New Financial Tools Section (Retirement Planner Is the Big One)

I mentioned in the WordPress-to-Hugo migration post that this site was going to start drifting a bit toward retirement and financial planning content alongside the usual networking stuff. Here’s the first real piece of that: a new Financial Tools section, same browser-only, nothing-sent-to-a-server philosophy as the Network Tools I’ve been building for years.

Retirement & Social Security Planner

This is the one that actually matters. It’s a full retirement dashboard — portfolio projections, Social Security claiming strategy (including spousal/survivor benefits), RMDs, a Roth conversion planner, Medicare/IRMAA cost estimates, and a Monte Carlo simulation that runs a thousand random market paths against your numbers instead of just assuming a flat return every year. I’ve been building and using a private version of this for a while now; this is that tool, cleaned up for public use. Find it at fryguy.net/financial-tools/retirement-planner.

Retiring WordPress – How I Migrated fryguy.net to Hugo (With an AI Pair Programmer)

This site has run on WordPress since basically forever. As of this week, it doesn’t anymore. Everything you’re reading is now a static Hugo site, built from Markdown, served by nginx, with no PHP and no database anywhere in the stack. Here’s why I did it, what actually moved, and how I used Claude Code as a pair programmer for most of the heavy lifting.

Why bother

Let’s be honest about how it got this bad: I didn’t keep up with it. I know. Servers don’t rot on their own — you stop patching them, stop upgrading them, and a few years later you’re staring at a stack that’s aged out from under you. The old droplet had quietly rotted underneath a site that still worked fine. Ubuntu 18.04 — EOL since 2023. PHP 7.4 — EOL since 2022, with no apt-upgrade path to anything newer (the PPA I’d have needed was frozen). MySQL 5.7 — also EOL. WordPress itself was current; everything under it wasn’t, and there was no clean patching path left, just a slow accumulation of risk on a box facing the public internet.

Worth Reading 080826


Would you work differently if you knew every keystroke was being saved, every website logged, every idle minute counted against you?

 


Everything I read about the AI industry leads me to think there will be an AI crash.

 


I designed this to help with different BGP communities and configuring them on your routers.

 


It’s commonly believed that when selecting between a number of routes for the same address prefix, a BGP speaker will select the route with the shortest AS Path.

 


There is an interesting fight within the leadership of U.S. AI companies. It is between the supporters of open-source AI and those driven to oppose open-source AI.

Hedge 315: Engineering Psychology

We often talk about “human infrastructure” in network engineering–but what does this mean, and how do we help engineers “produce” while helping them to flourish as individuals? Catherine Hicks joins Tom and Russ to discuss the psychology of software engineering, and how the lessons learned apply to network engineering.

download

You can find Catherine’s new book on the psychology of software engineering here.
If you would like to follow Catherine’s writing in this area, including the impact of AI on work, you can find her blog here.
You can connect with Catherine on LinkedIn.

Unveiling good and bad behaviors on the Agentic Internet

The Internet isn’t a single lane of traffic. For a long time, the rule of thumb in web security was that bots are bad, while humans are good. Of course, we’re far past this generalization. Humans can be fraudulent, and bots can be helpful at different levels. Site owners actively want some automated traffic to interact with our sites to make the Internet functional and discoverable.

To complicate things further, the line between "human" and "bot" is blurring more and more. Now, we have a type of “hybrid” traffic where a single session shifts from human to agentic and back again. (Think of a user browsing a store, and then handing off the checkout process to an automated shopping assistant.)

So, how do website owners manage this kind of complexity? What matters here is assessing behaviors. Is this behavior abusive? Malicious? What’s the risk presented here, and can I trust this visitor based on their actions? Solving this requires moving beyond static, point-in-time checks. It requires analyzing continuous behaviors to evaluate Trust.

In this post, we’ll share an inside look into the strategy of the Web Integrity & Trust team (covering the bots and fraud problem spaces) around detecting Continue reading

Introducing Radar Researcher: An AI tool for exploring Internet data in plain language

Since launching in 2020, Cloudflare Radar has provided one-of-a-kind insight into Internet traffic on a global scale. The open data that Radar publishes from our global network is used by a variety of experts in different domains: human rights advocates, journalists, academic researchers, network operators, and more.

Today, as part of Agents Week, Radar is beta-launching a new tool: Radar Researcher. 

Now, if you want to answer a question with Radar’s data, you can just ask in plain language and get an answer back with real, interactive charts, all built on Cloudflare's developer platform. You no longer need to find the right page, choose the right filters, or read the API documentation to write a query. 

Why we built Radar Researcher

Over the past six years, the Radar team has worked to provide clear, accessible, reliable data visualizations of complex datasets. This is not without its challenges: our user base is vast and ranges from curious novices to technical network experts. Even so, we publish as much insight into the Internet as seen from our network as we can: DNS queries from our public resolver 1.1.1.1, HTTP traffic from across our global network, Continue reading

Announcing Cloudflare Ambassadors, Community Engineers, and another $1M in open-source funding

As a platform for helping build a better Internet, Cloudflare helps turn ideas into real products and experiences around the world. Across communities and backgrounds, developers build with Cloudflare using the tools they love, shaping what comes next for the Internet while inspiring, collaborating with, and teaching others.

The community is where some of Cloudflare’s best moments happen. Students show their friends how to deploy Workers for the first time. Discord users answer questions from other developers via working code samples, instead of links to documentation. Open-source contributors build novel solutions to solve their own problems, then share them with the world. Organizers host events that give builders from all backgrounds the space to start building their dream project.

All of these represent a community at its best: people helping other people build.

This spirit of community is an exciting and vital part of helping to build the Internet. Those who step up to educate and support others, or to invent, build, or maintain tools shared across the ecosystem, make lasting contributions to the health and potential of the Internet.

We want to have their backs.

That's why today we’re announcing an improved community program, designed to better support, recognize, Continue reading

Unifying Workers AI and AI Gateway into a single AI control plane

AI Gateway and Workers AI first started as distinct products, but over time, we noticed our users were converging. With AI Gateway, you can proxy requests to any model provider and get built-in observability, logging, access, and security. On Workers AI, we host models on the GPU infrastructure that we manage, exposing an API endpoint you can leverage to access inference-as-a-service. 

The architecture of these products looks different, but to an end user, it achieves the same goal: connecting you to models with a sophisticated control plane. Today, we're excited to share our plans on how these products converge into one unified path, so you can connect to any model provider (including Workers AI), while managing things like observability, billing, security, and logging from a single control plane.

It’s the next step toward some big plans we have — read on to learn what a unified control plane means for the future of model routing.

Merging the binding and API

We've been hinting at the fact that these products are becoming more unified through our entrypoints: the Workers binding and the REST API. We have an AI binding that you can use to call AI Gateway and Workers AI. Continue reading

SONiC Deep Dive: Configuring VLAN 10 from CLI to ASIC

 

Introduction

In this chapter, we examine what happens under the hood when we configure a Layer-2 VLAN on a SONiC switch, enable two host-facing interfaces, and associate them with the previously created VLAN as untagged access ports. Figure 5-1 illustrates the conceptual configuration in which Host-1 and Host-2 are connected to interfaces Eth1/1 and Eth1/2, respectively. Both interfaces are members of VLAN 10, which at this stage functions as a Layer-2 broadcast domain. The host-facing interfaces are single-lane 25-Gigabit Ethernet interfaces.

 

We begin by creating VLAN 10 and examining the complete SONiC processing sequence, from the user's VLAN configuration to ASIC programming. Next, we study what happens when the interfaces are enabled and associated with VLAN 10. Finally, we verify that Host-1 and Host-2 have IP connectivity through Leaf-1. Although this is a very basic configuration example, many SONiC components participate in the process. The database examples presented in this chapter are taken from the lab environment. The communication between processes is explained at a conceptual level because the focus is on SONiC operation rather than the underlying Linux communication mechanisms.




Figure 5-1: Host Connectivity.

Step 1: Configure Vlan 10

 

Figure 5-2 depicts the conceptual sequence of Continue reading

The New MCP Headers Are a Gift to Gateways

In short, buried in the transport section of the MCP 2026-07-28 release candidate are three changes that matter more to infrastructure teams than to anyone else: mandatory Mcp-Method and Mcp-Name headers, cache-control-style ttlMs and cacheScope fields, and standardized W3C Trace Context propagation. Together with the stateless core, they turn MCP from a protocol that gateways had to fight into one that meets them halfway. What the headers still don’t carry: who the caller is, whether the call should be allowed, and any record that it happened.

Everyone is writing about MCP going stateless, and the coverage is deserved. No handshake, no session ID, any request can hit any server replica, round-robin load balancing just works. If you want the deep dive on what that does to protocol state, my colleague Peter is writing one.

I want to talk about the part of the release candidate that made me sit up, because I spend my days around a gateway that authorizes agent traffic. It’s three transport changes, a few paragraphs in the announcement, and it fixes a problem every MCP-aware proxy has been engineering around since Streamable HTTP shipped in the 2025-03-26 revision.

The problem: MCP was opaque at the network Continue reading

Cloudflare AI Search: give your agents a search engine for your data

Today, we’re excited to announce a few developer experience improvements to Cloudflare AI Search to make it easy to manage a search solution out of the box. Previously, you had to stitch together components of the Cloudflare primitives (Workers AI, AI Gateway, Vectorize, R2, Browser Run) but now, AI Search can do this automatically — and better. Our goal is to give your agents their own search engine, where they can easily find data to provide better answers for themselves and their humans. 

We’re also sharing an early preview of pricing for customers of AI Search so you can learn how this scales. We modeled pricing in a way that makes it predictable and scalable: embedding and reranking are free when you use the default models, so no need to worry about predicting token count.

In AI Search, users can now:

  • Index a collection of data for your agent: Make structured and unstructured data easily accessible for your agent to build with, from individual files to websites you own. (Today, it must be a zone on your Cloudflare account, but with more ways to verify ownership coming soon.)
  • Skip the sitemap for your websites: Previously, AI Search required Continue reading

From ranking to recommended: get your site ready to thrive in the age of AI agents

Your next customer may not find you through a search engine. Instead, they'll ask an AI assistant: "how do I do X?"; "which option is best for someone like me?"; "just handle it for me" and an agent will find the answer, weigh the options, and act on their behalf. Increasingly, the moment that determines whether a customer chooses you happens inside a model's response — before a human ever sees your homepage.

This agentic audience is already here: by our count, fewer than half of all HTML page requests now come from a human. Not all of those machines are agents acting for a person, but that share is growing fast, and answer engines, shopping assistants, and research tools will shape which businesses are found and recommended. Discoverability used to mean ranking on a results page. Now it means being found, read, and confidently recommended by the agents that guide your customers.

The old metrics, human clicks and page views, no longer paint the full picture. We spent time talking to site owners who were staring at access logs full of AI bots, completely blind to whether those bots were capable of using their site or recommending Continue reading

Building an open Agentic Internet: readable, discoverable, callable, and payable

Our data shows that a lot of traffic from well-behaved bots is re-fetching pages that have not changed. Billions of requests. An enormous amount of machine effort, attached to no outcome at all. That's the signature of a web built for humans being visited by something else.

Agents are here - not as a new kind of software, but as a new kind of visitor to the web.

The web reshaped around this new visitor is what we call the Agentic Internet. We see its future as readable, discoverable, callable, and payable. To realize that future, it needs its own tools and protocols.

Cloudflare's developer platform gave agents a place to run, and the first tools to build them. What's missing are the ones that let agents and domain owners cooperate instead of collide — on the open Internet, not just inside a single platform.

Every browser has always identified itself to the web with a header called User-Agent. The name only made sense once you realized the browser was acting on your behalf. Now a user agent is truly a user's agent: a program that fetches the web on a person's behalf. Today its most mature form is the Continue reading

Introducing Kitesurf: The agent-first browser that runs in V8 isolates on Cloudflare Workers

Should we build our own browser? This is one of those questions that has come up every few months internally at Cloudflare for years. Unsurprisingly, it’s the kind that triggers long threads with multiple reasons and persuasive arguments on why we should do it. The browser is obviously the most important software we use every day on our computers; it’s arguably the operating system of the Internet. We’re a company on a mission to build a better Internet — who wouldn’t want to take on the challenge of building a new browser?

But we never quite found the balance between the technical difficulty of such an endeavour and the unique problems we’d be solving by doing it. And so, the idea was shelved, over and over again. Until now.

Something magical happened: we reached a tipping point where a series of powerful technical advancements in our Developer Platform became a reality, while the advent of AI agents and the demand for a new kind of browser became critical at the same time.

Running WebAssembly (Wasm) in Workers is now very mature. Primitives like dynamic workers, SQLite-based Durable Objects, Worker-to-worker RPC, service bindings, higher NodeJS compatibility and Continue reading

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