---
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

### [Supabase Edge Runtime: Self-hosted Deno Functions](https://yomu.fyi/post/supabase-edge-runtime-self-hosted-deno-functions.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: laktek,inian
- Published: Apr 11, 2023
- Type: Announcement

Supabase has open-sourced Edge Runtime, an MIT-licensed Rust web server built on Deno Runtime 1.32+ for self-hosting Deno Edge Functions. It serves TypeScript, JavaScript, and WASM functions, and existing Supabase Edge Functions can run without code changes; the release also adds npm modules and Node built-in APIs. The Supabase CLI uses it to serve all local functions with JWT verification, import maps, custom environment variables, hot reload, and defaults of 150 MB memory and 60 seconds execution time. Its architecture combines hyper, a Main Worker in a V8 isolate, and restricted User Workers that handle requests with controllable resource limits, while exposing APIs intended to improve development and deployment parity. A Fly.io demonstration shows deployment, with Digital Ocean and AWS also cited as provider options; the project is in beta with bugs and performance quirks still expected.


### [Supabase Logs: open source logging server](https://yomu.fyi/post/supabase-logs-open-source-logging-server.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: chasers,ziinc
- Published: Apr 10, 2023
- Type: Announcement

Supabase is releasing Supabase Logs for self-hosted users and CLI development, built around Logflare, which processes more than 1 billion log events daily from Supabase services. Logflare is a multi-node, highly available Elixir cluster that ingests events through Vector or native integrations, streams them to BigQuery, and exposes SQL-backed HTTP Endpoints for Studio, Logs Explorer, and usage charts. Endpoints support parameterized queries, in-memory read-through caching, configurable cache warming, and select-only query sandboxing, allowing views over billions of daily events without querying many terabytes on every request. The release changes Logflare’s license to Apache 2.0, replaces closed-source SQL parsing with rust-based sqlparser-rs, and improves environment-based configuration for self-hosting; BigQuery is currently the supported backend, with more planned.


### [Supabase Beta March 2023](https://yomu.fyi/post/supabase-beta-march-2023.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: ant\_wilson
- Published: Apr 8, 2023
- Type: Announcement

Supabase’s March 2023 update previews Launch Week 7, an accompanying Web3 AI hackathon, and a collection of community projects and resources. It announces a Next.js OpenAI documentation-search template hosted on Vercel, combining GPT-3 text completion, a Postgres database with pgvector, and Deno Edge Functions. The update also documents the Launch Week ticket system, including an AI-fueled design and an infinite ticket scroll built with Next.js, Framer Motion, and Supabase, with separate posts covering implementation and artwork generation. It additionally promotes the SupaClub April 1 announcement, a Launch Week kickoff Twitter Space, and projects such as Markprompt, which creates embeddings from Markdown, Markdoc, and MDX files in GitHub repositories using Next.js, Vercel, OpenAI, and Supabase.


### [Designing with AI: Generating unique artwork for every user](https://yomu.fyi/post/designing-with-ai-generating-unique-artwork-for-every-user.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: marijana,thor\_schaeff
- Published: Apr 7, 2023
- Type: Explainer

Supabase Launch Week 7 needed distinctive, shareable tickets that could improve on earlier Launch Week designs while keeping overlaid text readable. The team experimented with Midjourney prompts and blends, then chose minimalist purple swirls and a gold overlay approach after finding generated visuals too chaotic and direct gold prompting unreliable. For each ticket, a Supabase Edge Function retrieves a cached PNG from Supabase Storage or renders HTML and CSS into an SVG with Vercel’s Satori, layering backgrounds, a GitHub profile picture, and text before uploading the result with long cache control. A Postgres view selectively exposes ticket fields, calculates referral counts and marks a ticket golden when both Twitter and LinkedIn sharing have been detected, while row-level security protects the underlying email-containing table. Supabase Realtime then sends client-side updates so users can see progress and stop listening once golden.


### [The Supabase AI Hackathon](https://yomu.fyi/post/the-supabase-ai-hackathon.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: tyler\_shukert
- Published: Apr 7, 2023
- Type: Announcement

Supabase announced an async, AI-themed hackathon running from 6:00 am PT on 7 April 2023 until 11:59 pm PT on 16 April 2023. Participants may enter individually or in teams of up to five and must create a new Open Source project using Supabase in some capacity; projects can be apps, tools, libraries, or other forms, in any language or framework. Entries compete for overall, AI, fun or Easter egg, technical, and visual categories, with a winner and runner-up in each category receiving Supabase Launch Week swag, while the overall winner also receives mechanical keyboards. The Supabase team will judge creativity, functionality, visual quality, technical achievement, Supabase usage, and fun, and submissions require source-code links, with an optional demo video earning extra points.


### [Adventures in Garbage Collection: Improving GC Performance in our Massive Monolith](https://yomu.fyi/post/adventures-in-garbage-collection-improving-gc-performance-in-our-massi.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Apr 6, 2023
- Type: Problem & solution

Shopify investigated high Ruby garbage-collection latency in its monolith, where minor marks took about 3 ms but major marks could exceed four seconds and some requests spent multiple seconds in GC. Logging showed that roughly 75% of major marks were triggered by oldmalloc and nearly 25% by shady, while nofree became dominant after oldmalloc was addressed. The team used production experiments, improved metrics, changed GC environment settings, increased initial heap slots, and added out-of-band collection during request processing. A 128 GB oldmalloc threshold reduced major marking by about 20%; later out-of-band collection cut the P99.99 and P99.9 GC-time tail by almost tenfold and largely eliminated median-request pauses. The resulting configuration, with collection frequency adapting from every 128 to every 512 requests, was deployed across the fleet after about three weeks.


### [Infinite scroll with Next.js, Framer Motion, and Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/post/infinite-scroll-with-next-js-framer-motion-and-supabase.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: fsansalvadore
- Published: Apr 4, 2023
- Type: Tutorial

The post presents a tutorial for displaying Supabase Launch Week tickets with infinite scrolling in a Next.js page instead of loading every ticket at once. It fetches an initial batch of 20 tickets in getServerSideProps, then listens for window scroll events with a 200-millisecond Lodash debounce and checks the ticket container’s bottom against the viewport height. When the container reaches the viewport, Supabase range queries retrieve successive 20-ticket pages using an offset, and the results are appended to the existing list. Framer Motion animates each ticket from opacity 0 and y 20 into place, with index-based delays intended to create a staggered appearance. The tutorial also sets an isLast state when a response is shorter than PAGE\_COUNT so scrolling can stop after the available tickets are loaded.


### [SupaClub](https://yomu.fyi/post/supaclub.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: ant\_wilson
- Published: Apr 1, 2023
- Type: Announcement

SupaClub is announced as the “world’s first Software Engineering Nightclub,” a Bali venue intended to combine Hardcore Techno with software engineering for South East Asia’s digital nomads. The stated motivation is that Supabase team members working remotely in Bali could not bring laptops into established nightclubs, preventing them from fixing bugs while listening to music. The venue is described as being in Canggu, opening the following Friday, with capacity for 4,000 developers across four floors, dedicated DJs, breakout rooms, 1Gbps WiFi, and bookable standing desks. Its private conference rooms reportedly offer SupaBrew bottle service, whiteboards, and UltraWide monitors, while the opening-night announcement names Ja Rule and Niki Minaj as performers. The post invites readers to request guest-list spots by email with a GitHub link and the subject “Re: april fools.”


### [Evolution of quality at Grab](https://yomu.fyi/post/evolution-of-quality-at-grab.md)
- Company: [Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab.md)
- Author: Abby Alcantara
- Published: Mar 31, 2023
- Type: Problem & solution

As Grab expanded its superapp, manual QA sign-offs led to prolonged testing cycles and a peak in major production defects around 2019. To counter defect leakage and improve delivery pace, the engineering organization transitioned to a shift-left testing strategy across its software development lifecycle. Quality engineers began writing Given/When/Then acceptance tests prior to coding so that software engineers could execute them during development, accompanied by Definition of Ready and Definition of Done standards. The team also structured a multi-layer test strategy spanning unit tests, pipeline-executed UI component tests with mocked APIs, backend integration tests, and a custom internal end-to-end framework. Between 2019 and 2022, these changes reduced major and critical production issues by 60% and development-phase critical bugs by 40%.


### [How Migrating from Vanilla Redux to Redux Toolkit Improved State Management in Shopify POS](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-migrating-from-vanilla-redux-to-redux-toolkit-improved-state-manag.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Mar 31, 2023
- Type: Explainer

Shopify’s React Native Point of Sale team migrated its production state management from Vanilla Redux to Redux Toolkit (RTK) after developers found boilerplate and debugging difficult. They rejected a full rewrite in favor of incremental reducer-by-reducer conversion, allowing Vanilla reducers and RTK slices to coexist and limiting rollback and destabilization risk. Most reducers adopted RTK’s mutable syntax and generated action creators, while asynchronous logic retained a hybrid thunk approach because RTK Query did not support GraphQL and wholesale use of pending and fulfilled actions would split logic between thunks and reducers. The roughly three-month migration deleted 3,500 lines of boilerplate and was released gradually to production. The team also identified explicit TypeScript typing for dispatch, selector, and store hooks, plus dispatch().unwrap() for awaited calls, as important details, while atypical reducers were deferred to separate projects.


### [What Being a Staff Developer Means at Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/post/what-being-a-staff-developer-means-at-shopify.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Mar 29, 2023
- Type: Explainer

The post defines a staff developer at Shopify as an individual contributor whose scope and seniority can match a manager’s, while emphasizing that the role is a form of leadership rather than simply a more senior senior developer. Technical excellence comes from varied, challenging project experience, including large-scale systems, refactors, technology shifts, mistakes, and learning to choose appropriate solutions under constraints. The role also pairs with a team manager, translating product and business objectives into technical proposals, judging scope and infrastructure needs, finding recurring product problems, and saying no when effort does not match return. Its impact is measured partly through enabling others via reviews, mentorship, sponsorship, and support, leading to an adaptable leader comfortable with ambiguity whose responsibilities evolve with company needs.


### [Supporting Passkeys in Shop's Authentication Flows](https://yomu.fyi/post/supporting-passkeys-in-shop-s-authentication-flows.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Mar 24, 2023
- Type: Explainer

Shop Pay and the Shop app began deploying passkeys in December 2022 across web and native app authentication, initially as an additional method for existing users and as a replacement for email and SMS verification. Passkeys use public-key cryptography: the private key remains on the device, while the service stores a public key, with platform or roaming authenticators providing options such as biometrics or hardware keys. Built on Ruby on Rails, Shop used webauthn-ruby to store a server challenge during registration, verify the allowed domain and challenge, and save the credential identifier; login looks up that identifier and verifies authentication while updating the sign count. The team also integrated passkeys into an iframe-capable login component for use across Shopify interactions, including merchant storefronts. Domain scoping, authenticator settings, challenge handling, Conditional UI, and cross-device interoperability are identified as important implementation considerations.


### [How OVO determined the right technology stack for their web-based projects](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-ovo-determined-the-right-technology-stack-for-their-web-based-proj.md)
- Company: [Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab.md)
- Author: George Matthew Limongan
- Published: Mar 21, 2023
- Type: Problem & solution

OVO faced maintainability issues caused by fragmented web technology stacks, including PHP, Vue, React, Nuxt, and Go, alongside outdated documentation. This fragmentation resulted in severe context-switching costs during code reviews and prolonged onboarding times for new engineers. To establish a single primary front-end stack, the team compared React and Vue against maintainability principles encompassing operability, simplicity, and evolvability. Vue was selected because its standardized framework structure and documentation minimized architectural variations across projects. Implementation entailed creating a standardized Vue boilerplate, updating the internal UI library, and scheduling periodic upgrades for legacy React services rather than migrating them entirely.


### [Lessons From Linguistics: i18n Best Practices for Front-End Developers](https://yomu.fyi/post/lessons-from-linguistics-i18n-best-practices-for-front-end-developers.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Mar 16, 2023
- Type: Tutorial

Front-end internationalization can fail when code encodes English assumptions about word order, punctuation, pluralization, gender, or text layout. The post uses an image-status example to show why a complete sentence should be translated as a whole, then examines interpolation through a reusable status bar whose file-type and count values vary across languages. It explains that plural categories can include zero, one, two, few, many, and other, with Polish examples showing why numeric rules should not be hardcoded, and that gender can affect articles and adjectives, as in French. Its recommended practices include keeping linguistic decisions in translation strings, avoiding code-level text construction and elaborate styled layouts, and letting i18n libraries select plural forms from quantities; complex promo layouts may need simplification or language-specific images.


### [Unlocking Real-time Predictions with Shopify's Machine Learning Platform](https://yomu.fyi/post/unlocking-real-time-predictions-with-shopify-s-machine-learning-platfo.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Mar 10, 2023
- Type: Explainer

Shopify’s Merlin machine learning platform was expanded to support online inference, allowing trained models to return predictions as input arrives rather than through periodic batch jobs. The design targets varied Shopify use cases and requirements, including support for TensorFlow, PyTorch and XGBoost, low latency, autoscaling, rolling deployments, observability and model updates. Each use case runs as a dedicated service on Google Kubernetes Engine, with a Python serving layer that loads models and artifacts, exposes an inference endpoint, and can use the Comet ML model registry and Pano feature store. Separate staging and production configurations let teams tune resources and test model versions before release; Shopify reports that online inference is providing the intended low latency, scalability and faster iteration, while ensemble inference, platform-based monitoring and continuous training remain planned areas.


### [Supabase Beta February 2023](https://yomu.fyi/post/supabase-beta-february-2023.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: ant\_wilson
- Published: Mar 9, 2023
- Type: Announcement

Supabase’s February 2023 beta update covers product changes across its dashboard, Auth, Postgres, Edge Functions, GraphQL, documentation, and community resources. GraphiQL is now built into the dashboard for exploring and querying pg\_graphql APIs, while Docs search uses pgvector and OpenAI to support Supabase-specific questions. Supabase CLI 1.36+ can serve multiple Edge Functions simultaneously, and a multi-stage Postgres Dockerfile reduces the image from 1.3GB to 250MB, enabling faster boot time. The release also adds dashboard management for database roles, moves API documentation into the table editor with type-file generation, and provides a full OpenAPI 3.0 specification for Auth. Additional updates include inferred supabase-js response types, Deno 1.30.3 for Edge Functions, and Realtime behavior for deletes under RLS.


### [Migrating from Role to Attribute-based Access Control](https://yomu.fyi/post/migrating-from-role-to-attribute-based-access-control.md)
- Company: [Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab.md)
- Author: Minh Khoi Nguyen
- Published: Mar 9, 2023
- Type: Problem & solution

Grab's streaming data platform team migrated the Kafka Control Plane from Role-Based Access Control to Attribute-Based Access Control to eliminate operational bottlenecks and manual permission management. The previous model required defining hundreds of roles, permissions, and group mappings in an internal IAM service, leading to approval delays and stale memberships. Under the new architecture, user attributes sync from the HRMS and token payloads, while resource attributes are tagged upon creation or backfilled to reflect department and team ownership. Open Policy Agent evaluates access requests defined in Rego via middleware by comparing user attributes with resource metadata. This transition eliminated over 200 roles, 200 permissions, and roughly 3,000 unused IAM resources while automating access provisioning for new joiners.


### [Responsibly mid-size: What Matters, Suffers](https://yomu.fyi/post/responsibly-mid-size-what-matters-suffers.md)
- Company: [Ramp](https://yomu.fyi/company/ramp.md)
- Author: Pablo Meier
- Published: Mar 4, 2023
- Type: Explainer

Moving into a mid-size company requires adopting processes and attitudes piecemeal rather than suddenly operating like a large enterprise, while preserving the ability to deliver customer value. The post challenges “clean code” as a universal standard, arguing from Sandi Metz’s discussion of churn and semantic complexity that important, frequently changed files are often large and complicated, making “bad code” an emergent feature of successful systems. It also uses Joel Spolsky’s case against rewrites to explain that ugly code may contain accumulated fixes for real bugs and operating conditions. The resulting advice is to distinguish code that manages responsibilities from code that does not, develop engineering judgment, and avoid letting aesthetic reactions damage collaboration, team cohesion, or delivery.


### [Geo Queries with PostGIS in Ionic Angular](https://yomu.fyi/post/geo-queries-with-postgis-in-ionic-angular.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: simon\_grimm
- Published: Mar 1, 2023
- Type: Tutorial

This tutorial shows how to build an Ionic Angular cross-platform app that stores and queries store locations with Supabase and PostGIS. It enables PostGIS, defines a stores table with a geography(POINT) location, adds a GiST spatial index, creates storage policies, and seeds example coordinates. SQL functions named nearby\_stores and stores\_in\_view calculate distances or select stores inside a coordinate box, while Ionic uses Capacitor Google Maps and geolocation to display markers and query nearby data. The app also uploads store images to Supabase Storage, retrieves them with a 300-pixel contain transformation, and opens store details in an Ionic bottom-sheet modal after marker selection. The completed code is provided on GitHub and requires project and Google Maps credentials plus the included SQL.


### [Securing GitOps pipelines](https://yomu.fyi/post/securing-gitops-pipelines.md)
- Company: [Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab.md)
- Author: Thang Le
- Published: Mar 1, 2023
- Type: Problem & solution

Grab's real-time data platform team transitioned from an Atlantis-driven Terraform workflow to an in-house GitOps platform called Khone to manage streaming infrastructure resources like Kafka topics and Flink pipelines. The earlier setup suffered from coarse-grained access controls, required manual merge request comments, and lacked flexible validation capabilities within native configuration files. Khone derives environment parameters directly from standardized directory paths and uses Python with the python-hcl2 library to inspect and validate resource definitions before executing Terraform stages in parallel. To prevent configuration tampering in merge requests, CI/CD pipeline definitions and execution scripts are isolated in a separate administrative repository and fetched during job runs using shallow Git clones.


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