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The engineering internet, summarised so you can actually read it.
Supabase ·
Supabase Alpha June 2020
Four months into development, Supabase released its June 2020 alpha update focused on simplifying PostgreSQL management and eliminating regional performance bottlenecks. The release introduces a spreadsheet-like interface for drilling down into relational tables alongside automated detection and editing support for JSON and JSONB columns. To address latency issues previously caused by hosting all projects exclusively in Singapore, the platform now allows developers to select specific database regions. In line with its zero lock-in principle, Supabase exposed daily backups on the dashboard and enhanced the SQL editor with improved syntax highlighting. The team also expanded by hiring PostgREST maintainer Steve Chavez while continuing efforts toward future multi-region replication and WAL-G backup integration.
Paul CopplestoneGrab ·
How We Built Our In-house Chat Platform for the Web
Grab extended its in-house chat platform to the web to support its internal Customer Support portal. Because the existing TCP gateway only supports unicast connections with one active connection per user, opening multiple browser tabs would repeatedly disconnect previous tabs. Rather than undertaking a complex migration to multicast connections on the server, the team adopted a hybrid client-side strategy using SharedWorker and BroadcastChannel APIs. The implementation uses a SharedWorker to maintain a single WebSocket connection per domain while a BroadcastChannel syncs events across all open tabs. A custom wrapper over the worker manages version transitions during deployments to avoid race conditions across tabs.
Vasu KrishnamoorthySupabase ·
Supabase Alpha May 2020
Supabase announced its May 2020 alpha development updates following acceptance into a fully remote Y Combinator cohort and unexpected attention from Hacker News. Operating under a ship early and often philosophy, the team continued deploying functional changes despite ongoing alpha bugs and platform instability. This milestone includes a revamped user interface configured to support incoming product capabilities alongside an initial, experimental Table View designed to rival tools like Airtable. Furthermore, Supabase rolled out realtime listeners that allow developers to subscribe to database changes comparable to Firebase functionality. The platform also added instant RESTful APIs and auto-updating documentation generated dynamically by introspecting modifications to the underlying Postgres schema.
Paul CopplestoneGrab ·
Go Modules- A Guide for monorepos (Part 1)
Grab transitioned its large Go monorepo dependency management from Glide to Go modules while retaining an existing vendor directory structure. The team generated root go.mod configurations from glide.yaml and used go mod vendor without directly enabling module-mode builds. Incompatible nested sub-vendor paths were excluded by placing empty go.mod files, relying on the rule that modules cannot contain other modules. Post-migration maintenance revealed challenges with dependency inheritance and implicit go.mod updates during builds, which engineers investigated using go mod graph and digraph to trace dependency paths.
Michael CartmellSupabase ·
Supabase Alpha April 2020
The April 2020 alpha release of Supabase introduces developer tools designed to make Postgres as straightforward to use as Firebase. Users can configure a Postgres instance in less than two minutes and execute database queries directly from the dashboard interface. The platform provides auto-generated RESTful APIs along with auto-updating documentation created through database schema introspection. Development work also encompasses realtime listeners for database change subscriptions, query performance analysis tools, and connectors that route realtime updates to queues or webhooks. Supabase is not yet production ready, storing only GitHub usernames and emails while running for free under Digital Ocean's startup program.
Paul CopplestoneZoom ·
Developer Platform updates Spring 20'
Zoom introduced several updates across its developer platform alongside new roadmap milestones for 2020. Marketplace enhancements include a Developer Dashboard tracking install numbers and API usage, as well as dynamic OAuth scope configurations that distinguish mandatory and optional permissions. For client development, the WebSDK adds Microsoft Edge Chromium compatibility with video and VOIP support, whereas the iOS SDK incorporates Xcode 11 support. Due to increased developer demand, Zoom updated its V2 REST API rate limits and delivered new chat webhooks tracking message, channel, and member activity. Upcoming platform initiatives include the permanent termination of all legacy V1 APIs on May 31, 2020, platform security enhancements, and an iframe-free JavaScript embedding framework for the WebSDK.
Michael PurnellZoom ·
Backwards Incompatible V2 API Changes
Following the removal of Zoom's Attention Tracking feature, backwards-incompatible modifications were introduced to the V2 REST API effective April 3, 2020. Under these deprecations, the attentiveness_score field in meeting and webinar participant reports returns an empty value, while the attention_tracking field across user, group, and account settings endpoints defaults to false. Both attention-tracking fields remain temporarily in API responses before full removal in a future release. Additionally, starting April 12, 2020, password-related configuration fields become immutable and permanently set to true for Free and single-host Pro K-12 Education accounts. These locking measures affect settings such as password requirements for scheduled, instant, or personal meetings, alongside PSTN password protection across account, group, and user endpoints.
Benjamin DeanGrab ·
Does Southeast Asia Run on Coffee?
GrabFood examined regional coffee ordering trends across major Southeast Asian cities over a nine-month period. Regional coffee orders expanded by 1,400%, with most countries recording their highest order volumes on Wednesdays before tapering off toward the weekend. Singapore and the Philippines deviated from this regional pattern, experiencing spikes in coffee orders on weekends and particularly on Sundays. Daily peak ordering times also differed across markets, peaking at 10:00 AM in Thailand, 2:00 PM in Indonesia, and 4:00 PM in Singapore. In addition to coffee, Green Tea Latte emerged as a top ten beverage item on the platform, accounting for over 25 million delivered cups.
Siu Sing LaiGrab ·
GrabChat Much? Talk Data to Me!
Grab launched GrabChat in September 2016 to facilitate in-app communication between passengers and driver-partners, subsequently adding features such as instant translation, image sharing, voice audio, and templates. An analysis of messaging data across Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia revealed distinct behavioral differences, with Indonesia averaging the highest volume at 5.5 chats per booking. Chat volume and the proportion of location-oriented messages peak between midnight and 4am across all three markets, driven by closed storefronts and obscure pickup spots. Image sharing sees higher utilization in remote areas, while pre-populated templates constitute nearly 50% of driver texts to reduce manual typing while driving. Furthermore, messaging responsiveness, directional guidance, and courtesy terms like saying thank you correlate directly with higher trip completion rates.
Jason Lee Jie ShienGrab ·
7 Fun Facts about Grab’s Driver-Partners in Singapore
Grab analyzed ride-hailing metrics from driver-partners operating in Singapore to identify platform usage trends and driving patterns. Findings indicate that drivers have a 1 in 400 chance of encountering a repeat passenger among the 5.4 million population, with Tampines recording the most pickups and Orchard and Marina Bay serving as top destinations in 2018. Driver behavior data shows that partners with over two years of platform experience routinely start shifts an hour earlier and leverage auto-accept features to minimize idle waiting time. Furthermore, drivers are twice as likely to receive back-to-back ride allocations during evening peak hours, resulting in roughly 50% higher hourly earnings. The dataset also highlights customer satisfaction metrics, showing that shared GrabShare rides achieved an average rating of 4.8 stars.
Lara PuReum YimGrab ·
Tackling UI Test Execution Time Imbalance for Xcode Parallel Testing
Parallel test execution in Xcode can suffer from test time imbalance when tasks finish at significantly different times across parallel simulator workers. Analysis of Xcode scheduling logs shows that the runner groups tests by test class and dispatches all tests from the same class to a single simulator. Attempts to customize the suite by swizzling XCTestSuite fail because made-up suites initialize only after tests are dispatched. To overcome this grouping constraint, unique tokens or test names are appended to the class name component in `-only-testing` command-line arguments. This trick forces Xcode to treat each test as an independent class, successfully distributing individual tests across separate workers.
Ngoc Thuyen Trinhhuggingface.co ·
How to generate text: using different decoding methods for language generation with Transformers
Auto-regressive language generation relies heavily on decoding methods to convert predicted next-token probability distributions into coherent text. Greedy search selects the single most probable token at each timestep, but it frequently leads to repetitive phrasing and misses high-probability sequences hidden behind low-probability intermediate words. Beam search alleviates this issue by maintaining multiple parallel hypotheses and can be paired with n-gram penalties to reduce immediate repetitions. Sampling approaches, including top-K and top-p sampling, offer alternative paths that can yield more fluent, varied open-ended generation. Using the Hugging Face transformers library, practitioners can configure these strategies via parameters on the model generate function.
Patrick von PlatenGrab ·
Returning 575 Terabytes of Storage Space to Our Users
Android Vitals data revealed that 15.7% of Grab users had less than 1GB of free device storage and uninstalled the app at 1.2 times the normal rate. To understand on-device storage consumption, the team instrumented session launches using the Android StorageManager API to collect binary size, cache folder size, and total footprint metrics. Analysis showed unusually large cache sizes driven by orphaned cache folders from discontinued third-party libraries, including an image library replacement of Picasso by Glide. An automated cleanup routine deployed in app updates purged legacy cache directories upon launch. This mechanism reclaimed 575 terabytes of junk data across more than 13 million devices, averaging 40MB per user.
Lucas NelaupeGrab ·
Grab-Posisi - Southeast Asia’s First Comprehensive GPS Trajectory Dataset
Grab released Grab-Posisi, a GPS trajectory dataset covering Singapore and Jakarta designed to overcome the poor coverage, low sampling rates, and missing contextual metadata common in existing public datasets. Captured in April 2019 from drivers in transit, the dataset comprises 84,000 trajectories, over 80 million GPS pings, and more than 1 million kilometres recorded at a one-second sampling frequency. Each entry in the 2 GB Apache Parquet dataset records geographic coordinates, timestamp, accuracy radius, bearing, speed, mobile operating system, and vehicle mode. To protect privacy, driver personal information is encrypted and trip start and end locations are removed. The data enables applications including automated road network reconstruction, map matching, real-time traffic forecasting, and municipal infrastructure planning.
Zhengmin XuZoom ·
New API Rate Limiter
Zoom announced an updated V2 REST API Rate Limiter launching in March 2020 to replace its previous one-size-fits-all throttling system. Rather than applying uniform constraints across all subscription tiers, the new framework cross-references customer Account Types against API Request Groups categorized by infrastructure importance and load intensity. While most API rate limits are increasing, resource-intensive Dashboard APIs are reduced from 1 request per second to 6 or 12 requests per minute depending on account level. Throttled HTTP 429 responses will return X-RateLimit-Reset timestamps for per-minute limits and ISO8601 Retry-After timestamps for per-day limits. Additionally, the system introduces lock-key restrictions on specific user identifier path variables to restrict concurrency and enforce daily meeting creation caps.
Benjamin DeanZoom ·
Developing Zoom Marketplace Apps w/ ngrok
Developers frequently use ngrok to establish fast, introspectable tunnels to localhost when building Zoom Marketplace applications instead of configuring complex reverse proxies like NGINX or Apache. However, using basic ngrok tunnels in production exposes systems to short URL expiration windows, single points of failure, and scalability bottlenecks. To maintain application availability, developers can purchase an ngrok license to secure a service-level agreement and support. Additionally, teams should reserve dedicated subdomains rather than using auto-generated endpoints, run ngrok as a monitored background service on a cloud provider or data center, and place a load balancer in front of the tunnel to handle heavy traffic.
Tim SlagleZoom ·
What’s New and What’s Coming for Zoom Marketplace in 2020?
Zoom announced several updates to its App Marketplace alongside roadmap deadlines scheduled for early 2020. Marketplace enhancements include functional app categories, additional URL fields for Terms of Use and documentation, and support for defining multiple webhook event subscriptions within a single application. Administrators and developers gained webhook logs, enhanced pre-approval permission settings, and the ability to test draft applications directly in the installed apps interface for Data Compliance API compliance. To accommodate surging traffic, Zoom introduced revamped V2 REST API rate limits and breaking behavioral changes to the List Users API. Crucially, the platform set an absolute end-of-life date of April 26, 2020, for all legacy V1 APIs, requiring immediate migration to V2 endpoints.
Benjamin Deanhuggingface.co ·
How to train a new language model from scratch using Transformers and Tokenizers
Recent library enhancements simplify pretraining custom language models from raw text corpora. A small 84-million-parameter RoBERTa architecture comprising six layers, twelve attention heads, and a hidden dimension of 768 was pretrained on a 3 GB Esperanto text dataset. Training began by fitting a 52,000-vocabulary byte-level Byte-pair encoding tokenizer, which natively handled Esperanto diacritics and reduced average sequence lengths by approximately 30 percent compared to GPT-2 tokenization. The model was trained using masked language modeling, evaluated using fill-mask pipelines, and subsequently fine-tuned for part-of-speech tagging via standard token classification scripts. Final model artifacts and configurations were uploaded for community reuse via pre-trained model interfaces.
Julien ChaumondZoom ·
Investing in Developers — Zoom Developer Summit and Competition 2020
Zoom launched the Zoom Marketplace Competition for developers creating applications on the Zoom platform. Open to for-profit organizations with less than $10M in prior funding, the competition offers a selected winner up to $2 million in potential investment. Finalists pitch their proposals to venture partners from Emergence, Horizons Ventures, Maven Ventures, and Sequoia. In addition to capital, the winner receives advisory sessions with Zoom product experts, priority platform support, a DTEN D7 whiteboard, and multiple three-year software licenses. Submissions require explicit details regarding problem definition, customer demographics, traction, revenue models, competitive analysis, and team credentials ahead of the March 31st, 2020 deadline.
Aleks SwerdlowZoom ·
Zoom Developer Relations — Meet the Team
Zoom's Developer Relations team supports third-party developers, manages the App Marketplace, and maintains platform tools including APIs and Web SDKs. The team comprises technical writers, developer advocates, developer educators, security engineers, and marketplace specialists. Specific responsibilities include authoring integration documentation, reviewing early API designs, testing webhooks, scheduling security evaluations for Marketplace applications, and building sample code. Developer interactions take place across multiple channels, including the Zoom Developer Forum, Zendesk support tickets, Zoom meetings, app submission review notes, and partnership calls. Specialists also guide creators through the formal app submission lifecycle, reviewing functional workflows, privacy statements, and regional ISV opportunities across global markets like APAC.
Abraham Queen
