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How Kafka Connect helps move data seamlessly
Grab's real-time data platform team, Coban, implemented a managed Kafka Connect ecosystem on Kubernetes to streamline moving data in and out of Apache Kafka. To resolve dual-write consistency issues and capture pre- and post-change data, the team integrated Debezium connectors to capture MySQL binlog events and accommodate database DDL migrations. For disaster recovery and stream migrations, Coban deployed MirrorMaker2 connectors managed via Terraform to handle message mirroring and consumer offset translation across AWS regions. Additionally, they developed a custom converter utilizing Confluent Schema Registry to transform Protobuf-serialized Kafka records into JSON for ingestion into Azure Event Hubs. This architecture enabled zero-downtime cluster migrations and robust cross-region disaster recovery.
The Magic of Merlin: Shopify's New Machine Learning Platform
Shopify’s machine learning platform team redesigned its infrastructure to accommodate varied use cases, dependencies, data types, integrations, and production requirements. Merlin uses an open-source stack in which on-demand Merlin Workspaces run as short-lived Ray clusters on Kubernetes, while projects isolate code and dependencies in Docker-based environments. Its first iteration focuses on training and batch inference, with users moving from local or Jupyter-based prototypes to automated production workflows through the Merlin API, Airflow, or Oozie. Shopify validated the platform by migrating its product categorization workflows, using Ray Train for distributed TensorFlow training and Ray ActorPool for batch inference; planned extensions include online inference, model lifecycle management, and machine learning monitoring.
~Don't~ Repeat Yourself
Hugging Face's Transformers library intentionally departs from the traditional "Don't repeat yourself" (DRY) software design principle by adopting a single model file policy. This architecture places all code required for a model's forward pass into a dedicated file, avoiding centralized shared modules for components like attention mechanisms. Because machine learning research evolves rapidly and published model architectures remain static, isolating code protects individual models from breaking changes and lowers contribution barriers for the open-source community. To maintain consistency without manually syncing duplicated code across successor models, the library uses automated tooling driven by Copied from comments. While this approach complicates unified API enforcement and component-wide research integration, Transformers validates API consistency by running approximately 20,000 automated tests daily.
Hackathon: Bring the Func(🕺)
Following the conclusion of its fourth Launch Week, Supabase announced the ten-day community hackathon titled Bring the Func, running through April 10th. The competition highlights newly released platform capabilities, establishing primary prize tracks dedicated to Supabase Edge Functions and GraphQL projects powered by pg_graphql. Participants can compete individually or in teams of up to five people, provided all design and code assets are built during the event and published as open-source repositories. Submissions require linking a repository detailing architecture, hosted demos, and Supabase feature usage across storage, authentication, realtime, or database access layers. Alongside category prizes and community swag, Supabase partnered with the Future Forest Company to plant a tree and issue a certificate for every completed project entry.
Supabase Realtime, with Multiplayer Features
Supabase announced the third major release of Supabase Realtime, evolving the system from a single-tenant PostgreSQL change listener into a multi-tenant, distributed real-time platform. Built using Elixir and the Phoenix framework across a distributed node cluster, the new architecture decouples the database listener into an extension model and opens generic WebSocket functionality. New multiplayer capabilities include Presence, which uses Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) to track user connection states, and Broadcast, which distributes ephemeral messages across topics without writing to disk. The modular extension design allows listening to multiple PostgreSQL instances, external systems like MySQL, and financial or blockchain feeds, as demonstrated on a globally distributed 20-node cluster.
Supabrew - Never Code Thirsty
Supabase presented SupaBrew, a mock non-alcoholic beverage engineered specifically to address developer thirst during extended coding sessions and large pull request reviews. Developed following a survey of 80,000 registered developers, the recipe relies entirely on three ingredients consisting of barley, hops, and water in strict adherence to German beer purity laws. The mock packaging design features bottles manufactured from recycled cathode-ray tube monitors and labels repurposed from leftover Ubuntu conference stickers. The fictitious rollout introduces tiered pricing models, including free access for indie developers, Pay-as-you-Drink consumption billing, and dedicated enterprise tiers. Supabase concluded the announcement by confirming that the product release is an April Fools joke.
Supporting large campaigns at scale
Grab developed a batch job service within its Trident automation engine to execute multi-step marketing campaigns for millions of users simultaneously. The system replaces sequential, single-server execution with a distributed architecture powered by Apache Kafka, which distributes batches of 100 users across server clusters using hashed partition keys. To reduce network overhead and queries per second, downstream reward and messaging services introduced batch endpoints backed by bulk database queries, decreasing API latency by up to 85%. Grab further optimized performance by sharding Kafka topics by country and action type to prevent long-running reward tasks from blocking time-sensitive messaging workloads. Additionally, making terminal messaging calls asynchronous allows subsequent batch processing to proceed without waiting for message delivery confirmations.
Edge Functions are now available in Supabase
Supabase launched Edge Functions to execute TypeScript code close to end-users across more than 30 data centers. Built on the secure-by-default Deno runtime and hosted via Deno Deploy, the feature offers fast start-ups, scale-to-zero pricing, and native support for npm modules and Node built-in APIs. Incoming requests first reach an API gateway called Relay, which authenticates JSON Web Tokens, handles rate-limiting, and forwards requests using a Deployment ID to Deno Deploy. Observability is handled through Logflare to feed structured logs and metrics directly into the Supabase Dashboard. To mitigate abuse risks experienced during earlier product rollouts, invocations are currently limited to POST requests rather than general website hosting.
Best-in-Class Developer Experience with Vite and Hydrogen
Hydrogen, Shopify’s framework for custom React storefronts, chooses Vite to improve developer experience while targeting performance for end users and evergreen browsers. Traditional bundling with tools such as Webpack can become complex and slow during development because each change may require processing more project files; Vite instead serves user code through native ES Modules, while pre-bundling and caching third-party dependencies. Vite combines an HMR development server with sensible defaults, ESBuild compilation, Rollup’s plugin system, CommonJS-to-ESM conversion, and SSR support, including transformations that differ between browser and server environments. Hydrogen integrates Vite through four plugins covering Hydrogen configuration, React Server Components, SSR and RSC middleware, and React fast refresh, enabling server components, streaming requests, and caching; the text concludes that Vite is a suitable choice, while acknowledging Webpack remains appropriate for some advanced use cases.
Introducing Supabase Enterprise
Supabase announced the launch of its Enterprise Plan alongside new features integrated across existing tiers. The Pro Plan now merges pay-as-you-go billing with a default twenty-five dollar monthly spend cap, and users gain access to self-serve database add-ons for on-demand scaling. A new Log Explorer powered by the Logflare acquisition allows querying logs directly with SQL, providing ninety days of retention on the Enterprise tier. Dedicated enterprise capabilities include Point-in-Time Recovery powered by the open-source tool WAL-G, custom Prometheus scraping endpoints for observability, and guaranteed support service level agreements. Additionally, Supabase achieved SOC2 Type 1 compliance and introduced Elixir Livebooks to monitor PgBouncer connection pools.
GraphQL is now available in Supabase
Supabase announced the general availability of GraphQL support on its platform via pg_graphql, an open-source PostgreSQL extension that reflects SQL schemas into GraphQL types, fields, and relationships. Accessible through SQL functions or HTTP endpoints, the extension enforces PostgreSQL row-level security and filters introspection schemas according to the SQL roles assigned to request JWTs. To optimize performance, pg_graphql transpiles every GraphQL query into a single SQL query that aggregates results into JSON, avoiding the N+1 query problem and eliminating redundant join data payloads. Transpiled queries are cached as prepared statements to bypass planning overhead, and all generated mutations and queries support bulk operations. On Supabase Free Plan hardware, these optimizations achieve mean throughputs of 377.4 requests per second over the API and 656.2 queries per second over SQL connections.
A Foolish Consistency: Consul at Fly.io
Fly.io’s global application platform uses Consul as a service-discovery catalog, but the post argues that a single globally consistent store is a poor fit for every part of the system. Consul Servers run Raft, while lightweight agents register events; fly-proxy consumes generated JSON describing service instances, and separate data tracks network distance. Because load and health are volatile, Fly.io moved load gossip to NATS and lets fly-proxy generate and distribute health hints, while Consul remains useful for orchestration and status. Strong consistency remains important for DNS, where stale or missing addresses can break ordinary applications; the proposed remedy is optional internal Anycast, routing internal traffic through fly-proxy. The conclusion is qualified: Consul is easy to deploy and valuable for infrastructure configuration, but Fly.io’s trajectory is away from using it as the backing store for a global app platform.
10 Books Shopify’s Tech Talent Think You Should Read
Shopify presents ten books recommended by its developers and engineers for people working in technology, spanning technical foundations, software design, learning habits, feedback, leadership, documentation, and focus. The recommendations were gathered from ten technical employees, while Shopify says its book bar stocks favorite titles and makes requested copies available to employees. Several entries address software systems directly: The Elements of Computing Systems guides readers through hardware, assembly language, programming languages, and operating systems, while A Philosophy of Software Design examines managing complexity and distinguishing tactical from strategic coding. Other selections argue for deep practice, smarter questioning, effective feedback reception, incremental knowledge transmission, decentralized leadership, critical reflection on the technology industry, and uninterrupted work blocks, with the contributors describing how particular books changed their studying, systems thinking, or approach to growth.
Community Day
Supabase initiated its Launch Week with Community Day, announcing a series of ecosystem updates, security integrations, and open-source contributions. Through a partnership with GitHub, secret scanning now detects exposed Supabase service role API keys and automatically revokes them to prevent unauthorized database access. The pre-release of PostgREST version 10 introduces arrow operator queries for composite types and array elements, structured PostgreSQL-compliant error messages, and automated recovery from Linux EMFILE conditions. Authentication features expanded with four community-contributed OAuth providers, two phone providers, email one-time passwords via verifyOTP, and framework-specific supabase-auth-helpers starting with Next.js and Nuxt. Finally, Supabase launched a partner gallery powered by Postgres Full Text Search alongside educational courses and an upcoming ten-day virtual hackathon.
Introducing Decision Transformers on Hugging Face 🤗
Hugging Face has integrated the Decision Transformer architecture into its transformers library and Hub, expanding support for offline reinforcement learning. Unlike standard reinforcement learning methods that maximize returns by learning value functions or policies through active environment interaction, Decision Transformers model trajectories as conditional sequence problems. The model feeds past states, actions, and target returns-to-go over a context window into a GPT-2 autoregressive backbone to generate future actions. Evaluating pre-trained continuous control checkpoints requires standardizing observations with training set statistics and iteratively updating the target return based on received rewards. This sequence modeling paradigm enables practitioners to adjust agent behaviors and skill levels directly by specifying different target returns at runtime.
Should I Open Source my Company?
Software founders often hesitate to make their companies open source due to concerns regarding code scrutiny, security exploits, and intellectual property theft. Supabase operated as an open-source business from its inception, finding that community scrutiny actually accelerates code refactoring and surfaces security vulnerabilities early through public reporting channels. In addition, rapid execution and developer experience provide stronger competitive defenses against larger competitors than proprietary code obfuscation or software patents. Open repos also transformed the company's hiring strategy by replacing traditional take-home tests and LeetCode interviews with evaluation of real-world pull requests and asynchronous discussions. Finally, external contributors expand product capability by independently developing niche integrations and platform adapters that core startup teams lack the bandwidth to build.
Supabase Launch Week 4
Supabase announced the schedule and lineup for Launch Week 4, detailing daily product releases and events starting on March 28, 2022. The week initiated with Community Day to highlight community contributions and open-source tooling utilized across the platform. Technical additions across the week included the introduction of GraphQL data fetching for PostgreSQL databases, the rollout of Supabase Enterprise, and the launch of Edge Functions. Final announcements on April 1 revealed Supabrew alongside Supabase Realtime with multiplayer features, concluding with the start of a ten-day virtual hackathon running through April 9. For the hackathon, titled Bring the Func, Supabase partnered with the Future Forest Company to plant a tree for every submitted project on madewithsupabase.com.
How We Built the Add to Favorite Animation in Shop
The Shop app’s Add to Favorite interaction animates a product thumbnail into the Favorites tab bar heart after a buyer favorites a product. The implementation is based on a motion spec that defines animated properties, target values, durations, easing curves, and ordering, with the thumbnail sequence followed by the icon’s color and bouncing movement. In React Native, Reanimated uses one shared progress value for the whole sequence, and interpolation maps progress ranges to opacity, scale, and vertical translation, including clamping and an instant disappearance at step 3. A 50 ms pause is included between thumbnail scaling and its downward movement. The shared value also creates a match cut between the disappearing thumbnail and the icon; a setTimeout-based handoff was rejected because a busy JS thread could delay the transition, while withDelay would keep timing on the UI thread.
How telematics helps Grab to improve safety
Grab developed an in-house telematics engine to monitor driver-partner habits, detect crashes, and improve ride safety beyond passenger feedback. The mobile telematics SDK collects accelerometer, gyroscope, and GPS readings, running on-device processing for immediate accident detection while batching ride data for post-trip safety reports. Because triaxial sensor sampling rates vary independently across diverse devices, the SDK synchronizes data through interpolation to a uniform time grid followed by decimation to an output data rate. Telematics signals are transformed to the frequency domain using Fourier Transform for local compression before backend upload. Grab also combines telemetry with spatial data to identify dangerous road zones and plans to expand on-device event detection across all platform verticals.
A Data Scientist’s Guide To Measuring Product Success
The guide addresses the problem of turning product success after launch into concrete metrics that reflect user impact rather than model or pipeline performance. It recommends starting with end-user goals, defining a main product goal and subgoals, translating them into primary questions, and selecting metrics before building a measurement plan. In Shopify’s example, the contextual analytics experience surfaces inventory data, with adoption measured through shops interacting with its navigation bar and product goals progressing from data-aware to data-savvy merchants. Metrics should be simple, precise, feasible, sensitive, and directional, while tripwires or anti-success metrics identify unwanted outcomes alongside desired gains. The plan pairs metrics with comparison measures and benchmarks, supports segmentation by merchant characteristics, and separates short-term, mid-term, and long-term measurement periods so results can be interpreted after release.
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