---
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

### [2026 customer service planning series: Vol. 01](https://yomu.fyi/post/2026-customer-service-planning-series-vol-01.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Author: Declan Ivory
- Published: Nov 18, 2025
- Type: Explainer

Part one of a five-part 2026 customer service planning series argues that support organizations must be redesigned around AI rather than adding AI to existing tools, processes, and org charts. It frames AI Agents as end-to-end resolution engines and infrastructure that can serve as the first and last touchpoint, manage workflows, orchestrate handoffs, and take actions. The proposed mindset shift includes planning for changing work distribution, treating support as a product function, measuring resolution, impact, and system reliability, and assigning clear ownership for agent performance and continuous feedback. The post also says teams should give AI increasingly complex workflows while people improve the system, creating compounding returns. It concludes that adaptability will be essential as AI evolves, and previews a future edition on designing the resulting support organization.


### [Secure Authentication with a Push Notification in Your iOS Device](https://yomu.fyi/post/secure-authentication-with-a-push-notification-in-your-ios-device.md)
- Company: [Okta](https://yomu.fyi/company/okta.md)
- Author: Darko Spasovski
- Published: Nov 18, 2025
- Type: Tutorial

The tutorial shows how to build a native iOS sign-in flow using Okta DirectAuth and push notification MFA. It starts with an Okta Integrator Free Plan org, configures an OIDC Native Application and enables Okta Verify push notifications, while noting additional authorization policies may be required for a custom authorization server. In Xcode, the app uses Swift, SwiftUI, Swift Package Manager, and the Okta mobile Swift packages OktaDirectAuth and AuthFoundation to handle credentials, tokens, and MFA challenges without browser redirects. An AuthService coordinates authentication state, user and token information, sign-out, access-token refresh, and session restoration from stored credentials. The completed flow is described as phishing-resistant and able to maintain an active session directly within a SwiftUI app.


### [Customer Experience: The 2026 Marketer's Guide](https://yomu.fyi/post/customer-experience-the-2026-marketer-s-guide.md)
- Company: [Brandwatch](https://yomu.fyi/company/brandwatch.md)
- Author: Gemma Joyce
- Published: Nov 17, 2025
- Type: Tutorial

Customer experience (CX) spans every interaction across the journey, from advertising and purchase through support, product use, and advocacy, rather than referring only to customer service, UX, or customer success. The guide argues that AI has raised expectations for fast, personalized responses, while privacy-first marketing increases the importance of consented zero-party and first-party data, voice-of-customer programs, and social listening. Its framework maps awareness, consideration, purchase, post-purchase, and loyalty or advocacy; combines social, survey, support, and review data; prioritizes fixes with an impact-versus-effort matrix; and establishes workflows, response SLAs, and ongoing measurement. It recommends metrics including NPS, CSAT, CES, sentiment, and churn rate, alongside competitive benchmarking and continuous iteration. Examples describe using Brandwatch's Data Upload API and Social Panels to identify product issues, customer questions, and improvement opportunities before broader launches or operational changes.


### [Easily Build and Share ROCm Kernels with Hugging Face](https://yomu.fyi/post/easily-build-and-share-rocm-kernels-with-hugging-face.md)
- Company: [Hugging Face](https://yomu.fyi/company/hugging-face.md)
- Author: Abdennacer Badaoui, Daniel Huang, colorswind, Zesen Liu
- Published: Nov 17, 2025
- Type: Tutorial

Compiling custom deep learning GPU kernels across architectures often leads to complex build flag management, compiler errors, and ABI issues. Hugging Face's kernels library and kernel-builder streamline this workflow by supporting backends such as ROCm, CUDA, Metal, and XPU. Using the RadeonFlow FP8 block-wise GEMM kernel optimized for the AMD Instinct MI300X GPU as an example, developers organize files into specific headers and HIP implementations. The build is configured via a build.toml manifest and flake.nix to ensure reproducible compilation across supported PyTorch and ROCm versions. Artifacts can then be pushed to the Hugging Face Hub, allowing users to load and execute custom operators directly via get\_kernel without traditional installation steps.


### [Join the AMD Open Robotics Hackathon](https://yomu.fyi/post/join-the-amd-open-robotics-hackathon.md)
- Company: [Hugging Face](https://yomu.fyi/company/hugging-face.md)
- Author: Eric Ma, Guruprasad MP
- Published: Nov 13, 2025
- Type: Announcement

AMD, Hugging Face, and Data Monsters announced the AMD Open Robotics Hackathon, an in-person competition scheduled for Tokyo and Paris in December 2025. Participating teams of up to four adults will compete over three days across two core missions. The first mission covers an instructor-led session on configuring the LeRobot development environment using AMD AI solutions. During the second mission, teams spend two days developing a freestyle project to address a real-world problem using LeRobot. Participants receive access to SO-101 robotics kits, AMD Ryzen AI laptops, and AMD Instinct MI300X GPUs via AMD Developer Cloud, with prizes awarded to the top seven teams in each city based on creativity, difficulty, ease-of-use, and practicality.


### [Treating Data as Code at Two Sigma](https://yomu.fyi/post/treating-data-as-code-at-two-sigma.md)
- Company: [Two Sigma](https://yomu.fyi/company/two-sigma.md)
- Author: Emily Majewski
- Published: Nov 13, 2025
- Type: Problem & solution

Scaling research and trading platforms across thousands of data sources created bottlenecks at Two Sigma, where reliance on database snapshots and fragmented infrastructure slowed dataset delivery to data scientists. To address operational costs and architectural complexity, the data engineering team adopted software development principles by treating data as code. The organization migrated to Google BigQuery's serverless architecture, standardized SQL transformations using dbt, and defined declarative pipelines with Terraform under continuous integration workflows. Internal tooling was introduced to track directed acyclic graph dependencies, automate anomaly detection, and streamline data discovery. These shifts eliminated manual data movement routines, reduced operational overhead, and enabled formal data contracts to safeguard downstream consumers and emerging language model integrations.


### [Past, Present, and Future](https://yomu.fyi/post/past-present-and-future.md)
- Company: [Cursor](https://yomu.fyi/company/cursor.md)
- Author: Cursor
- Published: Nov 13, 2025
- Type: Announcement

Cursor has announced a $2.3 billion Series D financing at a $29.3 billion post-money valuation, nearly two years after describing a vision for an AI-assisted code editor that could make programming more helpful, answer codebase questions instantly, and reduce the visibility of source code. The company says the early stages of that vision are taking shape while substantial work remains to realize Cursor’s potential. It reports a team of more than 300 engineers, researchers, designers, and operators, over $1 billion in annualized revenue, millions of developers and major engineering organizations as customers, and in-house models generating more code than almost any other LLMs in the world. Existing investors Accel, Thrive, and Andreessen Horowitz participated alongside new partners Coatue, NVIDIA, and Google, while the funding will support further research and Cursor’s next magical moments.


### [Building for an Open Future - our new partnership with Google Cloud](https://yomu.fyi/post/building-for-an-open-future-our-new-partnership-with-google-cloud.md)
- Company: [Hugging Face](https://yomu.fyi/company/hugging-face.md)
- Author: Jeff Boudier, Simon Pagezy
- Published: Nov 13, 2025
- Type: Announcement

Hugging Face and Google Cloud announced an expanded strategic partnership designed to streamline the deployment and management of open models on Google Cloud infrastructure. Prompted by a tenfold increase in Hugging Face usage on Google Cloud over three years, the collaboration introduces a joint CDN Gateway using Hugging Face Xet technology to cache models and datasets directly on Google Cloud. This caching mechanism aims to shorten download times, strengthen model supply chain resilience, and accelerate time-to-first-token across Vertex AI, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Run, and Compute Engine virtual machines. Hugging Face plans to integrate native library support for Google Cloud TPUs, lower instance prices on Inference Endpoints, and enhance Hub security scanning via VirusTotal, Google Threat Intelligence, and Mandiant.


### [Stretch Your Imagination and Build a Delightful Sign-In Experience](https://yomu.fyi/post/stretch-your-imagination-and-build-a-delightful-sign-in-experience.md)
- Company: [Okta](https://yomu.fyi/company/okta.md)
- Author: Alisa Duncan
- Published: Nov 12, 2025
- Type: Tutorial

This tutorial shows how to customize the Okta-hosted Sign-In Widget (SIW) for a fictional to-do application while retaining Okta Identity Engine authentication flows. It covers configuring a custom domain and enabling SIW Gen3, then using brand settings, design tokens, custom CSS properties, and page code to change fonts, colors, layout, and background treatment. The implementation uses the widget’s afterTransform method and FormBag to revise the identify form, remove help, unlock, and divider elements, change the title, and add a custom blog link. It also explains the default HTML and JavaScript rendering configuration and describes updating an OpenID Connect application to use the brand’s custom sign-in URL as its issuer.


### [Building world-class product search at Shopify: Where C++ excellence meets ML innovation](https://yomu.fyi/post/building-world-class-product-search-at-shopify-where-c-excellence-meet.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Nov 12, 2025
- Type: Problem & solution

Shopify describes a product-search stack built for multi-tenant commerce, where real-time indexing, retrieval, ranking, experimentation, and merchant controls must operate at global scale. Commerce ranking combines classical information retrieval with transformers, neural rankers, LightGBM, Catboost, and signals such as relevance, purchase popularity, brand trust, and navigational intent, while supporting privacy, multi-language, and accessibility requirements. RankFlow, a Python-like domain-specific language, lets data scientists change ranking logic without C++ expertise, while TurboDSL compiles and executes it with type safety, vectorized operations, cache optimization, predictable latency, and efficient memory use. The team first shipped SimScorerDSL in C++, then built TurboDSL without changing the DSL syntax, enabling continued experimentation during the transition. TurboDSL achieved a 48% speedup in ranking feature computation, and automated pull-request analysis compares component timings, statistical significance within a ±2% tolerance, and side-by-side results to detect performance or accuracy regressions.


### [The productivity impact of coding agents](https://yomu.fyi/post/the-productivity-impact-of-coding-agents.md)
- Company: [Cursor](https://yomu.fyi/company/cursor.md)
- Author: Oskar Schulz
- Published: Nov 11, 2025
- Type: Benchmark

The study examines how developers use Cursor’s agent and how its adoption affects software productivity across tens of thousands of users. After the agent became the default for eligible organizations, the rate of merged pull requests increased 39% relative to time trends in a baseline group, while revert rates did not change significantly, bugfix rates slightly decreased, and average lines edited and files touched per merged pull request were unchanged. Agent acceptance varied with experience: each standard-deviation increase in years of experience corresponded to an approximately 6% increase in acceptance relative to the mean, and experienced developers were more likely to plan before coding. In a sample of 1,000 users, about 61% of conversation-starting requests concerned implementation, with others focused on explanation or planning. The authors say no single metric yet captures AI’s economic impact on software engineering.


### [Hollywood demos vs. real](https://yomu.fyi/post/hollywood-demos-vs-real.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Author: Francesca Conde
- Published: Nov 11, 2025
- Type: Explainer

AI demonstrations fall into two categories: polished “Hollywood demos” and raw “real-world demos,” with the latter showing how customer-service AI agents perform under messy, complex interactions rather than edited presentation. Voice provides an especially demanding test because timing, tone, turn-taking, latency, interruptions, and real-time adaptation all shape the experience. At Pioneer, Paul Adams called Fin Voice live; within 90 seconds, it verified identity, retrieved account data, handled an interruption, offered options, completed the workflow, and sent a follow-up email. The demonstration exposed brief pauses for backend work, natural conversational flow, tone changes, and unscripted behavior, while later updates added voice customization, escalation guidance, deployment controls, integrations, support for 28 languages, and roughly 30–40% lower latency since launch.


### [Heroku Support for .NET 10 LTS: What Developers Need to Know](https://yomu.fyi/post/heroku-support-for-net-10-lts-what-developers-need-to-know.md)
- Company: [Heroku](https://yomu.fyi/company/heroku.md)
- Author: Rune Soerensen
- Published: Nov 11, 2025
- Type: Announcement

Heroku now supports building and running .NET 10 applications, including ASP.NET Core 10, C# 14, and F# 10, as the new three-year Long Term Support release becomes available. Its .NET buildpack detects single-file C# applications, installs the latest SDK, builds and publishes them, and configures web apps without project or solution files; it also supports both .sln and .slnx formats. Heroku CI continues to run dotnet test by default, with the .NET 10 SDK integrating the Microsoft Testing Platform into that command. .NET 8 and .NET 9 remain supported with updates but reach End of Support on November 10, 2026, while apps targeting net10.0 RC will use stable .NET 10 on their next push and can pin SDK versions through global.json.


### [The hidden cost of disconnected knowledge](https://yomu.fyi/post/the-hidden-cost-of-disconnected-knowledge.md)
- Company: [Notion](https://yomu.fyi/company/notion.md)
- Author: Drew Evans
- Published: Nov 11, 2025
- Type: Explainer

Disconnected knowledge leaves important decisions in Slack threads, meetings, and Jira comments rather than the wiki, separating information from the work that uses it. The post frames this fragmentation as three compounding costs: switching between tools, paying for tools employees do not adopt, and limiting AI because it cannot access conversations, decisions, projects, and tasks. It proposes shrinking the distance between knowledge and action through a connected workspace, while keeping tools such as Slack, Figma, and GitHub searchable through AI. In this model, documentation is created during work, remains current, and links specifications, roadmaps, OKRs, and projects. A framework evaluates organizations as Fragmented, Consolidating, or Integrated across connected, alive, accessible, intelligent, and adopted dimensions, with examples from Ramp, OpenAI, Faire, and Cursor.


### [Improving agent with semantic search](https://yomu.fyi/post/improving-agent-with-semantic-search.md)
- Company: [Cursor](https://yomu.fyi/company/cursor.md)
- Author: Stefan Heule, Emily Jia & Naman Jain
- Published: Nov 6, 2025
- Type: Benchmark

Cursor describes semantic search as a complement to grep for helping coding agents locate relevant code in large codebases. Its evaluation used Cursor Context Bench across widely used models, comparing tool sets with and without semantic search, and found an average 12.5% accuracy improvement, with gains ranging from 6.5% to 23.5%. In an online A/B test, semantic search increased code retention by 0.3% overall and 2.6% on codebases with at least 1,000 files, while its absence produced a 2.2% increase in dissatisfied follow-up requests. The retrieval system uses a custom embedding model trained from agent session traces, with an LLM ranking helpful content and training aligning embedding similarity scores to those rankings. The conclusion is that combining semantic search with grep produces the best outcomes, especially for large codebases.


### [Grab's Mac Cloud Exit supercharges macOS CI/CD](https://yomu.fyi/post/grab-s-mac-cloud-exit-supercharges-macos-ci-cd.md)
- Company: [Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab.md)
- Author: Madushan Gamage
- Published: Nov 6, 2025
- Type: Problem & solution

Grab moved its macOS CI/CD infrastructure from a US cloud vendor to a colocation cluster in Malaysia, closer to its Git servers in Southeast Asia. The change followed growth from one office Mac Pro to more than 250 Mac minis, rising demand, job queues, and cloud costs that made ownership or colocation more attractive at scale. Grab selected bare-metal hardware after comparing cloud, colocation, and on-premises options, then migrated progressively while monitoring failure rates, performance, and reliability; the later infrastructure also uses zero-touch provisioning to reduce manual setup as the cluster grows. The migration produced projected savings of more than $2.4 million over three years and performance improvements of 20–40%, while the team chose allocated-kilowatt power commitments and retained bare metal because macOS virtualization’s performance or stability trade-offs did not justify it.


### [You Should Write An Agent](https://yomu.fyi/post/you-should-write-an-agent.md)
- Company: [Fly.io](https://yomu.fyi/company/fly-io.md)
- Published: Nov 6, 2025
- Type: Tutorial

Thomas Ptacek argues that people should build an LLM agent before forming strong opinions about the technology, because implementation reveals how simple and surprising the underlying system can be. The example starts with a Python loop around the OpenAI Responses API, storing user and assistant messages in a context list to simulate conversation with a stateless model. Adding a JSON-defined ping function and a tool-calling loop lets the model choose and execute multiple network checks, demonstrating behavior not explicitly hard-coded in the loop. The discussion extends this pattern to coding agents, contexts persisted in SQLite, sub-agents, and design choices involving nondeterminism, ground truth, interchange formats, and token costs. It concludes that these remain open software-engineering problems whose practical behavior can be understood by building and iterating on agents.


### [Upgrade to Puma 7 and Unlock the Power of Fair Scheduled Keep-alive](https://yomu.fyi/post/upgrade-to-puma-7-and-unlock-the-power-of-fair-scheduled-keep-alive.md)
- Company: [Heroku](https://yomu.fyi/company/heroku.md)
- Author: Richard Schneeman
- Published: Nov 5, 2025
- Type: Explainer

Puma 6 and earlier could let a keep-alive connection “cut the line” when all threads were busy, allowing up to ten requests from that connection to run consecutively while previously accepted work waited. The behavior came from reusing a “fast inline” optimization intended for HTTP pipelining, where requests arrive together, for keep-alive requests that can arrive later. Puma 7 changes queueing so pipelined and keep-alive requests return to the back of the queue, and adjusts wait\_until\_not\_full so interleaving is possible; its accept loop now slows proportionally with load instead of stopping completely. The fix does not add capacity, but distributes overload delay more fairly across requests. The post recommends upgrading to Puma 7.1.0 or later, especially for applications that had disabled keep-alives after latency spikes.


### [Building an Enterprise Data Warehouse on Heroku: From Complex ETL to Seamless Salesforce Integration](https://yomu.fyi/post/building-an-enterprise-data-warehouse-on-heroku-from-complex-etl-to-se.md)
- Company: [Heroku](https://yomu.fyi/company/heroku.md)
- Author: Sudarshan Hiray
- Published: Nov 5, 2025
- Type: Problem & solution

The article describes Heroku’s effort to unify Salesforce and data from more than 20 applications in a real-time analytics warehouse after traditional ETL created API, freshness, performance, and maintenance problems. Its architecture uses Heroku Postgres as an operational warehouse and staging layer, AWS Redshift for historical analytics, Heroku Connect for direct Salesforce replication, follower databases for read-only source access, and Apache Airflow for orchestration. Template-driven Python jobs and 200+ JSON definitions support incremental, bulk, and date-range loads, while 30+ DAGs and monitoring across 12 regional Heroku Connect instances provide automated retries and consistency. Reported outcomes include over 10 TB processed monthly, sub-minute freshness, 99.99% pipeline uptime, 60% lower integration costs, and 40% better customer analysis accuracy. Tableau and Dataclips provide real-time, historical, and ad hoc reporting, while planned or newly described capabilities include Postgres Advanced, expanded Connect synchronization, and zero-copy Data Cloud ingestion in beta.


### [Shipping is your company's heartbeat](https://yomu.fyi/post/shipping-is-your-company-s-heartbeat.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Author: Darragh Curran
- Published: Nov 5, 2025
- Type: Explainer

Software becomes valuable only when it reaches customers, because deployment starts the feedback loop that tests assumptions and enables the next improvement. The post argues that although software deployment can now take seconds or minutes, teams often retain habits from an era of infrequent, costly releases, making shipping itself a source of risk and delay. It uses time to production (TTP) as a technical and organizational lens: a one-minute fix can be tested, reviewed, merged, deployed, and communicated immediately, while hours, days, or weeks encourage waiting, batching, deploy windows, larger releases, and growing bug backlogs. Continuous shipping is presented as a company-wide practice that improves feedback, decision-making, customer responsiveness, momentum, motivation, and hiring, while requiring ongoing effort to reduce TTP and treat shipability as a design concern.


[Newer posts](https://yomu.fyi/posts/page/165.md) · [Older posts](https://yomu.fyi/posts/page/167.md)