This is a genre of post that I've never really understood. Klabnik is great and all, but, ok? Sure? Were people really record-scratching over his totally reasonable decision to take a good-paying job at a big company?

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?

It's cool man, not everything is for everyone.

> 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.

Yeah just to be clear, you're simply at the leading edge of a phenomenon that's been puzzling me for awhile, probably starting with that Yegge/Grab piece (after which, from what I can tell, he was never heard from again). Don't fade away!

:) <3

Oh, one last bit I missed:

> Like: did you want to write this, or did Cloud Flare reallllllly want you to write this?

I brought up to them that I wanted to write a post about joining, and asked if they wanted marketing to look it over or something. They said "no need, we'll be happy with whatever you write."

I see it as a mutually beneficial thing, and always have, everywhere I've worked.

Are you concerned at all how the Wireguard thing is playing out vs your desire to see this stuff open sourced?