Cloudflare's Spring Developer Challenge: Build Real-Time Collaborative Apps

Cloudflare has announced a new developer challenge focused on building real-time, collaborative applications. The Spring Developer Challenge invites developers to leverage Cloudflare's platform features to create apps like chat rooms, games, and collaborative editing tools, with winning submissions featured on the company's blog and rewarded with merchandise.

Tools to Get You Started

Several Cloudflare services are well-suited for building collaborative applications:

  • Workers — Can serve as middleware connecting your app to APIs and an origin, or run the entire application. For TypeScript support, routing, and organized submodules, Cloudflare recommends Worktop, a popular Workers framework that can also complement existing framework-based apps like those using Svelte.
  • Cloudflare Pages — Simplifies site deployment, and you can make pages dynamic by placing a Worker in front or using Pages Functions (beta).
  • Durable Objects — Ideal for collaborative apps since they support websockets while coordinating state at the edge. A chat demo shows this in action, and Durable Object Groups can help scale load.
  • Workers KV — A global key-value store for securely storing and quickly serving data across Cloudflare's network. R2 handles enormous data volumes without costly egress fees.

Real-World Examples from the Community

Cloudflare's Developer Spotlight series has previously shown developers building complete applications on the platform. Notable community projects include JSON Hero, a readable JSON viewing tool built with Remix and deployed on Workers, and helix-flare, a GraphQL server deployment that uses Durable Objects for data coordination.

The company's Summer Developer Challenge in 2021 drew over 1,200 submissions, with hundreds of participants receiving swag boxes. That enthusiasm is expected to carry into this spring's event.

Challenge Rules and Participation

  • Participants must be at least 18 years old
  • Teams can have up to 10 people per submission
  • The submission deadline is May 24 June 7

Entries should be submitted through the challenge's official site. For assistance while building, participants can join the Cloudflare Developers Discord server.

The challenge offers a chance to explore how far Cloudflare's developer platform has come — and get rewarded for it.