---
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

### [Unveiling the process: The creation of our powerful campaign builder](https://yomu.fyi/post/unveiling-the-process-the-creation-of-our-powerful-campaign-builder.md)
- Company: [Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab.md)
- Author: Jie Zhang
- Published: Sep 10, 2024
- Type: Explainer

Grab details the event processing architecture behind Trident, its internal marketing campaign platform that evaluates If This, Then That (IFTTT) logic over Kafka streams. The core processing unit is a treatment consisting of an event, optional conditions, and actions. Complex campaign capabilities—such as counters, limits, and delays across multiple hours via recursive SQS message scheduling—are assembled from multiple coordinated treatments. To simplify campaign creation, Grab introduced a flowchart-like visual builder represented as a JSON node tree that compiles recursively into treatments while persisting node-to-treatment mappings to reconcile edits over time.


### [Tinder API Style Guide — Part 1](https://yomu.fyi/post/tinder-api-style-guide-part-1.md)
- Company: [Tinder](https://yomu.fyi/company/tinder.md)
- Author: Tinder
- Published: Sep 6, 2024
- Type: Explainer

Tinder’s rapid growth and expansion into domain-centric teams produced inconsistent API practices across services, including mixed error conventions, fragmented schemas, uneven versioning, unclear URIs, and weak API contracts. Part 1 presents standards for the RESTful APIs used across the platform, beginning with the URI pattern https://service-mesh-host-name/\[version\]/\[service-name\]/\[resource\]/\[sub-resource\] and guidance on concise, plural, kebab-cased paths. It defines path-prefix versioning, retaining the previous version until clients migrate and creating new versions only for breaking changes such as removing fields, changing types, or renaming fields. The guide also covers HTTP methods, standard and custom request headers, the X-Tinder- naming convention, and request tracing through MDC-populated identifiers and centralized logging. Request and response bodies, status codes, and enforcement tools are reserved for Part 2.


### [Elevate Access Token Security by Demonstrating Proof](https://yomu.fyi/post/elevate-access-token-security-by-demonstrating-proof.md)
- Company: [Okta](https://yomu.fyi/company/okta.md)
- Author: Alisa Duncan
- Published: Sep 5, 2024
- Type: Tutorial

Bearer access tokens let anyone holding a valid token call a resource server, creating risk when tokens are stolen. Existing protections include secure coding, short expiration, and origin restrictions, but the post presents OAuth 2.0 Demonstrating Proof of Possession (DPoP) as a way to bind tokens to client-generated cryptographic proof. The client creates a JWT containing request details, issue time, unique identifier, and public key; the authorization server uses it to bind a key hash and request information to the returned token. For sensitive requests, authorization or resource servers can require a nonce, prompting a new proof and limiting lifetime and replay risk. Resource servers must validate both proof and access token properties, with a vetted OAuth library recommended.


### [Advanced error handling patterns for Stripe enterprise developers](https://yomu.fyi/post/advanced-error-handling-patterns-for-stripe-enterprise-developers.md)
- Company: [Stripe](https://yomu.fyi/company/stripe.md)
- Author: Ben Smith
- Published: Sep 3, 2024
- Type: Tutorial

The post presents advanced error-handling patterns for Stripe integrations that face high request volumes, temporary API slowdowns, connectivity problems, and webhook delivery failures. It uses Stripe Workbench to inspect account-level API activity, traffic spikes, error rates, API versions, and webhook activity; one example links a 429 response to a scheduled job that created usage records across thousands of accounts simultaneously. The implementation combines request spacing with Limiter, a p-queue concurrency cap of five, and a token bucket configured for 100 tokens per 60 seconds. Stripe’s stated limits are 100 read and 100 write operations per second in live mode and 25 of each in test mode, with stricter limits for some resources. The reported before-and-after results show the combined controls processing high API-call volume within those limits, reducing errors and producing more predictable interaction.


### [Simple error handling strategies with Stripe Workbench](https://yomu.fyi/post/simple-error-handling-strategies-with-stripe-workbench.md)
- Company: [Stripe](https://yomu.fyi/company/stripe.md)
- Author: Ben Smith
- Published: Sep 2, 2024
- Type: Tutorial

Stripe Workbench addresses the difficulty of finding and understanding errors produced by Stripe API invocations. It gives developers a view of recent errors, groups repeated failures, shows their frequency, and links summaries to request logs and actionable resolution guidance. The article describes Stripe error categories such as StripeCardError, StripeInvalidRequestError, and StripeConnectionError, then demonstrates Node.js try/catch handling that branches on the error type. It also covers webhook responses for payment\_intent.payment\_failed events, including retrieving event.data.object.last\_payment\_error, and explains how objects such as PaymentIntents, Setup Intents, Invoices, Setup Attempts, Payouts, and Refunds retain failure information for later inspection. Combined, these mechanisms support targeted responses, troubleshooting through detailed request and response data, and more reliable Stripe integrations.


### [Iterating with shadow workspaces](https://yomu.fyi/post/iterating-with-shadow-workspaces.md)
- Company: [Cursor](https://yomu.fyi/company/cursor.md)
- Author: Arvid Lunnemark
- Published: Sep 1, 2024
- Type: Explainer

Cursor’s shadow workspace addresses the problem of letting AI agents iterate on code without disrupting a developer’s active workspace. The design prioritizes LSP usability—especially lints, definition navigation, and language-server interaction—while also requiring independence, privacy, concurrency, universality, maintainability, and speed. A copied in-memory TextModel was rejected because sharing the user’s language server could introduce copied files into references, duplicate declarations, or miss errors. The implemented approach uses a reusable hidden Electron window for the workspace, routing AI edits through Cursor’s processes and returning lints independently of the visible editor. The post treats runnability as a harder future extension, with folder-proxy designs, platform limitations, and network-level independence still open questions.


### [Stripe Developer Digest (August 2024): Workbench is now available to everyone](https://yomu.fyi/post/stripe-developer-digest-august-2024-workbench-is-now-available-to-ever.md)
- Company: [Stripe](https://yomu.fyi/company/stripe.md)
- Author: Stripe Team
- Published: Aug 30, 2024
- Type: Announcement

Stripe’s August 2024 developer update announces that Workbench is available to everyone across every Dashboard surface, addressing developers’ request for in-context guidance and debugging tools during API integration work. Workbench is a developer home in the Dashboard that provides an at-a-glance view of integration behavior, lets users inspect API and event history, prototype integrations, and receive critical account alerts. As developers build, it highlights errors, helps resolve them, and recommends ways to improve integration efficiency; it can be opened with a single keystroke. The update also places Sandboxes and Event Destinations in public beta, expands Tap to Pay on iPhone with Stripe to seven countries, and notes community resources for Stripe Tax, the Stripe CLI, Payment Links, and related integrations.


### [Bringing your Stripe objects to life with Workbench](https://yomu.fyi/post/bringing-your-stripe-objects-to-life-with-workbench.md)
- Company: [Stripe](https://yomu.fyi/company/stripe.md)
- Author: Ben Smith
- Published: Aug 29, 2024
- Type: Tutorial

The post demonstrates how Stripe Workbench’s Inspector can be used to examine a PaymentIntent throughout its lifecycle and diagnose payment workflow issues. It maps states including requires\_payment\_method, processing, requires\_action, succeeded, and canceled, showing how the status property changes as inputs and decisions move the object through a state machine. The walkthrough creates and confirms test PaymentIntents with Stripe Shell commands, including a 3DS-required card that produces a requires\_action state and a use\_stripe\_sdk next\_action. It also describes reacting to state changes through webhook endpoints or Amazon EventBridge, using the Inspector to identify friction such as PaymentIntents stalled at requires\_action and to debug abandoned payments.


### [Debugging your Stripe Invoicing integration with Workbench](https://yomu.fyi/post/debugging-your-stripe-invoicing-integration-with-workbench.md)
- Company: [Stripe](https://yomu.fyi/company/stripe.md)
- Author: David Edoh-Bedi
- Published: Aug 29, 2024
- Type: Tutorial

The post demonstrates how to debug and fix Stripe Invoicing integration errors with Workbench, a context-aware tool available throughout the Stripe Dashboard. It uses the Overview and Errors tabs to locate a recent parameter\_missing error, then examines the failed Invoice create request and identifies the missing Customer object that prevented invoice creation. The Shell and API Explorer let developers list customers, supply a Customer ID, construct and run the corrected create command, and generate an SDK request from the configured fields. Workbench’s Inspector then exposes the invoice’s JSON data map, logs, and lifecycle events; the example confirms successful payment for a zero-dollar invoice and explains that non-zero charges require Invoice Items tied to products and prices.


### [The Complete Social Media Content Plan Guide](https://yomu.fyi/post/the-complete-social-media-content-plan-guide.md)
- Company: [Brandwatch](https://yomu.fyi/company/brandwatch.md)
- Author: Gemma Joyce
- Published: Aug 27, 2024
- Type: Tutorial

The guide presents social media content planning as a focused process for choosing channels, understanding audiences, setting goals, and organizing content around a brand’s marketing objectives. It recommends auditing existing activity, comparing competitors, and examining demographics, interests, pain points, engagement, followers, and conversions before deciding where improvement is needed. The proposed strategy combines channel-specific planning with varied content, including evergreen, educational, visual, video, livestream, poll, quiz, and user-generated material, while emphasizing permission and credit for UGC. A content calendar, planning or management tools, analytics, hashtag research, and direct audience interaction support execution and measurement. The guide concludes that continuous testing, schedule adjustments, trend monitoring, and regular updates keep the approach responsive as audience preferences and the brand evolve.


### [Chimera Sandbox: A scalable experimentation and development platform for Notebook services](https://yomu.fyi/post/chimera-sandbox-a-scalable-experimentation-and-development-platform-fo.md)
- Company: [Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab.md)
- Author: Arkar Min Aung
- Published: Aug 27, 2024
- Type: Announcement

Grab's Chimera team built Chimera Sandbox to address resource accessibility challenges and enable rapid machine learning experimentation across technical and non-technical teams. The platform runs on multi-cluster Kubernetes infrastructure capable of scaling to thousands of nodes per cluster during peak loads. Users can provision customizable Docker environments with varying CPU and GPU configurations, collaborate in real time, and query data using Spark-on-Kubernetes integrations and helper magic cells. The workspace integrates with Grab's AI Gateway for LLM access alongside tools like MLflow, Optuna, RStudio, and LabelStudio on shared storage, backed by user-level cost attribution.


### [Peeking under the hood of Stripe Invoicing](https://yomu.fyi/post/peeking-under-the-hood-of-stripe-invoicing.md)
- Company: [Stripe](https://yomu.fyi/company/stripe.md)
- Author: David Edoh-Bedi
- Published: Aug 26, 2024
- Type: Tutorial

Stripe Invoicing’s no-code workflow hides the API calls and invoice state transitions that developers may need to inspect when debugging payment failures. Using Stripe Workbench’s Inspector, Logs, and Events tabs, the walkthrough maps object hierarchies, requests, event payloads, and previous\_attributes across an invoice lifecycle. Creating an invoice in the Dashboard produces a draft Invoice, a separate Invoice Item, an automatically generated Invoice Line Item, and related creation or update events. Sending it creates a Payment Intent and finalizes the invoice from draft to open; charging captures the Payment Intent, creates a Charge, and changes the invoice to paid. Draft invoices can be deleted, while open invoices can be voided, preserving the record and canceling the Payment Intent, and the same Workbench method can be applied to other Stripe API areas.


### [Tophat: Crafting a Delightful Mobile Developer Experience](https://yomu.fyi/post/tophat-crafting-a-delightful-mobile-developer-experience.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Aug 23, 2024
- Type: Problem & solution

Shopify built Tophat to reduce the time and friction involved in manually testing mobile pull requests, where switching branches, stashing changes, and waiting for Xcode or Android Studio builds slowed review. The macOS menu-bar application links GitHub pull requests to iOS and Android artifacts produced by CI and stored in Google Cloud Storage, allowing contributors to install builds on simulators or real devices with one click. Tophat parallelizes tasks such as downloading applications and booting devices, and its Quick Launch feature retrieves builds with up-to-date native code for React Native development. The project also addressed real-device iOS installation and signing challenges, integrated with Shipit Mobile, and provided automated setup guidance. After the latest improvements, daily usage doubled, and Tophat was later made open source.


### [Observing immediate versus delayed payments with Stripe Workbench](https://yomu.fyi/post/observing-immediate-versus-delayed-payments-with-stripe-workbench.md)
- Company: [Stripe](https://yomu.fyi/company/stripe.md)
- Author: Cecil Phillip
- Published: Aug 23, 2024
- Type: Tutorial

Stripe payment methods differ in how quickly they confirm attempted payments, with cards reporting status immediately and bank debits, bank transfers, and cash-based vouchers requiring additional processing time. The post uses Stripe Workbench and its in-browser CLI shell to create Checkout sessions in test mode, submit card and ACH Direct Debit payments, and inspect emitted events. For cards, charge.succeeded and payment\_intent.succeeded signal successful payment, while integration code must inspect checkout.session.completed payment\_status rather than confuse it with the session status. With delayed methods, checkout.session.completed can show unpaid before checkout.session.async\_payment\_succeeded or checkout.session.async\_payment\_failed arrives; the former changes payment\_status to paid, and production processing can take days.


### [Series A and Magic](https://yomu.fyi/post/series-a-and-magic.md)
- Company: [Cursor](https://yomu.fyi/company/cursor.md)
- Author: Cursor
- Published: Aug 22, 2024
- Type: Announcement

Cursor announces milestones in its effort to change software development with AI, describing a shift from slow, cumbersome building and modification toward greater lightness and control. The company says its tool replaces searches for primitives with instant answers, turns mechanical refactors into single “tabs,” expands terse directives into working source, and applies thousand-line changes in seconds. It reports more than 40,000 customers and an initial team that has built SOTA next-edit-prediction models, multi-billion-file retrieval systems, and fast code rewrites using speculative inference. The announcement also says Cursor raised $60m in Series A funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital, OpenAI, Jeff Dean, Noam Brown, founders of Stripe, GitHub, Ramp, Perplexity, and OpenAI, and others, while inviting people excited about coding’s future to consider joining the company.


### [What is Data Residency? Data Residency Concerns for Global Applications](https://yomu.fyi/post/what-is-data-residency-data-residency-concerns-for-global-applications.md)
- Company: [Heroku](https://yomu.fyi/company/heroku.md)
- Author: Ethan Limchayseng
- Published: Aug 22, 2024
- Type: Explainer

Global applications can move customer data across borders, making data residency a compliance concern for organizations serving multinational users. The post defines data residency as legal requirements governing where data may be stored and processed, then distinguishes it from data sovereignty’s jurisdictional reach and data localization’s requirement that storage and processing remain within a jurisdiction. It notes that GDPR and CCPA focus on compliant handling and individual rights rather than necessarily mandating storage locations, while China’s Personal Information Protection Law requires certain Chinese citizens’ PII to be stored within China. The proposed approach uses cloud regions to align storage with local requirements, citing Heroku Enterprise Private Dynos across ten regions and Heroku Shield Private Spaces’ PCI, HIPAA, ISO, and SOC certifications; the post concludes that these features can make compliance more achievable while improving control and potentially application performance.


### [Accident Forgiveness](https://yomu.fyi/post/accident-forgiveness.md)
- Company: [Fly.io](https://yomu.fyi/company/fly-io.md)
- Published: Aug 21, 2024
- Type: Announcement

Public cloud billing can turn accidental deployments, configuration errors, runaway VM allocation, or leaked CI/CD environments into unexpectedly enormous charges, making teams hesitant to experiment. Fly.io announces an initial “Accident Forgiveness” policy: customers with any support contract can request refunds for unexpected charges, almost without questions, while the company reserves the right to cut off abuse. The longer-term goal is an automated billing system with line-item vetoes, but fraud—especially cryptocurrency mining—requires an incremental rollout; the first version uses manual follow-up reminders to investigate incidents. A rebuilt billing system is intended to support future accident protection, including detecting month-over-month spikes, flagging unusual deployments before billing, and identifying opportunities for reserved pricing and backdated reservations.


### [Approaches to keep sending OTP over SMS... for now](https://yomu.fyi/post/approaches-to-keep-sending-otp-over-sms-for-now.md)
- Company: [Okta](https://yomu.fyi/company/okta.md)
- Author: Maurice Sharp
- Published: Aug 15, 2024
- Type: Explainer

SMS and voice OTPs remain broadly applicable for identity verification, but the post argues they should eventually be replaced because SIM swapping, phishing, uncontrolled secret-delivery channels, device-linking gaps, and slower logins weaken them. Until then, Okta will require organizations to bring their own telephony provider, using a telephony inline hook to send codes and report outcomes. The implementation can be built in-house, outsourced, or delegated to a managed service, with regional regulations, traffic peaks, reliability, branding, security, and available resources shaping the choice. A hook has three seconds to return success or failure before Okta’s heavily rate-limited failover sends the message; teams must also secure endpoints and API keys, monitor logs, and handle vendor or delivery failures.


### [Building an Event-Driven Architecture with Managed Data Services](https://yomu.fyi/post/building-an-event-driven-architecture-with-managed-data-services.md)
- Company: [Heroku](https://yomu.fyi/company/heroku.md)
- Author: Jonathan Brown
- Published: Aug 15, 2024
- Type: Explainer

Event-driven architecture (EDA) addresses the need to process and respond to continuous streams of real-time activity from applications, e-commerce systems, wearables, and other IoT sensors. Using Apache Kafka, independent producers publish events to topics while consumers subscribe and trigger downstream processes, keeping services decoupled and independently scalable. Kafka also distributes large data streams in real time and replicates data across synchronized broker nodes, so a node failure does not lose data or interrupt operation. Apache Kafka on Heroku is presented as a fully managed service, with multi-tenant basic and single-tenant private plans, automatic broker scaling, and Standard-tier-and-above configurations starting with three brokers and extending to eight. Recommended integration practices include mapping producer-consumer flows, using transactions, topic and schema management, and delivery guarantees, plus monitoring performance and logging Kafka operations.


### [We're Cutting L40S Prices In Half](https://yomu.fyi/post/we-re-cutting-l40s-prices-in-half.md)
- Company: [Fly.io](https://yomu.fyi/company/fly-io.md)
- Published: Aug 15, 2024
- Type: Announcement

Fly.io lowered the hourly price of NVIDIA L40S GPUs to $1.25, making them available at the same price as A10s after customer data showed that A10s—not the more powerful cards—were its most popular GPU. The post argues that most users adding GPUs to fast networks are running inference rather than training, making networking, memory, object storage, and request latency more important than access to an H100. The L40S is described as an AI-optimized L40 with AI compute performance comparable to an A100, while the L40 retains graphics hardware and is designed for rack use with more memory and lower energy consumption than gaming GPUs. The intended combination places model parameters, datasets, and compute near one another on Fly.io’s Anycast network and Tigris object storage. Examples include Llama 3.1 70B, Flux, Whisper, SegAlign, and DOOM Eternal.


[Newer posts](https://yomu.fyi/posts/page/185.md) · [Older posts](https://yomu.fyi/posts/page/187.md)