Cloudflare Workers Tech Talks in Tokyo #3

Cloudflare Workers Tech Talks in Tokyo #3

On August 1st, I held the Workers Tech Talks event in Tokyo. About 80 people joined in person, making it a large event. From Cloudflare, Ricky Robinett and Kristian Freeman attended and gave talks. They shared deep knowledge and experience about Cloudflare Workers, making the event a big success. Here’s a report on the event.

What is Workers Tech Talks?

I’ve been hosting ”Workers Tech Talks” since last year. It’s an event for developers who use Cloudflare Workers by developers who use Cloudflare Workers. I’ve held it twice in Tokyo and once in Osaka, Japan’s second-largest city.

• Workers Tech Talks in Tokyo #1
• Workers Tech Talks in Osaka #1
• Workers Tech Talks in Tokyo #2

One thing I always tell the speakers at this event is, ”Please don’t talk about what Cloudflare Workers is.” Instead, they are free to talk about whatever they like. They seem to enjoy this a lot. While some participants might find it hard to keep up, I believe it sparks their interest in Cloudflare Workers.

Venue

Like the first and second events, we borrowed the venue from Classmethod. They provided it for free. Classmethod is a cloud services consulting company and also a Cloudflare sales partner. Thank you as always!

Participants

We used the service “connpass” to create a page and recruit participants.

https://workers-tech.connpass.com/event/324272/

About 80 people attended the event, including the speakers. This is quite a large number for meetups in Tokyo.

When I asked, ”Have you ever used Cloudflare Workers?”, about 90% of the participants raised their hands.

Talks & Sessions

This event featured three normal talks, two Cloudflare sessions by Ricky and Kristian, and five lightning talks. Let’s take a look at each one.

Normal Talks

Why a Ruby Engineer Who Doesn’t Usually Write JS Uses Workers by @endy24502977

He is a Ruby engineer (who writes mostly YAML these days 😅) who uses Cloudflare Workers in various ways at his company. He shared the following examples:

• Mail to Webhook
• Azure OpenAI Service Proxy
• Mixture-of-Agents
• URL shortener for internal usage
• Slack Bot
• BetterChatGPT
• uptimeflare

According to him, Cloudflare Workers allows you to develop from proof of concept (PoC) to a production product without worrying about small details.

About Durable Objects by @naporin24690

The slides: https://speakerdeck.com/naporin0624/durableobjects-nituite

He uses Durable Objects heavily in his projects. He mentioned:

• WebSocket has become more accessible thanks to Durable Objects.
• The Hibernation API is convenient.
• He created a useful library for handling WebSockets with Durable Objects called ”DurabCast”. You can find more details on GitHub.https://github.com/napolab/durabcast

The library has the following features:

• Connection Monitoring and Auto-Close
  • Monitor and close idle connections automatically.
  • interval and timeout can be configured through options.
  • Opt-out of auto-closing by setting autoClose to false.
• Message Broadcasting
  • Broadcast messages to other connected clients.
  • Override webSocketMessage to customize message handling.
• Connection Alive Check
  • UseisAliveSocket to check if a connection is still alive.

He also highlighted PartyKit as a method for working with Durable Objects.

Call LLM on Durable Objects to Improve UX by @inaridiy

The slides: https://workers-tech.pages.dev/1

They are developing a service called Hanabi.rest, which allows AI to create Web APIs from prompts. (They also presented at the Hono Conference). The team is very young, consisting of one university student and two high school students.

Hanabi.rest is very interesting! It has the following features:

• Prompt to REST: Use LLM to build REST APIs from prompts and screenshots.
• Browser Playground: Edit and run APIs in the browser.
• One Click Deploy: Deploy APIs to Cloudflare Workers with one click.
• Local Build: Clone APIs to your local environment using CLI for continued development.

You can try it right away! https://hanabi.rest/

They use Durable Objects because if the browser is reloaded while the AI is generating an app, you can lose track of the generation process. Also, they use Cloudflare’s REST API to deploy the app that the user created in the browser to the user’s Cloudflare Workers.

Cloudflare Sessions

Ricky

Ricky’s session was titled ”Building fast with AI! (And Hono! and Cloudflare!)”. He used an AI-powered editor called ”Cursor” to build an application using only prompts. The result was an app with a UI for recognizing images using Hono and Workers AI. He finished just in time, earning applause from the participants.

He also introduced the multi-modal playground, which attracted great interest from the audience.

Kristian

Kristian’s session was titled ”Build a Classification API”. He introduced code to create a classification API using the Cloudflare stack and did a demo. Many participants were particularly interested in the “Vectorize” tool he used. In the latter half, he introduced the ”101” and ”201” YouTube videos he’s creating. I hope everyone watches them, as they are very easy to understand.

Lightning Talks (5 mins)

Cloudflare Workers with Otel by @_kaiinui

The slides: https://www.docswell.com/s/kaiinui/5R2319-2024-08-01-204329

He explained how to set up and use Open Telemetry at the application level.

Playing with WebGPU on Cloudflare Workers by @xiombatsg

The slides: https://speakerdeck.com/xiombatsg/cloudflare-workers-tewebgputoxi-reru-03737795-b4fd-4bb5-8334-a4b4ebc63ca0

He shared thoughts on using WebGPU for purposes other than AI, such as gaming.

How to Get Approval for Cloudflare Workers Development by @schwmtl

He introduced ideas on how to get approval for Cloudflare Workers development within an organization.

The Ultimate Authentication Trio: Hono x Passkey x Google Authenticator for Simple, Secure Logins by @yasuo_higa

He did a demo on passkey login using Cloudflare Workers and Pages.

Building a Wasm Worker with Moonbit and JSPI by @mizchi

He talked about the challenge of running Wasm built with Moonbit on Workers. He had to give up because JSPI doesn’t run on Workers.

Feedback

You can see participants’ feedback by searching for the hashtag ”#workers_tech” on X.

https://x.com/search?q=%23workers_tech

Participants were posting while listening to the talks, showing how engaged they were. Many were inspired by the presentations, and it was interesting to see so many pictures of Cloudflare socks, which were given as gifts to those who wanted them.

We had a great time 🙌 Thank you all 😊.It was my first time in Classmethod’s office, and it was so beautiful, spacious and clean with great access 🥹.

I’ve been presenting! I got so inspired!

Thank you for the Cloudflare socks at yesterday’s Cloudflare Workers Tech Talks @rickyrobinett !!! 🧦

Conclusion

We had three normal talks, two sessions by Cloudflare members, and five lightning talks, all in just two hours. It was a very packed and fulfilling time. Some participants have attended multiple times, which shows the community is maturing. It’s also great to see new faces at each event. We plan to hold the next one in winter.