---
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

### [From Ruby to Node: Overhauling Shopify’s CLI for a Better Developer Experience](https://yomu.fyi/post/from-ruby-to-node-overhauling-shopify-s-cli-for-a-better-developer-exp.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Jan 10, 2023
- Type: Problem & solution

Shopify rewrote its unified CLI from Ruby to TypeScript running on Node after growing dependencies on Node tooling, Hydrogen’s preference for npm-managed dependencies, and a broader fit with web technologies. The rewrite aims to reduce system requirements, improve terminal consistency, and make contribution easier, while using a modular architecture of domain NPM packages built on @shopify/cli-kit. The team established shared code, UI, convention, and principle foundations, addressed cross-OS support, used TypeScript for stronger contracts, and applied Cucumber for end-to-end testing. The Node CLI unified and streamlined app development and added extensibility such as functions, but Theme commands still use Ruby and removing that dependency remains future work.


### [Building Obsidian, Tinder’s Design System](https://yomu.fyi/post/building-obsidian-tinder-s-design-system.md)
- Company: [Tinder](https://yomu.fyi/company/tinder.md)
- Author: Tinder
- Published: Jan 9, 2023
- Type: Problem & solution

As Tinder scaled over a decade, maintaining visual consistency across its client applications became unsustainable and increased engineering overhead. To address this, the UI Platform team developed Obsidian, a unified design system combining design tokens, reusable components, and documentation. Designers define base and context tokens in Figma using the Tokens Studio plugin, which are then transformed by Style Dictionary into native artifacts for iOS, Android, and Web. Web developers integrate these tokens using Atomizer to generate static stylesheets, while a Zeroheight documentation portal and a custom token lookup tool assist legacy migrations. The ongoing migration has streamlined collaboration between designers and engineers, resolved styling ambiguities, and improved color contrast accessibility across platforms.


### [Supabase Beta December 2022](https://yomu.fyi/post/supabase-beta-december-2022.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: ant\_wilson
- Published: Jan 5, 2023
- Type: Announcement

Supabase's December 2022 beta update recaps Launch Week 6, Community Day, Postgres ecosystem work, and other recent releases. The announcements include redesigned documentation rebuilt with Next.js; Storage v2 features for image resizing, webhooks, and a Smart CDN; and multi-factor authentication with optional enforcement through Row Level Security. Supabase Wrappers extend PostgreSQL Foreign Data Wrappers to query external databases, systems, and third-party APIs using SQL, while The Vault enters beta for encrypted secrets and stored data. The update also announces custom domains, point-in-time recovery, SSO on the dashboard in preparation for SAML, and ecosystem projects including pg\_graphql v1.0, a PostgREST 11 pre-release, and an experimental pg\_crdt extension.


### [Graph service platform](https://yomu.fyi/post/graph-service-platform.md)
- Company: [Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab.md)
- Author: Wenxiang Lu
- Published: Jan 5, 2023
- Type: Problem & solution

Grab's GrabDefence team required a dedicated graph infrastructure to proactively identify mobile fraud patterns, such as multiple accounts operating on shared physical devices and suspicious financial loops. To address this, the team built a four-layer Platform as a Service that encapsulates graph database operations behind uniform RESTful APIs for OLTP search and OLAP analysis. The architecture utilizes Amazon S3 for raw data files, Amazon Neptune for graph storage, DynamoDB for schema and metadata configurations, and Kafka for streaming ingestion. When users trigger data loading tasks, the service validates entity attributes against schemas stored in DynamoDB before importing records into Neptune. This infrastructure allows investigators to traverse adjacent account IDs and visualize complex entity relationships without managing underlying database runtimes.


### [Reliving Your Happiest HTTP Interactions with Ruby’s VCR Gem](https://yomu.fyi/post/reliving-your-happiest-http-interactions-with-ruby-s-vcr-gem.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Jan 5, 2023
- Type: Tutorial

Ruby’s VCR library records HTTP interactions and replays them in test suites, verifying requests and returning predictable responses; the post presents it as a way to manage complex WebMock stubs and multi-step or unreliable API behavior. It contrasts recordings from a live API with manually authored stubs: cassettes preserve observed behavior at recording time but are harder to change and do not update when the API changes. The guidance covers VCR.use\_cassette, configurable request matching, YAML cassettes, before\_filter logging, filter\_sensitive\_data, and safer recording modes such as :once and :none instead of :new\_episodes. It recommends VCR for integration-focused tests involving unpredictable sequences, multiple calls, or troublesome APIs, while favoring WebMock or decomposition for simple calls and specific states; cassette isolation and inspection add debugging value but can hide interactions.


### [WAL Mode in LiteFS](https://yomu.fyi/post/wal-mode-in-litefs.md)
- Company: [Fly.io](https://yomu.fyi/company/fly-io.md)
- Published: Jan 4, 2023
- Type: Announcement

LiteFS v0.3.0 adds support for SQLite’s write-ahead log (WAL) alongside the previously supported rollback journal, allowing its distributed file system to replicate transactions from either journaling mode. The post explains how rollback journals and WAL differ, then shows how LiteFS observes filesystem calls, identifies changed pages, and emits a common LTX change-set format; in WAL mode, the final frame’s commit field marks transaction completion. Replica nodes validate LTX files, acquire SQLite-compatible locks, and apply the changes, while the new litefs import command transactionally replaces a database for bootstrapping or snapshot reversion. Version 0.3.0 also replaces previous-page checksum tracking with a per-page checksum map, costing about 3 MB of RAM per gigabyte and roughly 5 ms of CPU time per gigabyte per commit, and adds a trace log whose enabled use can double disk I/O.


### [Launch Week 6 Hackathon Winners](https://yomu.fyi/post/launch-week-6-hackathon-winners.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: andrew\_smith,tyler\_shukert
- Published: Jan 3, 2023
- Type: Announcement

Supabase announced the winners of its sixth hackathon, held during Launch Week 6 after ending 2022 with many feature releases. Projects were judged across categories including Best Overall, Most Fun/Interesting, Best Flutter, Best Storage, and Best Edge Functions, with Deno participating in judging the edge category. Depulso, a CLI and web app for static site deployments with per-deployment .depulso.site subdomains and SSL, won Best Overall, while Supa SQL App was runner-up for converting human language into SQL queries. Other winners included HTTP Sense, a reverse proxy and network monitoring tool; supaquiz, a realtime multiplayer trivia game; Lookout, a metadata-based image discovery app; and Vista, a video transcoder that adds customizable subtitles from audio. Winners received keyboards or swag, and a Discord event was scheduled for January 5 at 7:00 AM PST.


### [Monte Carlo Simulations: Separating Signal from Noise in Sampled Success Metrics](https://yomu.fyi/post/monte-carlo-simulations-separating-signal-from-noise-in-sampled-succes.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Jan 3, 2023
- Type: Tutorial

Sampled success metrics can be difficult to interpret when the underlying population is too expensive or time-consuming to measure completely. The method presents a Monte Carlo simulation for estimating how sample size and an assumed trend affect the reliability of Shopify’s sampled “shop issue rate,” which estimates requirement violations for an average installed app. Its workflow establishes simulation metrics such as 1mDO, 2mDO, and 1qDO, measures MAPE, defines a sampling distribution, and runs repeated simulations across parameter combinations using Python and pandas. For the example, the issue count is modeled with a Poisson distribution, while sample size, lambda, and monthly decrease are varied to quantify uncertainty and collection cost. With 100 audits per month, an initial mean of 10 issues, and a 5-percent monthly decrease, the simulations predict monthly decreases 83 percent of the time and decreases over two months 97 percent of the time.


### [React Native Skia: A Year in Review and a Look Ahead](https://yomu.fyi/post/react-native-skia-a-year-in-review-and-a-look-ahead.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Dec 29, 2022
- Type: Explainer

React Native Skia’s first year produced an initial alpha and 89 additional releases, evolving a React Renderer and Skia integration for declarative 2D graphics across iOS, Android, the Web, and Node.js testing. The project changed direction after identifying two bottlenecks: dependence on the JavaScript thread and the overhead of thousands of JSI allocations in large drawings. Skia DOM addresses them with a declarative drawing state that recomputes only necessary changes and executes drawings on the UI thread, with C++ implementations on iOS and Android and a JavaScript implementation on React Native Web. CanvasKit compatibility, Expo integration, Metal on iOS, and OpenGL on Android and the Web support the cross-platform design, while extension points enable modules such as Skottie and camera-frame effects. The library’s tests compare rendered examples across platforms, and planned work includes JavaScript-worklet and Reanimated animation integration plus advanced text layouts through Skia’s paragraph module.


### [Migrating our Largest Mobile App to React Native](https://yomu.fyi/post/migrating-our-largest-mobile-app-to-react-native.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Dec 27, 2022
- Type: Problem & solution

Shopify’s largest mobile app, Shopify Mobile, had 300 screens per platform and more than six years of development, making a full rewrite impractical because it could take at least three years and halt feature work. The team first adopted React Native incrementally, but migration was projected to take four to five years while requiring three design-system implementations, three architectures, and costly native interoperability. It then switched to “Iterative Porting”: engineers were trained through the five-milestone RN Accelerator, surfaces were inventoried and prioritized with a RICE-based score, and eligible features were migrated behind flags, tested, monitored for two weeks, then completed by removing the native version. The effort also introduced Native Routes, modal deeplink handling on iOS, and component-level Safe Area fixes; with root screens ported and infrastructure in place, the team reports that ports are accelerating, although substantial work remains.


### [Optimizing Ruby’s Memory Layout: Variable Width Allocation](https://yomu.fyi/post/optimizing-ruby-s-memory-layout-variable-width-allocation.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Dec 25, 2022
- Type: Explainer

CRuby’s original garbage collector stores most Ruby objects in fixed 40-byte RVALUE slots, leaving differently sized data partly unused or forcing additional allocations through malloc. Shopify’s Variable Width Allocation project adds dynamic-sized allocation APIs and five fixed-size pools—40, 80, 160, 320, and 640 bytes—while increasing heap pages from 16 KB to 64 KB. The design targets cache locality, malloc overhead, memory utilization, and future garbage-collector experimentation; a new GC.stat\_heap API reports size-pool statistics, and an escape hatch can disable the feature at build time on Ruby 3.2. Benchmarks on development Ruby 3.2.0 showed gains in most workloads, including 9.8% for psych-load, 5.3% for hexapdf, and 2.1% for railsbench, while mail was 1.7% slower.


### [Year in Review 2022: Tenderlove's Ruby and Rails Reflections and Predictions](https://yomu.fyi/post/year-in-review-2022-tenderlove-s-ruby-and-rails-reflections-and-predic.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Dec 22, 2022
- Type: Explainer

Aaron Patterson’s 2022 review surveys developments in Ruby and Rails, pairing runtime performance work with tools intended to improve developer productivity. YJIT’s compiler was rewritten in Rust, enabling ARM and Apple Silicon support while producing faster machine code; Variable Width Allocation adjusts object slot sizes to keep instance variables embedded and improve data locality. Ruby 3.2’s Object Shapes use property order as a class-independent inline-cache key, while Ruby LSP adds editor services and Error Highlight adds column-level diagnostics that now appear on Rails error pages. Patterson predicts—more accurately, hopes—that languages, frameworks, and development environments will become more interconnected, providing better suggestions, context, and assistance so developers can spend less time coding and more time solving problems.


### [Automatically Rotating GitHub Tokens (So You Don’t Have To)](https://yomu.fyi/post/automatically-rotating-github-tokens-so-you-don-t-have-to.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Dec 20, 2022
- Type: Problem & solution

Shopify needed automated GitHub workflows that could clone from private repositories, update organization-level projects, and trigger downstream workflows but could not use GITHUB\_TOKEN. Personal access tokens supplied those capabilities, yet introduced developer churn, user-attributed actions, and no organization-enforced rotation or expiry. The proposed system uses GitHub Actions and a GitHub App to generate repository secrets that rotate automatically while preserving PAT-like references in existing workflows. Its serverless design delegates scheduling, managed infrastructure, approvals, secret management, auditing, and break-glass operation to GitHub, while a custom TypeScript action encrypts and writes generated secrets. Prototyping exposed that parallel one-second jobs could accrue multiple billable minutes, prompting sequential execution in a consolidated workflow; the stated goal is improved resilience to developer churn and reduced leaked-secret blast radius.


### [Custom Domain Names](https://yomu.fyi/post/custom-domain-names.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: div\_arora
- Published: Dec 16, 2022
- Type: Announcement

Supabase is releasing Custom Domains and Vanity Subdomains to give projects a more branded user-facing address. Custom Domains let a project use its own domain, such as api.example.com, instead of an assigned supabase.co hostname; they are generally available as a paid add-on through the Supabase dashboard. Vanity Subdomains let paid-plan projects choose a relevant subdomain on Supabase's domain, such as my-example-brand.supabase.co, at no additional cost, and the feature is launching in closed beta with setup instructions in the documentation. The release currently supports only one custom domain or vanity subdomain per project, while Edge Functions must still be accessed through their existing endpoint because they do not support either feature yet.


### [Launch Week 6: Wrap Up](https://yomu.fyi/post/launch-week-6-wrap-up.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: paul\_copplestone
- Published: Dec 16, 2022
- Type: Announcement

Supabase’s Launch Week Day 6 wrap-up consolidates the products and platform changes announced during the event. The roundup announces redesigned Next.js documentation, Storage v2 features for image resizing, webhooks, and a Smart CDN, plus multi-factor authentication usable in Row Level Security policies. It also introduces Wrappers, an Alpha framework for connecting Postgres to external systems, Vault for encrypted secrets, and pg\_graphql 1.0 with general availability. Additional releases include dashboard-enabled point-in-time recovery for Pro Projects, custom domains, pg\_crdt, PostgreSQL 15 for new projects, a PostgREST 11 pre-release, and the PGroonga multilingual full-text search extension. Community partnerships with Flutterflow and OneSignal provide Flutter app development and push-notification integrations.


### [What's new in Postgres 15?](https://yomu.fyi/post/what-s-new-in-postgres-15.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: pavel
- Published: Dec 16, 2022
- Type: Explainer

PostgreSQL 15, released as a stable version in October 2022, adds security, performance, SQL, replication, logging, compression, and string-processing changes. CREATE permission is revoked from all users except the database owner, views can use caller permissions with security\_invoker=on, and sorting is reported up to four times faster for in-memory and on-disk workloads; window functions also improve. The release introduces MERGE, supports two-phase commits and selective data in logical replication, allows conflicting transactions to be skipped or subscriptions disabled, and enables parallel workers for SELECT DISTINCT. It also adds JSON logging, Zstandard and ZL4 compression for WAL and pg\_basebackup, and POSIX regexp functions such as regexp\_substr() and regexp\_count(). The post recommends upgrading for bug fixes and stability, while noting that migrated databases may need manual permission changes and upgrades should be checked for rare manual actions.


### [pg\_graphql v1.0](https://yomu.fyi/post/pg-graphql-v1-0.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: oli\_rice
- Published: Dec 16, 2022
- Type: Announcement

pg\_graphql 1.0 marks the general availability of a PostgreSQL extension that lets databases be queried with GraphQL and formalizes a SemVer-based guarantee against backward-incompatible changes. It was designed for Supabase Free Plan servers with 1 GB of memory, where alternatives such as Hasura and Graphile consumed more memory than the platform could sacrifice. The implementation began with a C parser and SQL transpiler exposed through PostgREST RPC, then moved from SQL to Rust after nested SQL functions, copied state, and JSONB AST processing slowed schema introspection; v0.5.0 completed the rewrite. On Free Plan hardware, version 1.0 adds less than 300 microseconds per request, reaches about 1,060 SQL queries per second per connection, and the full Auth and HTTP stack handles about 645 requests per second, while larger instances exceed 10,000 requests per second.


### [Point in Time Recovery is now available for Pro projects](https://yomu.fyi/post/point-in-time-recovery-is-now-available-for-pro-projects.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: angelico\_de\_los\_reyes
- Published: Dec 16, 2022
- Type: Announcement

Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR) is now available to eligible Pro Plan projects, expanding access beyond Enterprise customers and adding a Dashboard UI for enabling it. Projects created from August 2022 onward can enable PITR except in Northeast Asia / Seoul, and they must use the Small compute add-on; older projects are not yet generally eligible. The system combines daily physical database snapshots with archived Write Ahead Log (WAL) records, using the open-source WAL-G tool; snapshots are uploaded daily and WAL files are archived as transactions occur. WAL files are backed up at two-minute intervals, potentially faster when a file threshold is reached, reducing the recovery point from the up-to-24-hour exposure of daily backups. PITR backups retain up to seven days by default, with self-serve expansion to 28 days, and restoration can target a specified point in time.


### [PostgREST 11 pre-release](https://yomu.fyi/post/postgrest-11-pre-release.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: steve\_chavez
- Published: Dec 16, 2022
- Type: Announcement

PostgREST 11 is still in pre-release, with the latest features and fixes available through the Supabase CLI rather than Supabase Cloud. The update improves querying related data with spread operators that flatten one-to-one and many-to-one relationships into the response, avoiding an extra view or function for that shape. Related-table ordering is also supported, such as ordering films by technical\_specs.duration, with the same relationship limitation. Anti-joins and inner-join behavior can be expressed by filtering related resources with is.null or not.is.null; the latter can also be combined with an or filter and is more flexible than the existing !inner modifier. The release can be tried locally with supabase start, and the post asks users to report bugs, suggestions, and ideas.


### [Supabase Vault is now in Beta](https://yomu.fyi/post/supabase-vault-is-now-in-beta.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: michel
- Published: Dec 16, 2022
- Type: Announcement

Supabase Vault is a Postgres extension and accompanying dashboard UI for storing encrypted secrets and encrypting data in database tables, released progressively across the platform and later made available on all Supabase projects. It stores secrets and encryption keys using authenticated encryption on disk, exposes decrypted secrets through a Postgres view, and lets applications use them from SQL in functions, triggers, and webhooks. Its foundation is pgsodium Transparent Column Encryption (TCE), which can encrypt text or bytea values, authenticate associated row columns, and create row-by-row decryption views for encrypted columns. Encryption keys are kept outside the database while only key IDs are stored with encrypted data; Supabase manages root keys in internal backend systems and offers an alternate dashboard endpoint for external decryption, while the post also outlines possible future end-to-end, group, and public-key encryption features.


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