average of the USA (because it will be a part of the USA)
A lot of people like to think a place will become the USA in all the perceived "good" ways like higher potential salaries, lower income taxes, more freedom, etc., but they fail to realize a place will also become the USA in all the ways that make the USA so vastly different from every other developed nation (healthcare, education, violence, crime, etc.)
Of course it does! Those higher crime areas are using up limited time and money that could be better put to use making your life better, but instead it's being used to deal with all that crime and criminals.
Interestingly enough while the Canadian constitution doesn’t flat out permits this, it does allow the province to have a binding referendum and should a vote come to pass by it’s people, it forces the federal government to seriously consider it, thus a faithful negotiating can take place which could lead to the province becoming a sovereign nation.
I've always joked about joining Europe because I feel we have more in common with them then our neighbour to the South, but recent comments from said neighbour's upcoming Führer have made the jokes just a tad more serious.
sadly "hostile ux" is a phrase i've heard more than once and we're working hard to improve. if you're open to it, would love to hear more about the issues you've be running into
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