What’s happening on Fastly Connect

One of the core features of an excellent developer experience is that it gives assurance that one does not have to get started, or unstuck, alone. That’s why we have Fastly Connect, a community forum where developers learn and help each other on their journey of building fast, secure and engaging experiences. Fastly Connect is the place where you can hear from other developers in the community, including the ones building Fastly, about everything from the smallest details of CDN configuration to the biggest questions about building apps and websites.

Here are just a few of the interesting conversations that have been happening.

Learning how to purge CDN path via a webhook

Fastly users love us because our instant purging is faster than anything else they can find. But what about purging via a webhook?

A community member was planning to use Fastly CDN to deliver firmware and package artifacts of a mid-sized open source project and they were looking to use a webhook for flushing a certain path of the CDN to prevent issues they had been running into with their parallel Buildbot setup. DevRel team members Andrew Betts and Kevin Fleming gave advice on a few different ways to solve this problem, multiple solutions, and the developer was able to get it working! Check out how they solved it →

Community member wonders what’s the best JavaScript library for supporting WebSocket-over-HTTP on Fastly Compute

WebSockets was a big topic this month! The number of possible solutions to the challenges our community members have can be daunting, but asking for guidance in the forum is a quick and easy way to connect with the engineers working on their solutions. In this thread, a community member with experience in using Pushpin locally was trying to get the same thing to work on Compute. Katsuyuki Omuro, from Fastly’s Dev Rel team, told them about how to get there with Fastly Fanout, including links to demo applications and other starter kits. See how Fanout works with Compute →

Andrew Betts on the Fastly Dev Rel team is looking for developers in the community to meet one-on-one and help him update our developer experience research

If you’re a developer working hands-on with the Fastly platform, here’s a great opportunity to have direct input into our product development, and Andrew will even offer help on any challenges you have or guidance you may need in your Fastly journey. Start chatting with Andrew →

What was the first open source project that you got involved in?

Many developers at Fastly and in the community, if not all, have had a moment where an open source project impacted their workflow, philosophy, and even career. Tell us your story in this thread, and read what other members have to say about their experiences when working with open source. Read about it →

Speaking of open source, the community helped us write a Code of Conduct/Contributor Guidelines for our own open source work

Hannah Aubry, community manager and lead of our open source program, Fast Forward, asked the community for their suggestions on the best way to codify our developer community values across Fastly’s wide range of open source repos. This thread is rich with advice, and prior art from other organizations like the Python Software Foundation (a Fast Forward member!), Elastic, Django, and more. Thanks to the community’s input we shipped our new Code of Conduct this month. Take a look at how we got there →

Kay Sawada, specialist field engineer for Fastly Compute, wants the community’s thoughts on debugging Fastly Compute services

We’re asking the community to share what they want to learn about or wish they knew when they started using Fastly Compute. One member said they’d like a tutorial showing off a normal way to debug a Compute program – what other kinds of content would be useful? Let us know →

Everyone is welcome to join Fastly Connect today and start learning and growing with other developers. If you're not sure what to say there, start by letting us know how we can further help you on your developer journey.