Cloudflare Workers Tech Talks in Niigata #1

Aug 26, 2025

Cloudflare Workers Tech Talks in Niigata #1

I hosted “Workers Tech Talks in Niigata #1” on August 22. It was the first Workers Tech Talks held in Niigata, a city known for its delicious rice, located about 2 hours from Tokyo by bullet train. About 15-16 people joined, creating a warm and intimate atmosphere. We had 5 main talks covering various aspects of Cloudflare Workers development. Everyone was engaged and listened attentively to the presentations!

What is Cloudflare Workers Tech Talks?

Cloudflare Workers Tech Talks is an event where developers who are developing using Cloudflare Workers talk about Cloudflare Workers. It has been held multiple times in Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto. The feature of this event is that the speakers are free to talk about whatever they want. I often tell the speakers, “Please don’t give introductions like ‘What is Cloudflare Workers?’“. I ask them to talk about whatever they want to talk about.

Venue

The venue was the first-floor lobby of Kaishi Professional University Yoneyama Campus, an IT-focused professional university. The lobby had a large screen and beautiful, clean facilities. The event was co-hosted with “Niigata 5分 Tech,” a local IT community in Niigata. Thank you for providing such a wonderful venue!

Venue

Attendees

We gathered participants through the event page on connpass.

https://workers-tech.connpass.com/event/363848/

We had 17 people sign up out of 30 available spots, and about 15-16 people joined on the event day. Despite being a smaller gathering, the atmosphere was warm and everyone was highly engaged with the talks.

Timetable

Here is the timetable.

Timetable

Talks

Five speakers gave main talks. I was impressed by how many attendees were already using Cloudflare in their projects, and the energy from the student speakers was particularly notable.

Hono Updates Summer 2025

Yusuke Wada (me), Cloudflare Developer Advocate, talked about the new features and middleware added to Hono in 2025. The presentation covered several exciting updates including the Proxy Helper for reverse proxy functionality, Standard Schema Validator for flexible validation approaches, SSG Plugin System for static site generation, MCP middleware for remote server creation, UA Blocker middleware for bot blocking, and Parse Response utility for type-safe data extraction. Attendees appreciated learning about features they weren’t familiar with.

The slides: https://speakerdeck.com/yusukebe/honoatupudeto-2025nian-xia

Technologies Supporting (Trying to Support) Aizu University Festival

Shake no Kirimi and sgr_9661_ea

Shake no Kirimi and sgr_9661_ea, both students from Aizu University, presented together about the systems they built for their university festival. They created multiple applications using the Cloudflare stack, including a Kanban system, equipment management for the festival, link tracking, and more. Everyone was amazed by the scope and quality of their work. The students’ enthusiasm and technical skills were truly impressive.

Trying Discord Bot with Workers

Hiroshi Kasahara

Hiroshi Kasahara, talked about migrating Discord bots to Cloudflare Workers to make them serverless instead of running them on always-on cloud instances. He used Discord Hono, a lightweight framework for building serverless Discord bots. His presentation covered the implementation of a slash command “/mogiri” for granting Discord roles, challenges faced (such as Discord role hierarchy issues), and the cost benefits of the serverless approach compared to maintaining EC2 instances.

The slides: https://speakerdeck.com/kasacchiful/20250822workers-tech-talk-niigata

Cloudflare Workers x Next.js

ryuapp

ryuapp introduced four different methods for running Next.js applications on Cloudflare Workers. The four approaches were: using OpenNext, using @cloudflare/next-on-pages, using static build, and using Containers. Attendees were surprised to learn there were so many different ways to deploy Next.js on Workers. ryuapp recommended OpenNext as the best option among the four.

Starting an Honest AI Life with Remote MCP Server

Nakazan

Nakazan talked about using MCP to provide AI with specialized, trustworthy information sources instead of letting it randomly pick information from the internet. He demonstrated his concept with a hobby-related demo featuring horse racing AI prediction servers and odds lookup servers. The presentation emphasized that high-expertise information should come from authoritative sources to reduce AI hallucinations. He even proposed a future system where multiple AI agents could collaborate using different specialized MCP servers.

The slides: https://speakerdeck.com/nkzn/workers-specialist-mcp

Feedback

I asked the attendees to post on X with the hashtag #workers_tech. You can see their feedback here:

https://x.com/search?q=%23workers_tech

Networking

After the talks, we had a social gathering. The attendance rate for the networking session was excellent - most participants stayed to chat and enjoy local food. Everyone was friendly and engaged in great conversations about technology. Many expressed interest in having another event in the future.

Summary

This was the very first Workers Tech Talks in Niigata, and despite the smaller size, it was a wonderful event. I was particularly impressed by the high engagement level of the participants - many were already using Cloudflare in their projects. The energy from the student presenters was infectious, and the local food during the networking session was delicious. The collaboration with Niigata 5分 Tech helped create a warm, welcoming atmosphere for everyone.

Here’s our group photo - everyone is smiling!

Group photo