Andrew Betts
Principal Developer Advocate, Fastly
Andrew Betts is the Principal Developer Advocate for Fastly, where he works with developers across the world to help make the web faster, more secure, more reliable, and easier to work with. He founded a web consultancy which was ultimately acquired by the Financial Times, led the team that created the FT’s pioneering HTML5 web app, and founded the FT’s Labs division. He is also an elected member of the W3C Technical Architecture Group, a committee of nine people who guide the development of the World Wide Web.
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Demos and starter kits: new ways for you to learn and build
We’ve overhauled our developer solutions content, adding two new content formats and reorganizing our popular recipes and solution patterns. Meet our new code examples, tutorials, demos, and starter kits!
Designing Edge-Native Applications | Fastly
Become "edge-native" in your next project and seamlessly run multiple instances concurrently and be prepared for the server-less world.
Code-splitting and minimal edge latency: the perfect match
Fastly Fiddle, our code playground tool, is a React single-page app that uses the excellent Monaco IDE component that powers VS Code. Problem is, Monaco is huge. And most uses of Fiddle are read only. Code-splitting removes the need to load a whole IDE to display some non-editable code. Let’s explore how.
Purging Fastly using GCP cloud functions
When using Fastly in front of Google Cloud Storage, cloud functions can enable purging of Fastly’s edge cloud platform instantly and selectively to ensure content updates are seen by users immediately. Here, we’ll show you how.
Better VCL for more maintainable Fastly configurations
Over the last eight years of providing a platform for coding at the edge, we've learned a lot about common patterns, as well as common mistakes and risky code. Best practices in Fastly VCL have changed over time to help address expectation gaps and help improve maintainability.
17 new solutions to Build on Fastly
Since the August launch of Build on Fastly, our developer library, we have been quietly adding many new solutions: beacon termination, geofencing, numerous flavours of load balancing, and lots of other goodies. Here's a list so you don't miss out on all the new ideas for getting the most out of Fastly.
Testing your Fastly config in CI
Many customers now upload their CDN configuration as part of their continuous deployment process. That means you need to be able to automate testing too. Here’s how.
Improving your search engine ranking (SEO) with Fastly
SEO is a murky science, with search engines striving to present the best possible result, and everyone else trying to figure out what "best" means in practice. What we do know is that reliability, speed, and security make a significant difference, and Fastly can help get you closer to number one.
Introducing scripted testing for Fastly fiddle
Fastly Fiddle allows for instant experimentation with Fastly's edge cloud behaviours without having to set up a Fastly account. Now, we're adding the ability to define assertions to specify the behaviour you are trying to create.
Prevent attacks with proof of work | Fastly
With attackers using publicly available lists of compromised passwords in an attempt to steal accounts, proof of work is a good way to slow the attackers down.
Feature policy: the web's missing guardrails
Over almost 30 years of its life, the web has grown beyond anyone's imagination, and the platform has become immensely powerful and flexible. With that power and flexibility comes complexity, and the potential for slow or insecure websites to deliver a poor user experience that drives people away from the web. Feature policy is here to help, and we've built a tool to show you how to use it.
Testing new ideas with Fastly Fiddle
Quickly experiment, debug and try out ideas on Fastly's platform, without signing up, or even logging in.
Patterns for authentication at the edge
Identity is a boring, but necessary element of most website builds. Validating a user’s identity and access rights is something that is in the critical performance path, required site-wide, and often implemented in a bespoke way. Moving it to the edge improves performance, and can simplify your application architecture.
How to get Faster Websites With Early and Priority Hints
Websites still load too slowly. During the most critical time in the page load lifecycle, your connection is often almost totally idle. At Fastly, we’re watching a new technology that hopes to make better use of that critical first couple of seconds.
The headers we want
Manipulating HTTP headers is one of the most common things that Fastly customers do. Using the right combination of headers is one of the best things you can do for the security of your site, and also a significant contributor to performance.
The headers we don't want
HTTP headers are an important way of controlling how caches and browsers process your web content. But many are used incorrectly or pointlessly, which adds overhead at a critical time in the loading of your page, and may not work as you intended.
How to Clear Cache in the Browser
Learn how to clear a cache memory with JavaScript to fix errors and improve front end performance.
Understanding the Vary header in the browser
Browsers need to understand and respond to Vary rules, and the way they do this is different from the way Vary is treated by CDNs. In this post, Principal Developer Advocate Andrew Betts explores the murky world of cache variation in the browser.
Diff at the edge with serverless cloud functions
Requesting the difference between two previously cached files — using just a CDN configuration and a serverless cloud compute function — is a great example of exploiting edge and serverless compute services to make your website more efficient and performant, and lower your bandwidth costs. Read on to learn more.
Getting the most out of Vary with Fastly
You can use the `Vary` response header in creative ways, including A/B testing and internationalization. At the same time, many people still use `Vary` badly or misunderstand what it does; in this post, we’ll provide an expanded guide, including some of the more exotic ways you can get value out of `Vary` in intermediate caches like Fastly.
