Speaker: Ashley Williams

In September of 2008, Google’s Chromium Project released V8, a JavaScript engine, as part of a browser optimization wave that heralded the era of JavaScript browser applications that we both love, and love to hate. Less than a year later, in 2009, Ryan Dahl announced a way to run the V8 browser environment outside of the browser- Node.js, a platform that held the promise of unifying web application development, where both client and server-side development could happen in the same language - JavaScript.

A decade later, V8, JavaScript, and its new buddy WebAssembly, have found themselves in territory neither server nor client- the “Edge”. More specifically, Cloudflare's network of 194 data centers all over the globe.

In this talk, we’ll introduce what the “Edge” is and why we are excited for it to revolutionize computation on the web. We’ll dig into why the V8 JavaScript engine is so well suited to tasks previously limited to Virtual Machines, Containers, or Operating Systems. We'll explore why Workers, Cloudflare's Serverless Edge Compute platform, is unique, from both a programming model and architecture point of view, and why we think it heralds a new paradigm shift in JavaScript and web development.