Continuing down the journey of Building out Flipfeeds the Discord Clone sample app for codingcat.com’s next course has been fun and frustrating at the same time.

I think that it would be a really good idea for Cloudflare to separate out its Developer Platform products into something like Firebase did for Google Cloud Platform. I know I know Firebase started as a separate company but it still feels like something that makes more sense to have a dedicated product that handles app creation specifically.

Right now when you enter dash.cloudflare.com you are directed to a list of websites, which totally made sense when Cloudflare was all about, well, websites and their traffic. Now they are turning a corner and getting into similar spaces like GCP, Azure and AWS. So with that big change they need to start thinking about their products not tied to any given website.

For example I was recently approved to build out a new product using Cloudflare for Startups, which is freaking amazing!! When I did this they had me apply the credit to a specific website not my overall account. So how in the world will I know when I misconfigure my worker to call itself a million times and my bill goes through the roof that it was in fact the correct one associated to that account?

So far building locally has been really easy with one caveat that I think they need to allow for better association to a centralized file but they do allow for --persist-to when using wrangler dev --local . Right now I have chosen to make a dummy d1 workers that is treated as my database project basically so that I can have a central database that all of my other workers can communicate with while still designing in a serverless architecture similar to what can be found on cloudflare’s Serverless global APIs reference architecture.

Probably the most challenging part in all of this is making the services actually start correctly. I have this setup in a pnpm monorepo workspace is which is nice but would I would love to have is where it brings up the database, then starts my API Gateway worker, this is a current limitation as the first services gets localhost:8787 . Then once all of that has happened start the Next.js app (or Expo app) for the front end to be ready to be connected.

I think Cloudflare has all the right peices in place for local development but it would be nice to have something like Firebase’s Emulator Suite for local development. Right now I have to manually connect to the SQLite database using something like DBeaver or Prisma Studio.