Cloudchella 2025

Issue #384.April 14, 2025.2 Minute read.
Bytes

Today’s issue: The 12,000-word Node.js ebook that should’ve been a tweet, “slopsquatting”, and the missing piece to my Rammstein fansite.

Welcome to #384.

Eyeballs logo

The Main Thing

Raccoons praying on a mountain top

Blessed be the workers

Cloudchella 2025

Am I a little jealous that I wasn’t able to scream along in person to every word of Lady Gaga’s Coachella set last weekend? Of course I am.

But I was busy having a different out-of-body experience during my annual pilgrimage to the top of Cloudflare Mountain for their 2025 Developer Week. And it wasn’t just the CF-branded molly tabs that Matthew Prince was handing out in that cave – it was the 32 different announcements they made during a dizzying 5-day stretch that puts most other launch weeks to shame.

Here are three of our favorites.

Cloudflare Containers coming in June: This will allow you to run user-generated code in any language, execute CLI tools that need a full Linux environment, and lots of other container-y things in a simple and scalable way. Containers will integrate deeply with Workers and Durable Objects, so you’ll be able to use Workers as your API gateway, service mesh, and orchestrator – without having to bolt on a bunch of extra infrastructure.

Cloudflare Vite plugin 1.0: Historically, the Vite dev server has always run server code in Node.js, even if you were targeting Workers. But thanks to Vite’s new Environment API, your Worker code can now run inside the native CF Workers runtime, letting your local dev environment match production behavior almost exactly.

MCP comes to the Agents SDK: You knew there had to be some AI slop hype in here, but this is pretty interesting. The Agents SDK is already popular for letting you build powerful AI agents with Durable Objects and Vectorize. Now, they’re adding in a new class, MCPClientManager, along with some other MCP capabilities that provide all the tooling you need to allow your AI agent to make calls to external services via MCP.

Bottom Line: Love them or hate them, we all have to admit one thing – Cloudflare ships. And Matt still owes me $65 for that Uber.

        
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Our Friends
(With Benefits)

Edna Mode from the Incredibles staring into the camera

Me watching all of my tests slowly fail one by one

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Cool Bits logo

Cool Bits

  1. If you want to see some of the new Cloudflare hotness in action, Bhanu just launched MCPify.ai – a Bolt-like tool for building your own MCP servers, which he created using Cloudflare Workers + Durable Objects.

  2. Tailwind CSS 4.1 comes with some long-awaited text-shadow utilities, mask elements, and fine-grained text wrapping that’ll “defend the integrity of your layouts from even the longest German words your users will throw at you.” Time to fire up my old Rammstein fansite and get to work.

  3. Next.js 15.3 comes with Turbopack builds (alpha) and two new navigation hooks, onNavigate and useLinkStatus for better client-side routing.

  4. Right on cue, the Blazity team created The expert guide to Next.js performance optimization – a 10-chapter ebook with practical strategies, real-life examples, and open-source tools to help make your Next.js app faster and more user friendly. [sponsored]

  5. Google just relaunched Project IDX as Firebase Studio and added more AI tools and features for building full-stack apps in the browser. Hopefully this rebrand goes better than when my high school band changed our name to Weezer 2.

  6. Jordan Eldredge wrote an article called {transitions} = f(state) about how a React application can be thought of as modeling a state machine.

  7. This Convex repo contains the entire codebase for their reactive database, which they just open-sourced last month. [sponsored]

  8. Node.js Testing Best Practices is a very in-depth, 12,000-word ebook that the authors published in a GitHub readme. I look forward to reading their next ebook in an even more user-friendly format – hundreds of text screenshots that you swipe through on a LinkedIn post.

  9. WebTUI is a modular CSS library that “brings the beauty of Terminal UIs to the browser.” I double-checked, and I’m 90% sure they weren’t being sarcastic with that description.

  10. Expo created this new page showing you how to migrate seamlessly from CodePush to EAS Update – and considering CodePush just got axed by Microsoft for good, it’s pretty helpful. [sponsored]

  11. In a new development that absolutely no one saw coming, LLMs are hallucinating package names and making up software dependencies – which is creating a fun new trend called “slopsquatting” that may or may not eventually threaten the security of the entire internet.

  12. But on the other hand, have you ever wondered why JSON has commas?