Cloudflare Opens Developer Challenge With Swag Boxes Up for Grabs
Cloudflare is looking to recreate two of the pre-pandemic experiences its developer community says it misses most: collaborating with peers and collecting conference swag. The company's answer is the Cloudflare Developer Summer Challenge, which rewards 300 participants with boxes of popular Cloudflare merchandise while encouraging interaction through the Workers Discord channel.
To enter, developers must build a project using Cloudflare Workers in combination with at least one other product in the company's developer platform. Submissions close November 1, 2021, with judging based on innovation and how much of the platform a project puts to use. No more than one swag box is awarded per person. Full eligibility details are published in the terms and conditions.
Platform Building Blocks
The challenge revolves around four products that together span compute, storage, and frontend delivery:
- Cloudflare Workers, the serverless compute layer that deploys code across the global edge network.
- Workers KV, a low-latency key-value store tuned for high read volumes and dynamic APIs that respond like cached static files.
- Durable Objects, which offer consistent, coordinated storage at the edge for stateful serverless applications.
- Cloudflare Pages, a Jamstack platform for collaborative, high-performance web development.
Submissions are assessed on three points: meeting the baseline (two platform products, a live link, and a public repository), originality and usefulness of the project, and how deeply the submission integrates additional Cloudflare services.
Getting Started
Newcomers should begin with the Workers Quickstart Guide and review the documentation for Workers KV or Durable Objects. Frontend-focused developers can consult the Pages Quickstart Guide.
For inspiration, Cloudflare points to its tutorials and examples, plus the Built With Workers showcase. Completed projects should be shared with the community by tagging @CloudflareDev on Twitter using the hashtag #CloudflareSummerChallenge.
Participants who want to connect with other builders can use a dedicated channel on the Workers Discord server to discuss ongoing work, ask questions, and join Q&A sessions.
Advanced Project Ideas
The platform's strength lies in letting developers write code while Cloudflare owns the infrastructure. The edge network handles scaling and global distribution automatically, opening several ambitious build paths.
Serverless APIs for frontends. Workers is a natural complement to a Pages-hosted frontend, acting as the backend for applications built with frameworks such as React, Gatsby, Hugo, or Svelte. Starting a new API is done through the Wrangler CLI:
‘wrangler generate serverless-api https://github.com/cloudflare/worker-typescript-template’Complete instructions for connecting the API to a Pages site are available in the Pages documentation.
Interactive games and real-time apps. Combining Workers, Durable Objects, and WebSockets supports low-latency state management at the edge. Example implementations range from chat rooms to multiplayer video games. Developers can integrate Unity or WebGL clients while authoritative game state resides in Durable Objects, and the client can run directly in the browser via WebAssembly rather than requiring a dedicated game client.
E-commerce and personalization. A commerce site built on Workers can layer in A/B tests, localization, and geo-targeted content such as local currency at any traffic level. For lightweight product catalogs, Workers KV can store item metadata like IDs, descriptions, and prices without provisioning a full database, and integrations with third-party payment or retail platforms like Stripe and Shopify are supported. Cloudflare cites Dig, a US restaurant chain that relocated its online ordering to a headless React app hosted across Pages and Workers to ride out pandemic traffic surges.
