Ryan Townsend

person 9 connections

Ruby/web developer who built on Rails for two decades. Joined Cloudflare in March 2026 as Principal Product Manager responsible for the Real User Monitoring web analytics product (available for free as a standalone product, with visibility across the ~20%+ of the web Cloudflare powers). Speaker of 'No-build Utopia' at wroclove.rb 2026 on how Rails + emerging web-platform APIs can replace client-side JavaScript. Also raised HTTP shared dictionary compression from the audience during Emiliano's Q&A as a way to apply compression to REST, GraphQL, and MCP JSON APIs — getting payload sizes close to Protobuf without a protofile contract. Plans to push the Declarative Partial Updates API to be adopted natively by browsers as his first browser API contribution.

role

Principal Product Manager

employer

Cloudflare

person Ryan Townsend

attended

wroclove.rb 2026 event

Speaker and attendee at wroclove.rb 2026.

person Ryan Townsend

authored

No-build Utopia: Modern User Experiences with Rails & Web Standards talk

Delivered this talk at wroclove.rb 2026.

person Ryan Townsend

has_skill

Ruby on Rails tool

Built on Rails for two decades.

level: expert

person Ryan Townsend

recommends

HTTP Shared Dictionary Compression concept

Advocated shared dictionary compression as a way to shrink JSON API payloads close to Protobuf size.

person Ryan Townsend

recommends

Cloudflare Web Analytics tool

Recommends it (free, standalone) as the first step when measuring client-side performance during an SPA migration.

person Ryan Townsend

recommends

htmx tool

In Q&A called HTMX 'a great little library' that works well with Rails.

person Ryan Townsend

works_at

Cloudflare company

Joined Cloudflare in March 2026 as Principal Product Manager.

role: Principal Product Manager since: 2026-03

person Ryan Townsend

works_on

Cloudflare Web Analytics tool

Principal PM responsible for Cloudflare's Real User Monitoring web analytics product.

role: Principal Product Manager

person Ryan Townsend

works_on

Declarative Partial Updates concept

Plans to push browser vendors to adopt this as his first browser API.

role: advocate

Provenance

Created: 2026-04-17 16:17 seed
Last updated in: No-build Utopia: Modern User Experiences with Rails & Web... 2026-04-22 08:41
Total updates: 2 extractions
Read by: 21 extractions