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One Year of the 1.1.1.1 Interns: 750+ Builders Shipped Real Products at Cloudflare

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Hello everyone, it's Shii-chan! Today's post is less of a tech announcement and more of a story about Cloudflare's interns!

Cloudflare Blog blog.cloudflare.com

What was announced?

The Cloudflare Blog published a one-year look back at its "1.1.1.1 interns" program. A year after announcing the goal of hiring 1,111 interns, more than 750 early-career builders have shipped real products across 48 teams.

Why it matters

Cloudflare believes AI makes early-career talent more valuable and able to make an impact faster. The post's argument is that AI amplifies human potential instead of replacing it: interns learn systems quickly with AI tools and take on harder problems.

What changes

Here's the scale of the program:

  • Interns: more than 750
  • Teams: 48
  • Offices: nine, in Austin, San Francisco, London, Lisbon, New York, Singapore, Bengaluru, Washington DC and Sydney
  • Several interns converted to full-time positions

Dive Deep

Here are some of the projects:

  • Cache Transcoding: Aashi built a system that compresses assets with Zstandard, cutting on-disk cache size to roughly one-third, which could unlock petabytes of additional storage
  • Post-quantum security: Tiago and Sophie built CryptoLabe, an internal AI tool that finds cryptography across the codebase, and per-connection post-quantum visibility
  • EmDash CMS: Noah became the second maintainer, contributing to the media library, content editor and admin interface
  • BGP analysis: Iliana measured ORIGIN attribute manipulation across 70% of observed network paths

Beyond engineering:

  • Internal audit: AI-assisted ISO compliance automation
  • Product management: modernized startup program credit management tooling
  • People operations: improved background verification workflows
  • Customer support: explored AI-triggered troubleshooting features

Interns authored or engineered seven major Birthday Week launches, including Protected Quick Tunnels, Rust Workers support and BEACON.

Wrap-up

  • In the year since the goal was announced, 750+ interns shipped across 48 teams
  • Real results came out: cache compression, post-quantum work, a CMS and BGP research
  • Interns contributed to seven Birthday Week launches
  • The program is planned to keep growing for next year's cohort

A good read if you're curious about Cloudflare's engineering culture and how it grows early-career talent!

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