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Three Chapters at Cloudflare: Programmer to CTO to Board of Directors

by jgrahamc on 5/7/25, 5:43 PM with 27 comments

• by dang on 5/7/25, 7:22 PM

  All: we're going to bury this thread today, for unrelated (but legit) reasons. Sorry not to give a more satisfying explanation but it's not my place to do that this time.

  That said, I totally missed this announcement in March and, since it never made HN's frontpage at the time, I imagine most of the community missed it too. Therefore I propose to arrange a repost when the time is right and we can have a HN party to celebrate jgrahamc. In the meantime, I guess, both belated and premature congratulations!

• by simonw on 5/7/25, 6:29 PM

  Congratulations John. Knowing you're on the board reassures me, given the amount of trust placed in Cloudflare by the internet at large.

• by ddorian43 on 5/7/25, 6:12 PM

  Will your email still work when we have issues? I've used it with great success and gotten same-day fixes.

• by aanet on 5/7/25, 6:06 PM

  Kudos to JGC! <3

  I've always loved reading his blog posts on his own site, and learning / using the wide variety of his projects (hello POPfile!, hello Make!) and interests (Analytical Engine!).

  Thanks for your efforts to get the British Govt to apologize for their actions towards Alan Turing!

  Well deserved promo, Sir!

• by lysace on 5/7/25, 6:03 PM

  Congrats on your non-retirement!

  My personal Cloudflare pro/con list:

  + Keeps the web working at scale

  + Made me a lot of money in the stock market

  - It's so very high-touch/sales-intensive. I want a tiered public price list that is universally adhered to. Otherwise there's always that nagging feeling that I'm getting screwed for not being aggressive enough, or something. I know I'm fighting an uphill battle here. See also this documentary about Jared Dunn/Ed Chambers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-CA2EW4Z_U

• by nashashmi on 5/7/25, 7:11 PM

  Hi John, do you think it would be a worthwhile completion of cloudflare’s mission to buy Google Chrome? And maybe also purchase the data pipeline?

• by ChuckMcM on 5/7/25, 6:59 PM

  Congrats John. Of all the roles in a company for a technical person I find member of the board to be the most complex.

• by bgwalter on 5/7/25, 7:00 PM

  Nice. If the helpdesk function still works, could you make the Cloudflare Stackoverflow captchas go away? Stackoverflow becomes unusable lately.

• by bzmrgonz on 5/7/25, 7:13 PM

  Aren't you taking credit for Lets-encrypt? 'doubling SSL /Universal SSL' . As I understand it, LETS-ENCRYPT was the one to democratize and liberate SSL from the commercial grip to the masses!! Right?? Maybe my knowledge base is flawed.

• by TimCTRL on 5/7/25, 6:53 PM

  Where is Lee Lee Holloway now and how is he doing?

• by campbel on 5/7/25, 6:06 PM

  From the linked Programmer blog [1]:

  > It might seem lowly to be a Programmer, but in a world where so much is driven by computers there's nothing shameful in being the person who makes them go.

  I find it interesting that in 2012 he thought the title of "Programmer" was shameful. In 2012 I was a somewhat recent grad and definitely more junior, at that time I thought programmers were the smartest folks at my company, exactly because they were "the [people] who make [computers] go".

  [1] https://blog.jgc.org/2012/02/programmer.html

• by bsoles on 5/7/25, 7:20 PM

  Perhaps we shouldn't celebrate a faceless mega-corporation (and their executives) that has the power to block individual people's (or rather their IP addresses') access to the Internet with no recourse to remedy the situation.

• by andrethegiant on 5/7/25, 6:03 PM

  Anything new here besides what was announced in March?

• by babelfish on 5/7/25, 6:03 PM

  You also posted this at the time of announcement, back in March: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43497738

  I wonder how this will impact the blog-driven engineering culture.

• by pieter1976 on 5/7/25, 6:08 PM

  [flagged]