--- 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 ### [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. ### [Epsilon3 Self-Host Supabase To Revolutionize Space Operations](https://yomu.fyi/post/epsilon3-self-host-supabase-to-revolutionize-space-operations.md) - Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md) - Published: Jul 26, 2021 Epsilon3 digitizes paper procedures and telemetry data for high-stakes space missions and complex operational testing. Operating in heavily regulated environments requires strict security, ITAR compliance, and flexible deployment options ranging from AWS GovCloud to on-premises installations. To meet these demands without sacrificing developer velocity, Epsilon3 deployed a self-hosted Supabase configuration running against an Amazon RDS Postgres instance on AWS. This architecture gives the team real-time data streaming capabilities over Postgres so operators can track live procedure changes as they happen. In addition to reducing DevOps complexity, self-hosting Supabase enables Epsilon3 to leverage Postgres Row Level Security while ensuring full compliance across diverse deployment environments. ### [Supabase Community Day](https://yomu.fyi/post/supabase-community-day.md) - Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md) - Author: Steve Chavez - Published: Jul 26, 2021 Supabase announced a series of platform upgrades and open-source contributions centered around PostgreSQL and its broader tooling ecosystem. Every new project on the platform now deploys on PostgreSQL version 13.3, accompanied by marketplace images on Digital Ocean and AWS. PostgREST version 8.0 incorporates upstreamed performance enhancements, achieving up to 50% more throughput on GET requests by adopting prepared statements for SELECT queries and decreasing log verbosity. The release eliminates downtime during schema cache reloads and replaces the pg\_listen requirement with standard NOTIFY commands for dynamic in-database configuration updates. Additionally, community-led efforts introduced beta releases of Flutter and Dart client libraries alongside a dedicated Discord server for developer discussions. ### [Supabase is now on Postgres 13.3](https://yomu.fyi/post/supabase-is-now-on-postgres-13-3.md) - Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md) - Author: Angelico de los Reyes - Published: Jul 26, 2021 New Supabase projects now run on Supabase Postgres 13.3, transitioning the database platform forward from PostgreSQL 12.0. This release introduces features such as native UUID generation with gen\_random\_uuid, parallel index vacuuming, incremental sorting, smaller btree indexes, and extended statistics improvements. The underlying PostgreSQL binary was built from the ground up to enable Large System Extensions on AWS Graviton2 ARM instances, optimizing locking and synchronization performance. Alongside upgrading the underlying operating system to Ubuntu 20.04 for long-term support through 2025, the team integrated fail2ban to protect direct database connections on ports 5432 and 6543 against brute-force attacks. Finally, Supabase Postgres version numbering now mirrors upstream PostgreSQL major and minor versions to make tracking installed releases easier. ### [Protecting Personal Data in Grab's Imagery](https://yomu.fyi/post/protecting-personal-data-in-grab-s-imagery.md) - Company: [Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab.md) - Author: Adrian Popovici - Published: Jul 26, 2021 Grab's KartaView platform collects geotagged street imagery across over 100 countries, requiring automated obfuscation of faces and licence plates to protect personal privacy. Because off-the-shelf solutions struggled with diverse global environments and equirectangular 360-degree camera formats, Grab built a custom machine learning pipeline. The system projects varied image formats into standardized planar views, applies a YOLOv4 object detection model to locate target regions, and transforms bounding coordinates back to the original imagery for blurring. Training the detector required iterative dataset updates to accommodate edge cases like face masks and mirror reflections, paired with offline view splitting and oversampling of scarce large bounding boxes. Assessments confirmed that obfuscating these regions had minimal negative impact on downstream map feature extraction services. ### [Supabase Launch Week II: The SQL](https://yomu.fyi/post/supabase-launch-week-ii-the-sql.md) - Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md) - Author: Paul Copplestone - Published: Jul 22, 2021 Supabase scheduled Launch Week II: The SQL for the week of Monday 26 July 2021, occurring four months after its initial launch week held in March. The five-day schedule opens by spotlighting the latest developments from the community alongside core ecosystem tools including Postgres and PostgREST. Tuesday introduces Storage Reloaded, representing four months of further engineering work following the Version 1 storage release. Wednesday focuses on authentication capabilities, specifically passwordless login features that build upon existing platform support for eight distinct OAuth providers. The week concludes with platform dashboard improvements alongside announcements regarding Supabase Functions updates, a community hackathon, and the official Supabase Swag Store. [Newer posts](https://yomu.fyi/page/49.md) · [Older posts](https://yomu.fyi/page/51.md)