---
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

### [How to easily charge customers across accounts in an organization](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-to-easily-charge-customers-across-accounts-in-an-organization.md)
- Company: [Stripe](https://yomu.fyi/company/stripe.md)
- Author: Daniel Wood
- Published: May 7, 2025
- Type: Tutorial

Stripe’s Organizations customer and payment method sharing addresses the difficulty of giving customers a unified checkout when a business uses separate accounts for business lines or countries. After access is enabled, all new and existing customers and their saved card payment methods can be shared between selected accounts, using the same IDs, so a saved card can be charged in another account without recollection. Only selected customer fields—such as name, email, phone, tax IDs, and preferred locales—are shared; metadata, shipping, and other fields remain account-specific, while non-card payment methods cannot be charged cross-account. The guide demonstrates testing in an organization sandbox, creating Checkout Sessions with the shared customer ID, viewing organization-wide transactions, and using a single organization webhook; sharing is in preview and requires customer consent.


### [Introducing Stripe Workflows: Tailoring Payments to Your Business Needs](https://yomu.fyi/post/introducing-stripe-workflows-tailoring-payments-to-your-business-needs.md)
- Company: [Stripe](https://yomu.fyi/company/stripe.md)
- Author: Ben Smith
- Published: May 7, 2025
- Type: Announcement

Stripe introduces Stripe Workflows, a Dashboard-based system for orchestrating Stripe products and APIs through responsive, end-to-end automation. It addresses the complexity of coordinating multiple Stripe products by replacing custom event-handling and dependency-management code with visual workflows that support real-time triggers, branching logic, dynamic fields, and more than 600 event triggers. Workflows includes execution monitoring with event-payload and step-level tracing, 30-day default log retention, exponential-backoff retries, built-in idempotency, and recursion protection capped at a depth of five. The post describes applications including reducing chargeback risk, routing high-value transactions for compliance review, and creating custom-priced subscriptions from finalized quotes without additional infrastructure.


### [Introducing Stripe's new public preview release channel](https://yomu.fyi/post/introducing-stripe-s-new-public-preview-release-channel.md)
- Company: [Stripe](https://yomu.fyi/company/stripe.md)
- Author: Paul Anderson
- Published: May 7, 2025
- Type: Announcement

Stripe announces its new public preview release channel, which provides early access to API features before their General Availability launches. Preview features are described as operationally stable and production-ready, but they may receive breaking changes more often than GA features and may have geographic, onboarding, or approval restrictions. Each preview uses a distinct API version ending in preview, such as 2025-04-30.preview, selected through the Stripe-Version header; preview versions also appear in the API reference and changelog. Beta SDKs will use these preview versions and include preview features, with releases differentiated from GA counterparts by suffixes such as 5.2.0-beta.1. The example shows that a feature released only in preview is rejected by a GA version, requiring an explicit version change before use; this separation lets teams integrate earlier and provide feedback while avoiding unintended adoption of features with known restrictions.


### [Sessions 2025 Developer Track resources](https://yomu.fyi/post/sessions-2025-developer-track-resources.md)
- Company: [Stripe](https://yomu.fyi/company/stripe.md)
- Author: Ashley Ansari
- Published: May 7, 2025
- Type: Announcement

Stripe’s Sessions 2025 developer track recap presents new products, APIs, and enhancements for building and managing financial infrastructure. Stripe’s Workflows provides visual automation for real-time events, with more than 600 triggers, branching logic, dynamic fields, and built-in error handling, while the MCP server and agent toolkit connect AI tools and agents to Stripe documentation, account data, APIs, and financial capabilities. Accounts v2 unifies connected-account management, and fully localized Connect Mobile Embedded Components bring onboarding to iOS and Android; the Payment Element also gains support for the Checkout Sessions API. New Stripe Apps UI components, generally available Sandboxes, Organization-wide sharing of customers and payment methods, and conversational documentation extend customization, testing, and collaboration.


### [eBay Uses Agentic AI to Supercharge Personalized Ecommerce](https://yomu.fyi/post/ebay-uses-agentic-ai-to-supercharge-personalized-ecommerce.md)
- Company: [Ebay](https://yomu.fyi/company/ebay.md)
- Author: eBay News Team
- Published: May 6, 2025
- Type: Announcement

eBay announces a new AI shopping agent designed to provide personalized product recommendations and guidance throughout the marketplace and buying journey. It uses shopping preferences, user requests, and predictive inline messaging to support activities such as finding gifts or assembling a Spring Break wardrobe. The agent extends eBay’s shift from simple chatbots toward conversational and interactive systems intended to understand, interact with, and anticipate customer needs, combining agentic AI with eBay’s infrastructure, customer insights, and product knowledge. eBay says its Responsible AI team collaborates on AI-powered features to align them with safety, fairness, transparency, and accountability, while the new experience starts with a small percentage of U.S. customers and will expand on a rolling basis.


### [How I Improved My Productivity with Cursor and the Heroku MCP Server](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-i-improved-my-productivity-with-cursor-and-the-heroku-mcp-server.md)
- Company: [Heroku](https://yomu.fyi/company/heroku.md)
- Author: Julián Duque
- Published: May 5, 2025
- Type: Tutorial

Cursor is presented as the author’s primary AI coding companion, with inline suggestions, quick edits, and agentic features supporting coding, testing, design, and deployment from one editor. Connecting it to Heroku through the Model Context Protocol (MCP) enables an assistant to deploy apps, scale dynos, fetch logs, and update configuration without opening the Heroku dashboard or terminal. The article explains MCP’s host–client–server model and gives Cursor setup configurations for the Heroku MCP Server, LangChain MCPDoc, and Figma MCP Server, including required Heroku authorization and tool commands. It reports that this workflow reduced context-switching, saved minutes on tasks, reduced errors from recalling commands, and helped the author stay focused while building and deploying demos.


### [How to turn your company's knowledge into action](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-to-turn-your-company-s-knowledge-into-action.md)
- Company: [Notion](https://yomu.fyi/company/notion.md)
- Author: Monica Perez
- Published: May 2, 2025
- Type: Explainer

Companies can lose speed when knowledge remains in silos, making work harder to complete quickly. A Harvard Business Review survey cited in the text found that 44% of respondents think their company manages knowledge well, while 3% use AI to help. Conversations with Rohit from OpenAI, Jennifer from Slack, and Kristen from Hinge point to organizing information around actual work, establishing clear locations for knowledge, and designing systems people will use. The examples include Hinge’s weekly “Documentation Fridays” and Slack’s inclusion of documentation in performance expectations. Recommended actions are to define a source of truth, map where information lives, use templates, build sharing into routines, and recognize contributors; the stated payoff is faster movement, more innovation, and learning from experience.


### [How On-Device AI Models Find Your Best Tinder Profile Photos](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-on-device-ai-models-find-your-best-tinder-profile-photos.md)
- Company: [Tinder](https://yomu.fyi/company/tinder.md)
- Author: Tinder
- Published: Apr 28, 2025
- Type: Problem & solution

Tinder developed an on-device AI Photo Selector to recommend compelling profile photos directly from a user's camera roll without exposing private assets. To establish a reference face, the system extracts facial landmarks via Apple's Vision framework and normalizes the crop using affine transformations. To prevent funnel drop-offs from mandatory selfies, the architecture includes a fallback mechanism that detects a single recognizable face in existing profile photos. Processing workflows execute concurrently across thousands of local assets while downloading and initializing TensorFlow Lite models in parallel using Combine. A dedicated analytics queue synchronizes operation counts with DispatchGroup to ensure accurate metric capture before the global rollout.


### [Early team](https://yomu.fyi/post/early-team.md)
- Company: [Cursor](https://yomu.fyi/company/cursor.md)
- Author: Sualeh Asif
- Published: Apr 26, 2025
- Type: Announcement

Cursor introduces a representative sample of the people on its team and collaborators, spanning infrastructure, distributed systems, AI research, design, performance, and product development. The profiles include Aman Karmani, Jeremy Stribling, Jacob Jackson, Ian Huang, Sasha Rush, Alex Haugland, Ryo Lu, Lukas Möller, Jack Gallagher, and Michael Feldstein, with prior work at GitHub, Keybase, OpenAI, Cornell, Google, Notion, DeepJudge, Midjourney, Figma, and Meta. Their cited work includes KBFS, speculative decoding, a browser-based multiplayer Minecraft engine, language-model efficiency and long-context research, Cursor’s in-house inference engine, and Midjourney pretraining and reinforcement learning. The post invites people interested in transformational AI products, frontier RL, AI infrastructure, or distributed systems to contact hiring@cursor.com.


### [Retargeting Marketing: A 7-Step Campaign Guide](https://yomu.fyi/post/retargeting-marketing-a-7-step-campaign-guide.md)
- Company: [Brandwatch](https://yomu.fyi/company/brandwatch.md)
- Author: Sandra Busch
- Published: Apr 25, 2025
- Type: Tutorial

Retargeting marketing re-engages people who have previously interacted with a brand, including website visitors, cart abandoners, and social users who have not purchased. The guide explains how cookies, tracking pixels, email engagement, and mobile device IDs supply advertising platforms with behavioral data for follow-up campaigns. It recommends segmenting audiences by actions, tailoring creative and offers, maintaining consistent messaging, applying frequency caps, and using burn pixels to exclude purchasers across display, social, search, email, video, and mobile channels. It also covers measurement, privacy-aware first-party and cookieless approaches, AI-driven personalization, and coordination with other touchpoints, while describing Brandwatch tools for audience insights, segmentation, analytics, and integrations. The conclusion positions retargeting as part of a broader, regularly optimized marketing strategy.


### [Introducing the SOP-driven LLM agent frameworks](https://yomu.fyi/post/introducing-the-sop-driven-llm-agent-frameworks.md)
- Company: [Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab.md)
- Author: Fujiao Liu
- Published: Apr 25, 2025
- Type: Announcement

Grab introduces an LLM agent framework that uses Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) to guide enterprise automation and improve consistency in complex processes. It represents SOPs as trees of action and decision nodes, while a planner uses Depth-First Search, prompt generation, and backtracking to direct an LLM-powered worker agent; context compression and limited APIs are used to address hallucination and efficiency concerns. An SOP editor, plugins for APIs, Python, and SQL, workflows, a GRAG pipeline, playground, multilingual user agent, and state stack extend the framework’s capabilities. Reported evaluations include over 99.8% accuracy, an Account Takeover Investigations bot automating 87% of cases and reducing investigation time from 23 minutes to three, and fraud investigations cutting AHT by 45% and saving over 300 man-hours monthly.


### [Mobile Bridge: Making WebViews Feel Native](https://yomu.fyi/post/mobile-bridge-making-webviews-feel-native.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Apr 25, 2025
- Type: Problem & solution

Shopify’s mobile app has about 600 screens, but building every non-critical screen natively or in React Native was costly and slowed development, while conventional WebViews felt slow, disconnected, and out of place. Mobile Bridge addresses this hybrid-app problem with native iOS and Android modules that preload, authenticate, cache, and reuse WebViews, reducing P75 load time from 6 seconds to 1.4 seconds, including network latency and rendering. Built on @remote-ui/rpc, the framework uses JavaScript, CSS, Polaris overrides, title and action APIs, TransportableView, snapshots, and native modal transitions to preserve state and align web screens with native navigation and appearance. WebViews can also invoke native features such as date pickers, barcode scanning, and Add to Wallet; Shopify says the standalone library is being adopted across other products while critical features remain native or React Native.


### [Astronomy Geek to Oktanaut: Landing as a Dev Advocate at Okta](https://yomu.fyi/post/astronomy-geek-to-oktanaut-landing-as-a-dev-advocate-at-okta.md)
- Company: [Okta](https://yomu.fyi/company/okta.md)
- Author: Akanksha Bhasin
- Published: Apr 21, 2025
- Type: Announcement

Akanksha Bhasin joins Okta as an “Oktanaut” in Developer Relations after more than six years building developer communities and four years focused on Developer Relations. Her path began with experiments in Arduino, programming, and AI applications, then shifted toward Voice AI after Google Assistant launched in 2018; she built applications for Google Assistant and Alexa and was later featured at Google I/O. She taught these technologies at meetups and colleges across India, founded Women in Voice, India, led Google Developer Groups, and helped organize events including DevFests that gathered more than 3,000 developers. At Okta, she wants to help independent software vendors and developers secure user identities, treating identity security and access management as foundational to enterprise applications rather than a checklist item.


### [Optimizing Stripe API performance in Lambda with caching strategies](https://yomu.fyi/post/optimizing-stripe-api-performance-in-lambda-with-caching-strategies.md)
- Company: [Stripe](https://yomu.fyi/company/stripe.md)
- Author: James Beswick
- Published: Apr 21, 2025
- Type: Problem & solution

The post addresses performance, cost, latency, and rate-limiting challenges that arise when applications make high-volume requests to Stripe's API from AWS Lambda. It presents a two-level cache using ElastiCache for Redis as the first layer and DynamoDB as the durable second layer, with Lambda coordinating cache reads, Stripe retrieval, and writes. On a miss, the function checks Redis, then DynamoDB, fetches the customer from Stripe if necessary, and stores the response in both layers with one-hour Redis and 24-hour DynamoDB TTLs. The DynamoDB design uses composite keys, a GSI for cache-type and timestamp queries, TTL cleanup, and environment-specific capacity settings; the post also discusses Redis connection pooling, Lambda sizing, capacity planning, cost control, monitoring, and webhook-based invalidation.


### [How to Add the Moesif API Observability Add-On to Your Heroku Applications](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-to-add-the-moesif-api-observability-add-on-to-your-heroku-applicat.md)
- Company: [Heroku](https://yomu.fyi/company/heroku.md)
- Author: Matt Tanner
- Published: Apr 16, 2025
- Type: Tutorial

Heroku applications can add the Moesif API Observability add-on to analyze API traffic and support monetization. The setup uses either the Heroku CLI or Dashboard: the CLI command is heroku addons:create moesif, while the UI path goes through Resources, Find more add-ons, and Metrics and Analytics. Provisioning creates a MOESIF\_APPLICATION\_ID config variable, and the application then requires the Moesif SDK initialized with that value. The guide also covers copying the variable into a local .env file with Heroku Local and excluding that file from Git through .gitignore. Once configured, API events should flow into Moesif for live logs, time-series metrics, funnels, retention, alerting, and billing features, while Heroku handles add-on billing and user management.


### [Evaluating performance impact of removing Redis-cache from a Scylla-backed service](https://yomu.fyi/post/evaluating-performance-impact-of-removing-redis-cache-from-a-scylla-ba.md)
- Company: [Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab.md)
- Author: Md Riyadh
- Published: Apr 11, 2025
- Type: Problem & solution

A Rust service at Grab serves tens of thousands of peak QPS for batched count requests, using Scylla, Redis, and MySQL counter configurations. Its 15-minute cache-key truncation and five-minute TTL caused cache-hit declines and recurring Scylla QPS spikes at the end of each quarter-hour, when recent-data requests generated new keys. The experiment progressively disabled Redis, while a daily major compaction job was added to Scylla nodes; the service continued combining minutely, hourly, and daily tables for range calculations. With Redis fully decommissioned, Scylla cache hits rose from about 30% to 70% of reads, cache misses stayed about the same despite doubled traffic, peak CPU moved from roughly 50% to 52%, and overall service performance was maintained while eliminating a component responsible for about 25% of service cost.


### [30 Minutes With MCP and flyctl](https://yomu.fyi/post/30-minutes-with-mcp-and-flyctl.md)
- Company: [Fly.io](https://yomu.fyi/company/fly-io.md)
- Published: Apr 10, 2025
- Type: Explainer

Kurt Mackey describes building a minimal MCP server for flyctl in 30 minutes, motivated by testing how an LLM could inspect deployed applications. MCP connects an LLM client to server-exported tools through JSON exchanges; this implementation uses stdio mode, a Go MCP library, and exposes only fly logs and fly status, producing roughly 90 lines of code. Existing JSON modes in flyctl commands made the tools easier to drive from automation. When pointed at unpkg through Claude, the server surfaced a globally distributed deployment, identified two critical machines, and connected repeated restarts and oom\_killed events to Bun using about 3.7 GB of a machine’s 4 GB allocation. The post calls the result surprisingly useful while warning that local MCP servers give cloud-hosted Claude access to native programs and would be safer in isolation.


### [Because nobody likes being charged twice](https://yomu.fyi/post/because-nobody-likes-being-charged-twice.md)
- Company: [Stripe](https://yomu.fyi/company/stripe.md)
- Author: Ben Smith
- Published: Apr 10, 2025
- Type: Problem & solution

Payment workflows can produce duplicate charges when a customer retries after a connection drop while the backend is still retrying the original request. The post frames network timeouts, crashes, database locks, downstream errors, and user interruptions as normal distributed-systems failures that can leave payment state uncertain. It recommends generating a unique idempotency key for one specific action, sending it with the Stripe request, and reusing it on every retry; Stripe recognizes the key for 24 hours and returns the original response. It also recommends placing payment jobs in a queue such as Amazon SQS, where workers retry failures and route repeatedly failing messages to a dead-letter queue. Together, queues preserve work during temporary outages and idempotency makes retries safe, while careful key scope and timing avoid stale or cross-operation behavior.


### [eBay Reduces the Time to List on Mobile With New Simplified Selling Tool, Now Featuring Magical Listing AI Technology](https://yomu.fyi/post/ebay-reduces-the-time-to-list-on-mobile-with-new-simplified-selling-to.md)
- Company: [Ebay](https://yomu.fyi/company/ebay.md)
- Author: eBay News Team
- Published: Apr 9, 2025
- Type: Announcement

eBay has introduced a simplified, mobile-friendly listing flow that integrates its “magical listing” AI technology to reduce the effort required to create high-quality listings. Sellers start with photos and a title, while AI uses image matching and inference to suggest item specifics and categories through guided pages where sellers can review and approve the content. Early testing in the U.K. found a 50% reduction in total listing steps and faster listing times, while eBay says item-specific accuracy will continue improving through updates made during the year. The tool is available in the eBay mobile app for private sellers across all categories in the U.S., U.K., and Germany, and eBay plans to expand it to sellers using business tools.


### [Our Best Customers Are Now Robots](https://yomu.fyi/post/our-best-customers-are-now-robots.md)
- Company: [Fly.io](https://yomu.fyi/company/fly-io.md)
- Published: Apr 8, 2025
- Type: Explainer

Fly.io reports that users driving the platform’s most recent growth are robots rather than people, prompting a reconsideration of developer experience (DX) as the primary product lens. The post describes how vibe-coding workflows use Fly Machines—Docker containers running as hardware-isolated virtual machines—to create, modify, stop, and rapidly restart environments without paying during stopped periods. These workflows favor incremental filesystem state, object storage, and controllable routing for MCP connections, including potentially long-lived SSE connections that should reach the same stateful instance. Fly.io also proposes exposing its API through MCP and using sealed, tokenized secrets so isolated machines can substitute real OAuth credentials only when needed. It concludes that a useful robot experience (RX) will require more than an MCP interface, while managed Postgres remains the company’s most important engineering priority and the platform is still primarily designed for humans.


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