---
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

### [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.


### [Processing ETL tasks with Ratchet](https://yomu.fyi/post/processing-etl-tasks-with-ratchet.md)
- Company: [Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab.md)
- Author: Amar Prakash
- Published: Jul 19, 2021

Grab's Lending team relies on multiple microservices to finance various user segments, requiring automated pipelines for operational tasks like loan rescheduling and merchant whitelisting. To execute these workflows, the team uses Ratchet, a Go library that organizes data pipelines into concurrent stages connected by Go channels and JSON payloads. In the Azkaban service, each ETL task is structured as a Job Processor that configures custom Data Processors for extraction, transformation, and loading. For merchant whitelisting, a custom processor pulls uploaded CSV files from Amazon S3, validates the rows to prevent manual errors, calls microservice APIs, and passes the output to an empty load stage. This pipeline architecture allows the team to isolate failures quickly, eliminate manual data validation, and automate routine operational tasks.


### [Deep Learning over the Internet: Training Language Models Collaboratively](https://yomu.fyi/post/deep-learning-over-the-internet-training-language-models-collaborative.md)
- Company: huggingface.co
- Author: Max Ryabinin, Lucile Saulnier
- Published: Jul 15, 2021

Pretraining state-of-the-art Transformer language models typically requires vast computing resources and expensive hardware clusters that are inaccessible to many researchers. Standard distributed deep learning struggles over public Internet infrastructure because consumer connections suffer from limited bandwidth, dynamic peer disconnections, and restrictive firewalls. To resolve these networking bottlenecks, Distributed Deep Learning in Open Collaborations (DeDLOC) introduces an adaptive training framework that accumulates massive batch sizes across heterogeneous volunteer devices before applying optimizer updates. The framework splits gradient vectors dynamically based on participant connection speeds and allows firewalled nodes to contribute data without performing aggregation. In a practical deployment with 40 volunteers, the 18-million-parameter sahajBERT model achieved Bengali downstream benchmark performance comparable to much larger multilingual models trained on dedicated supercomputers.


### [App Modularisation at Scale](https://yomu.fyi/post/app-modularisation-at-scale.md)
- Company: [Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab.md)
- Author: Amar Jain
- Published: Jul 13, 2021

Grab transitioned its monolithic mobile application into a modular architecture to resolve increasing code conflicts, slow releases, and difficult team collaboration. The team decomposed the single module by establishing base infrastructure modules, shared UI and utility libraries, discrete feature modules, and bridge kit modules for inter-module communication. Dependency injection using Dagger ties these components together in the main app module while preventing feature modules from directly depending on one another. The architecture spans over 1,000 modules across the app, with more than 200 modules in the Grab Financial Group payments domain where over 95% of modules build in under 15 seconds. This approach accelerated Gradle CI and local builds through parallel compilation and caching, though it increased Gradle sync times, IDE memory usage, and configuration maintenance overhead.


### [Welcome spaCy to the Hugging Face Hub](https://yomu.fyi/post/welcome-spacy-to-the-hugging-face-hub.md)
- Company: huggingface.co
- Author: Omar Sanseviero, Ines Montani
- Published: Jul 13, 2021

Hugging Face has integrated spaCy pipelines into the Hugging Face Hub to simplify the distribution, testing, and deployment of natural language processing models across the community. More than 60 canonical models from the spaCy 3.1 release are hosted in the spaCy organization, alongside discoverable community pipelines. Users can package and upload models directly through the command line using the spacy-huggingface-hub extension, which auto-generates required metadata and model cards. Hosted pipelines offer direct pip installation from live wheel URLs, interactive browser exploration, and production-ready HTTP endpoints through the Inference API. The platform provides immediate interactive widget support for named entity recognition components, with upcoming support planned for text classification and part-of-speech tagging pipelines.


### [Deploy Hugging Face models easily with Amazon SageMaker](https://yomu.fyi/post/deploy-hugging-face-models-easily-with-amazon-sagemaker.md)
- Company: huggingface.co
- Author: Philipp Schmid
- Published: Jul 8, 2021

Hugging Face and Amazon introduced an inference solution integrating Hugging Face Transformers with Amazon SageMaker. The SageMaker Hugging Face Inference Toolkit and specialized Deep Learning Containers enable deployment of trained models or publicly available Hub models to managed production endpoints. Users configure endpoints with minimal code using the SageMaker Python SDK, standard pipelines, or custom inference scripts that override default behaviors. The architecture supports models stored in Amazon S3 as well as direct references via HF\_MODEL\_ID and HF\_TASK environment variables. Deployments benefit from native AWS infrastructure features, including built-in monitoring, Identity and Access Management permission controls, and Virtual Private Cloud connectivity.


### [Reshaping Chat Support for Our Users](https://yomu.fyi/post/reshaping-chat-support-for-our-users.md)
- Company: [Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab.md)
- Author: Elisa Monacchi
- Published: Jul 7, 2021

Grab transitioned from voice hotlines and third-party tools to an in-house native chat support system integrated into their CRM. The team validated the platform through an MVP and user shadowing to address session disconnections, agent context switching, and routing bottlenecks. To optimize support operations at scale, they introduced dynamic queue limits based on Little's law, machine learning autocomplete suggestions for agents, and duration timers with visual nudges. These enhancements reduced chat waiting times by 30%, unresponsive users by 7%, and overall chat handling duration by 22%.


### [Protecting reserved roles with PostgreSQL Hooks](https://yomu.fyi/post/protecting-reserved-roles-with-postgresql-hooks.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: Steve Chavez
- Published: Jul 2, 2021

Supabase required granting database customers the CREATEROLE privilege to manage custom roles while preventing them from dropping or altering backend service roles such as supabase\_storage\_admin. Because stock PostgreSQL lacks a native mechanism to define custom reserved roles, the team created the SupaUtils extension using PostgreSQL hooks. Loaded via shared\_preload\_libraries, SupaUtils intercepts utility statements by overriding the global ProcessUtility\_hook function pointer. The extension inspects incoming statements like ALTER ROLE and DROP ROLE against a configurable list defined in postgresql.conf using DefineCustomStringVariable. If a targeted role matches the configured reserved roles, the hook raises an error, preserving backend infrastructure roles while permitting broader role administration.


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