- Event: Cloudflare Connect 2026
- Dates: October 19–21, 2026
- Location: Moscone West, San Francisco
- Host: Cloudflare
I’ve decided to take my five newest projects to Cloudflare Connect and present them there: AltSql, VPN Works, Precomputing, Preconfiguration and BareProxy. They’re small infrastructure tools, all of them put online over the past few weeks. Each one says Alpha or 0.1 up front. That’s where they are.
Why Connect
Connect expects more than 5,000 people who build and secure infrastructure for a living, which is the crowd I want looking at these. Two of its five tracks, agents to production and AI control, could pass for subtitles of VPN Works and Preconfiguration. And yes, bringing a small reverse proxy to a company whose network runs in front of more than a fifth of the web is a little cheeky. BareProxy is coming anyway.
What I’m bringing
AltSql is a native hybrid of key-value and SQL for connected devices. About 15 KB of code on the device keeps its readings and settings as records in flash, and it can act on them with the network down; the gateway runs SQL over the very same records, byte for byte, with nothing to translate in between. The How It Works page puts both sides next to each other, and six AltSql modules already build on the idea. In the live demos you can cut a simulated device’s power in the middle of a write and check what survived. (The hardware is simulated so far; real microcontrollers come with the Beta.)
VPN Works gives one program its own network path. vpnw seals a coding agent inside a Linux network namespace, so every connection it tries gets checked against a policy and recorded; a hostname the policy doesn’t allow never even gets resolved. Nobody enjoys writing an allow list from scratch, so vpnw learn drafts one from a traced run for a person to edit. VPN Works Scope brings the same idea to a company VPN, drafting least-privilege rules from who actually uses which internal systems. The live demo replays an agent trying to leak a deploy token.
Precomputing keeps dashboard answers ready as data arrives, so they don’t get worked out again from raw events every time someone asks. A short policy names the answers and how long each level of detail lives, then compiles to SQLite triggers; the answers end up as plain views in a normal SQLite file. The policy language page walks through it. In the SQL demo, three hours of simulated API traffic run through SQLite’s WebAssembly build in your browser and come out as a 4.5 MB file, against 35.2 MB of raw rows.
Preconfiguration gets a coding agent’s machine ready before the agent starts. You describe the machine once, in a short preconfig.yaml, and it builds the setup files each agent platform expects; preconfig verify then proves the setup by running the project’s tests on an empty Ubuntu container. When a setup fails anyway, Preconfig Doctor reads the log for you. In one recorded failure that log ran to 1,096 lines, with the cause on line 778. Doctor runs on rules with no language model behind it, so the same log always gets the same answer. The live demo pairs recorded runs with the real engine, running in your browser.
BareProxy is the baby of the group, a few days old: a small web server and reverse proxy that explains every routing decision. The core has no regular expressions and no scripting, which keeps its rules simple enough for the server to reason about. bareproxy explain shows which rule takes a URL and why the rules above it passed on it; bareproxy why reconstructs a past request from its ID; bareproxy plan lists the requests that would change hands before a new config goes live. Caching, rate limits and the like are BareProxy modules, and the demo shows what the commands print for a sample config.
Five projects, one instinct
Side by side, the five turn out to be one instinct applied to five different problems. Each tool is small enough to understand and can tell you what it did. Wherever there’s a decision to make, the software drafts and a person signs off. Every one of them also has a demo that opens in a browser, so nobody has to install anything to judge the idea.
That’s what I’m taking to Moscone West. If one of them gets something wrong while you’re looking, ask it why.
It should be able to tell you.