[threatofrain]

The Cloudflare cloud experience is "being sold short by subpar documentation" right now because important elements of their ecosystem are being ramped up from beta status. They also have internal docs which aren't kept up to date with their actual product. I'd check back in a few months because their beta experience can be very touch-and-go.

[Leftb]

Agreed. One area where it's maybe not sold short but just hurting the UX; it's not immediately clear from their documentation that certain NextJS features you get 'automatically' on Netlify/Vercel just aren't supported yet. For example, using any kind of dynamic routing (i.e. going to `/books/:id` directly rather than clicking through) doesn't work yet as there's no router available to tackle this for you. According to their Discord, it's in the works but it has been in that state for a few months already.

You can work around this with some Workers that capture the dynamic routes, request the nextjs html file and return that, but then you're using up your Functions quota as well.

[superdug]

I've noticed that Cloudflare documentation is lacking, but I rarely find information that is published on official sources that is out of date. I find the fact that there are two dozen sources of information out there for an AWS or Terraform configuration, but they're all still wrong because the API has since changed and the documentation wasn't cleaned up when the breaking change was made.

I have found that with Cloudflare's documentation that where it's lacking they have the ability to PR in changes and if you go back to a saved page, I've found them pleasantly updated numerous times.

Thankfully the cutting edge development is based off of open standards that you can easily build off of. I know personally that I've found most of the sticking points of developing against Cloudflare to be easily mitigated and just be an overall better experience as a customer than with another hosting provider.

It doesn't hurt that they aren't charging me all that much personally, but I have a day job that fills up the Cloudflare stock price just fine.

[cxr]

> The Cloudflare cloud experience is "being sold short by subpar documentation" right now because important elements of their ecosystem are being ramped up

Their docs are subpar because Cloudflare is just not interested enough in documentation improvements and is hostile to the people who are interested and who try to make the improvements.

I tried fixing a 404 in their docs once. This would have taken, you know, approximately 2 seconds with a real wiki or CMS[1]. What resulted instead was an excruciating back-and-forth that took 9 messages over a span of exactly 5 hours, ended in no fix, and a Cloudflare dev trying to "upperhand" me (in the vein of George Constanza's pre-emptive breakup—"I'm afraid that I am gonna have to break up with you"[2]).

Sure, Cloudflare team, there's nothing wrong, I guess, with choosing to believe in the delusion that a repo full of Markdown files and the GitHub generation's busted-ass PR-based edit workflow is an acceptable substitute, just like there's nothing wrong with writing your name with a pencil that has a brick taped to it[3].

1. <https://groups.google.com/g/mozilla.dev.mdc/c/BU09C48bmGU>

2. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aIG2EJzE4o>

3. <https://gordonbrander.com/pattern/brick-pencil/>