---
title: "Latest reads"
description: "The engineering internet, summarised so you can actually read it."
---

# Latest reads
> The engineering internet, summarised so you can actually read it.

## Articles

### [Hosting your Models and Datasets on Hugging Face Spaces using Streamlit](https://yomu.fyi/post/hosting-your-models-and-datasets-on-hugging-face-spaces-using-streamli.md)
- Company: huggingface.co
- Author: merve
- Published: Oct 5, 2021

Streamlit enables developers to create interactive web demonstrations and visualizations for machine learning models and datasets. In an illustrative text completion interface recreating Write with Transformer, UI components such as text areas, sidebars, number inputs, and continuous sliders collect user text and inference hyperparameters. For data inspection, the streaming feature in Hugging Face Datasets loads large corpora directly into memory without requiring complete local downloads, integrating with pandas, matplotlib, and seaborn for tabular and chart rendering. Deploying these interactive applications to Hugging Face Spaces involves uploading the code files while defining dependencies inside a requirements.txt file. Matching local Streamlit versions ensures consistent runtime execution when hosting models and datasets online.


### [Showcase Your Projects in Spaces using Gradio](https://yomu.fyi/post/showcase-your-projects-in-spaces-using-gradio.md)
- Company: huggingface.co
- Author: merve
- Published: Oct 5, 2021

Demonstrating machine learning projects to the community requires accessible hosting and minimal interface boilerplate. Gradio integrates directly with the Hugging Face Hub and its underlying Inference API, enabling developers to load models using repository identifiers and launch interactive interfaces with a few lines of code. Hugging Face Spaces provides a free hosting environment where users select Gradio as the SDK, commit an app.py script, and deploy live web demonstrations for frameworks like Transformers, spaCy, SpeechBrain, and Asteroid. For complex workflows, developers can chain multiple models sequentially via Gradio Series or host custom checkpoints directly when models lack native Inference API support.


### [Supabase Beta Sept 2021](https://yomu.fyi/post/supabase-beta-sept-2021.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: Paul Copplestone
- Published: Oct 4, 2021

The September 2021 beta update for Supabase outlines several product enhancements, documentation revamps, and community milestones. Developers using the JavaScript library can now leverage AbortController support to cancel long-running queries. Multiple PostgreSQL capabilities have been surfaced directly within the Supabase Dashboard, allowing users to apply custom column types, configure unique constraints on tables, view and edit columns in bulk, and manage table relationships spanning multiple schemas. In addition, the authentication documentation has been restructured into dedicated sections for Authentication and Authorization alongside an accompanying deep dive series. The update also marks two years since the initial commit to the Realtime Postgres engine, details upcoming events such as a Hacktoberfest hackathon, and announces open hiring for Site Reliability Engineers.


### [Supabase Hacktoberfest Hackathon 2021](https://yomu.fyi/post/supabase-hacktoberfest-hackathon-2021.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: Thor Schaeff
- Published: Sep 28, 2021

Supabase announced its virtual open-source hackathon tied to Hacktoberfest 2021, running from October 1st to October 10th. Participants can compete individually or in teams of up to five to build a new open-source project with Supabase or contribute to designated community repositories. Submissions may use any programming language or framework but must be created during the event and made open source with a public code repository. Entries are evaluated on criteria including technical complexity, visual polish, functionality, and Supabase feature adoption across five award categories. Winners and runners-up receive limited edition Supabase swag, while participants retain full intellectual property rights over their submissions.


### [Summer at Hugging Face](https://yomu.fyi/post/summer-at-hugging-face.md)
- Company: huggingface.co
- Author: system
- Published: Sep 24, 2021

Hugging Face released several major updates across its ecosystem, expanding its public Hub repository to over 16,000 models. Platform additions include Spaces for deploying Gradio and Streamlit demo applications, automatic TensorBoard instances, and evaluation metric tracking integrated with Papers With Code leaderboards. The Transformers library gained JAX/Flax support across more than 5,000 models, improved TensorFlow implementations, and introduced the transformers.onnx export module for model conversion. In research, the BigScience project completed large-scale training of a 13-billion-parameter English decoder model on Jean Zay, while the DeDLOC method enabled training the sahajBERT Bengali model without HPC infrastructure. Accepted conference papers detailed the Datasets library, prompt data-point equivalence, prompt-based fine-tuning heuristics, and block pruning techniques that reduced BERT size by 74 percent.


### [Hugging Face and Graphcore partner for IPU-optimized Transformers](https://yomu.fyi/post/hugging-face-and-graphcore-partner-for-ipu-optimized-transformers.md)
- Company: huggingface.co
- Author: Sally Doherty
- Published: Sep 14, 2021

Hugging Face launched its Hardware Partner Program at the 2021 AI Hardware Summit to offer device-optimized models and software integrations. As a founding member of the program, Graphcore collaborated with Hugging Face to optimize Transformer models for its Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU). Graphcore IPUs use a massively parallel MIMD architecture with on-die ultra-high bandwidth memory designed for AI workloads featuring fine-grained parallelism, low precision arithmetic, and sparsity. Through Hugging Face's open-source Optimum toolkit, developers will receive plug-and-play access to certified, hardware-optimized models across vision, speech, translation, and text generation. Graphcore's Poplar SDK integrates with PyTorch, TensorFlow, Docker, and Kubernetes, simplifying the process of porting workloads to IPU-POD datacenter compute systems.


### [Introducing Optimum: The Optimization Toolkit for Transformers at Scale](https://yomu.fyi/post/introducing-optimum-the-optimization-toolkit-for-transformers-at-scale.md)
- Company: huggingface.co
- Author: Morgan Funtowicz, Ella Charlaix, Michael Benayoun, Jeff Boudier
- Published: Sep 14, 2021

Running Transformer models fast and efficiently at production scale presents a significant challenge due to the complex compatibility between model architectures, acceleration techniques like quantization or sparsity, and specific silicon hardware features. Hugging Face introduced Optimum, an open-source library built to abstract hardware acceleration complexity and optimize training and inference on target devices through direct collaborations with hardware partners. Using quantization as a primary example, engineering teams often struggle with eager-mode model graph modifications, kernel compatibility checks, calibration parameter tuning, and acceptable accuracy loss trade-offs. Optimum addresses these challenges by integrating tools such as Intel Neural Compressor, which supports post-training quantization, quantization-aware training, and dynamic quantization driven by user-defined YAML configurations. Through these hardware-tailored integrations, the library aims to democratize production performance and reduce the aggregate energy consumed by machine learning workloads.


### [Supabase Beta August 2021](https://yomu.fyi/post/supabase-beta-august-2021.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: Paul Copplestone
- Published: Sep 10, 2021

Supabase announced a thirty million dollar Series A funding round alongside multiple product updates and platform improvements during August 2021. The team opened an RFC for WALRUS, an initiative aimed at bringing Row Level Security to Postgres subscriptions via Write Ahead Log Realtime Unified Security. Auth updates included customizable SMS login messages, HCaptcha integration for passwordless authentication, and a revised email change flow that notifies both old and new addresses. Platform enhancements introduced a twelfth hosting region in Seoul, improved CSV importing for large files, and Dart reference documentation covering CRUD, Auth, and Realtime operations. Supabase reiterated an ongoing engineering focus on security, performance, and reliability to prepare the platform for production readiness across all workloads.


### [Automating Multi-Armed Bandit testing during feature rollout](https://yomu.fyi/post/automating-multi-armed-bandit-testing-during-feature-rollout.md)
- Company: [Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab.md)
- Author: Weicheng Zhu
- Published: Sep 1, 2021

Traditional feature rollouts and Multi-Armed Bandit testing operate as separate workflows that often depend on delayed offline analysis. To eliminate manual intervention, the Multi-Armed Bandit Optimiser automates testing concurrently during feature rollouts by responding to minute-level feedback metrics. The architecture connects Kafka Streams data processing, a metrics server with Spark jobs, and an adaptive rollout module updating online experimentation configurations. Candidate models are evaluated via Thompson Sampling on Beta distributions, with Monte Carlo simulations determining traffic allocation across user entities. In production for the GrabFood recommendation widget, the system optimizes the Effective Conversion Rate over a 30-minute window and includes fallback distribution logic.


### [Supabase Beta July 2021](https://yomu.fyi/post/supabase-beta-july-2021.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: Ant Wilson
- Published: Aug 12, 2021

Supabase concluded July 2021 with its second Launch Week event, delivering daily product updates and infrastructure upgrades across its platform. Authentication features expanded to support SMS logins through Twilio, Twitch authentication, and API endpoints for generating custom email authentication links. Storage capabilities were upgraded to include media streaming, public buckets, directory uploads, and speed improvements, alongside dashboard enhancements for usage statistics and database insights. Furthermore, all newly created Supabase projects now run PostgreSQL 13.3 by default, and instances incorporate the updated PostgREST version 8.0 server to generate CRUD APIs. The release also introduced preliminary components for Supabase functions as development continues toward general availability.


### [Open Source Hackathon Winners](https://yomu.fyi/post/open-source-hackathon-winners.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: Ant Wilson
- Published: Aug 9, 2021

Supabase announced the winners and runners-up for its inaugural open-source hackathon after concluding deliberations across a larger-than-expected pool of entries. Top entries included Work From, an employee schedule tracking application, and Fireplace, a video streaming platform that leverages Supabase Storage to synchronize playback events across multiple viewers. Additional recognized projects encompassed Feature.so for modular application component management, Flutter Add-ons for telemetry and crash reporting, and Peckish Peach, which uses machine learning to generate recipes from input ingredients. All submitted projects remain fully open source for community inspection, contribution, and forking. Gold and silver prize winners receive custom limited-edition Supabase apparel, while every hackathon participant receives a participation prize.


### [The Supabase Hackathon](https://yomu.fyi/post/the-supabase-hackathon.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: Ant Wilson
- Published: Jul 30, 2021

Following the conclusion of Launch Week II: The SQL, Supabase announced its first week-long hackathon running from July 30 to August 6, 2021. Participants can enter individually or in teams of up to five to build any open-source tool, library, or application using Supabase. The judging criteria evaluate creativity, visual appeal, technical execution, and the integration of Supabase features across five distinct prize categories. All code and design elements must be created during the event and submitted via a repository link prior to the deadline. Winning teams receive limited edition Olympic gold and silver themed shirts while retaining full ownership of their intellectual property.


### [Updates for Supabase Functions](https://yomu.fyi/post/updates-for-supabase-functions.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: Paul Copplestone
- Published: Jul 30, 2021

Supabase has announced an Alpha release of Database Webhooks alongside dashboard management tools for native PostgreSQL Functions and Triggers. Database Webhooks act as a wrapper around PostgreSQL triggers, asynchronously emitting HTTP GET and POST requests whenever table data is inserted, updated, or deleted. The networking layer relies on a new PostgreSQL extension called pg\_net, which pairs a PostgreSQL background worker queue with libcurl to handle multiple concurrent outbound requests without blocking SQL queries. Although pg\_net currently processes over 300 requests per second, Supabase plans to expand capabilities to include direct triggers for AWS Lambda and Google Cloud Run before launching dedicated Supabase Functions.


### [Supabase Swag Store](https://yomu.fyi/post/supabase-swag-store.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: Rory Wilding
- Published: Jul 30, 2021

Supabase has officially launched the Supabase Swag Store to meet ongoing community demand for branded merchandise. The company built the online storefront using Shopify to go live quickly during launch week rather than dogfooding internal systems for e-commerce. Gifting remains the primary goal of the swag program, prioritizing contributors who create content, report bugs, answer community questions, or submit pull requests. All items are designed, packed, and dispatched directly by the internal team from Singapore in limited production batches of around one hundred items per run. Due to hands-on fulfillment and ongoing international shipping disruptions, inventory is scarce, and some small-batch designs will remain permanently limited editions.


### [Supabase Reports and Metrics](https://yomu.fyi/post/supabase-reports-and-metrics.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: Div Arora
- Published: Jul 29, 2021

Supabase introduced a dedicated Reports section and updated project home pages to deliver observability across hosted Postgres projects and complementary services. Because developers can run unconstrained database queries and custom workloads, monitoring both project-level service usage and underlying infrastructure metrics is essential. The new dashboard displays one month of historical data, including CPU and memory usage alongside request volumes for Database, Auth, and Storage APIs. To collect metrics across hundreds of thousands of targets without high latency, Supabase implemented a federated monitoring architecture running regional Prometheus instances that scrape local exporters and aggregate subsets into a central VictoriaMetrics instance. All project databases now also launch with the pg\_stat\_statements extension enabled for future query statistics.


### [How We Cut GrabFood.com’s Page JavaScript Asset Sizes by 3x](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-we-cut-grabfood-com-s-page-javascript-asset-sizes-by-3x.md)
- Company: [Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab.md)
- Author: Gibson Cheng
- Published: Jul 29, 2021

GrabFood.com faced high cloud costs while serving over 1 TB of weekly network egress across 175 million requests. To minimize egress and improve page performance, the engineering team audited and reduced their webpack dependencies using tools such as webpack-bundle-analyzer and dependency-cruiser. Their strategies included lazy loading rarely used libraries, unifying duplicate modules under single entry points, and substituting utility libraries like axios with native browser Web APIs. Additionally, altering implementation approaches, such as replacing client-side signed JWT cookie encoding with plain JSON strings, eliminated heavy Node dependencies like crypto. These optimizations reduced JavaScript static assets from 750 KB to 250 KB, decreased CloudFront costs by 20%, and accelerated build times by 3.6x.


### [Mobbin uses Supabase to authenticate 200,000 users](https://yomu.fyi/post/mobbin-uses-supabase-to-authenticate-200-000-users.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Published: Jul 28, 2021

Mobbin originally launched its mobile design search platform using Firebase, quickly growing to hundreds of thousands of registered users. As the platform scaled, the team faced user friction because Firebase Authentication did not merge accounts sharing the same email address across different providers. Furthermore, mutative Firebase Function failures threatened document data integrity, and multi-round-trip document queries drove high monthly costs across five million API requests. To resolve these challenges, Mobbin migrated its backend to Supabase, adopting its GoTrue authentication service and underlying Postgres relational database. This migration resolved authentication conflicts, safeguarded data consistency, and reduced monthly infrastructure expenses since Supabase does not charge on a per-API-request basis.


### [Supabase Auth v2: Phone Auth now available](https://yomu.fyi/post/supabase-auth-v2-phone-auth-now-available.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: Kang Ming Tay
- Published: Jul 28, 2021

Supabase has released an update to its authentication server, a fork of Netlify's GoTrue, introducing phone-based authentication with SMS one-time passwords. Developers can now configure Twilio credentials in the Supabase Dashboard to support passwordless SMS logins or combine phone numbers with passwords for user authentication. The release also expands third-party login options by adding Twitch alongside existing integrations, bringing the total number of supported OAuth providers to ten. To assist teams needing dynamic or internationalized messaging, a new API endpoint exposed through supabase-js allows backend services using admin keys to generate confirmation, recovery, invite, and magic links directly. These features build on Supabase Auth's architecture, which stores credentials directly in PostgreSQL databases to enable granular Row Level Security policies across database tables and storage buckets.


### [Spot: a video sharing app built with Flutter](https://yomu.fyi/post/spot-a-video-sharing-app-built-with-flutter.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Published: Jul 27, 2021

Supabase compiles a broad index of case studies documenting how organizations deploy its platform for infrastructure, authentication, and database workloads across diverse industries. Multiple companies report significant operational efficiencies, including Quilia reducing development time by seventy-five percent through Data API and row-level security capabilities. Infrastructure migrations are highlighted prominently, with Shotgun achieving an eighty-three percent reduction in data infrastructure costs and Good Tape cutting expenses by sixty percent. Several teams also adopt the platform specifically for artificial intelligence workflows, such as Quivr deploying thousands of vector databases and Firecrawl transitioning from Pinecone to Supabase Vector. Other organizations, including Mobbin and Replenysh, use the platform to migrate hundreds of thousands of user accounts and implement one-time password systems within twenty-four hours.


### [Supabase Storage now in Beta](https://yomu.fyi/post/supabase-storage-now-in-beta.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: Inian Parameshwaran
- Published: Jul 27, 2021

Supabase released Storage Beta with several functional and architectural improvements three months after its alpha launch. The storage service now supports the Content-Range HTTP header for streaming audio and video, alongside entirely public buckets configured with dashboard safeguards and standard authorization policies. Directory uploads are enabled via the File and Directory entries API, while self-hosted instances can use a new local filesystem backend rather than requiring AWS S3 configuration. To support Node.js without adding polyfills or bundling complexity, the storage server was updated to accept binary data and streams directly. Additionally, the dashboard storage explorer simulates filesystem directories using hidden placeholder files and implements list virtualization.


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