Cloudflare Workers is a serverless platform that lets you run JavaScript at the edge, handling requests close to users without managing servers. It powers fast APIs, routing logic, and lightweight apps with minimal setup. What’s less obvious is that the runtime behind it, workerd, is open source. That means you can replicate a similar setup on your own machine or server without relying on Cloudflare’s infrastructure. I tried exactly that: self-hosting a Workers-like environment using workerd, and it turned out to be far simpler than expected, both in terms of setup and actually getting something useful running locally.