---
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

### [Building a Realtime Trello Board with Supabase and Angular](https://yomu.fyi/post/building-a-realtime-trello-board-with-supabase-and-angular.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: simon\_grimm
- Published: Aug 24, 2022
- Type: Tutorial

The tutorial builds a Trello-style project-management board with Supabase, Angular, and Tailwind rather than stopping at a small “hello world” example. It defines boards, lists, cards, users, and user\_boards in Postgres SQL, adds magic-link authentication, and uses Row Level Security policies plus helper functions and triggers to control access and maintain relationships. Angular components and services use the Supabase JavaScript client, while realtime is enabled for cards and lists and exposed through an Observable that applies INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE events to local board state. The resulting clone supports shared boards for invited, already registered users, and the article provides SQL and source code for running the project with a Supabase instance.


### [How SQLite Scales Read Concurrency](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-sqlite-scales-read-concurrency.md)
- Company: [Fly.io](https://yomu.fyi/company/fly-io.md)
- Published: Aug 24, 2022
- Type: Explainer

SQLite’s write-ahead log (WAL) is presented as the mechanism that overturns the common claim that SQLite is inherently single-user or unable to scale reads. Unlike the rollback journal, which blocks readers and writers from operating at the same time, WAL leaves original database pages in place and appends changed pages to a -wal file, allowing point-in-time snapshots to coexist with ongoing writes. SQLite tracks those entries in a shared-memory (SHM) index: 32KB blocks contain page-number lists and 8,192-slot hash maps, with slot positions calculated as (pgno \* 383)%8192 while transaction position determines visibility. The post concludes that WAL mode benefits most applications, while noting that rollback journaling can remain preferable for edge cases such as multi-database transactions.


### [How We Built Oxygen: Hydrogen’s Counterpart for Hosting Custom Storefronts](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-we-built-oxygen-hydrogen-s-counterpart-for-hosting-custom-storefro.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Aug 23, 2022
- Type: Explainer

Oxygen is Shopify’s hosting counterpart for Hydrogen custom storefronts, designed to provide globally available, fast storefronts with secure Shopify integration without additional third-party hosting costs. Its architecture combines GitHub and GitHub Actions with Cloudflare Workers and edge distribution, Shopify CDN, Admin API, Identity and Access Management, and Oxygen-scoped developer tooling and observability. Requests pass through a Gateway Worker, which validates authorization for the shop and storefront version before using Cloudflare’s Dynamic Dispatch API to route traffic to a Storefront Worker running Hydrogen code. Rather than build proprietary infrastructure, Shopify reused Cloudflare’s worker platform to reduce upfront complexity, scale, and security risks, while its observability stack uses Grafana, Cortex, Loki, and Tempo. Oxygen is used in production by Allbirds, Shopify Supply, Shopify Hardware, and Denim Tears, and is generally available to Plus merchants.


### [One more thing](https://yomu.fyi/post/one-more-thing.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: paul\_copplestone
- Published: Aug 19, 2022
- Type: Announcement

During Launch Week, Supabase announces six product updates spanning database security, authentication, dashboard administration, and developer tooling. Supabase Vault is a Postgres extension for managing secrets and encryption inside the database, built as a thin usability layer over pgsodium and released to gather user feedback rather than for immediate Supabase Platform availability. Auth UI moves from the @supabase/ui library into @supabase/auth-ui-react, with customizable themes, CSS and inline styles, and overridable labels for multilingual support; the initial release supports React. The update also adds granular Dashboard roles, pg\_jsonschema for JSON Schema validation on json and jsonb, pg\_graphql v0.4.0 with json/jsonb, the in filter, and larger-schema introspection, plus early-access signups for Supabase Auth MFA.


### [pg\_jsonschema: JSON Schema support for Postgres](https://yomu.fyi/post/pg-jsonschema-json-schema-support-for-postgres.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: oli\_rice
- Published: Aug 19, 2022
- Type: Problem & solution

pg\_jsonschema is a Postgres extension released on the Supabase platform that adds JSON Schema validation for json and jsonb data types. The post addresses a trade-off in storing complex webhook payloads as documents: JSON simplifies the model and accommodates changing payloads, but an unconstrained column cannot enforce required structure or types. It introduces JSON Schema as a formal, human-readable way to describe those constraints, including an object with a required string foo attribute and no additional properties. The extension provides json\_matches\_schema and jsonb\_matches\_schema, which can be used in a Postgres CHECK constraint to validate inserted documents. In the example, the constraint handled all eight test cases correctly, and invalid rows produced a constraint-violation error.


### [PostgREST v10: EXPLAIN and Improved Relationship Detection](https://yomu.fyi/post/postgrest-v10-explain-and-improved-relationship-detection.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: steve\_chavez
- Published: Aug 19, 2022
- Type: Announcement

PostgREST v10 adds HTTP and supabase-js access to PostgreSQL execution plans for reads, writes, and RPC requests, with the feature restricted to development-oriented use through db-plan-enabled. Plans can be returned as text or JSON, analyzed to show execution time and RLS filtering, and queried in verbose form for the pg\_stat\_statements query identifier and related settings. The release also improves relationship detection: unique or foreign-key primary keys produce one-to-one JSON objects, while computed relationships let SQL functions define efficient links for views and materialized views. Many-to-many detection now requires a join table’s primary key to include both foreign-key columns, a breaking change; the post says PostgREST 10 was not yet on the Supabase Platform and was planned for release there over the following month.


### [Supabase Vault](https://yomu.fyi/post/supabase-vault.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: michel
- Published: Aug 19, 2022
- Type: Announcement

Supabase Vault is a Postgres extension for managing secrets and encryption inside the database, presented as a thin usability layer over pgsodium. The announcement contrasts it with pgcrypto, which accepts raw encryption keys directly and lacks public key signing, key derivation APIs, and streaming encryption. Vault stores secrets in an encrypted text column, while a unique per-database root key is managed outside SQL by pgsodium and libsodium; rows expose an internally derived key ID rather than the raw key. The vault.decrypted\_secrets view decrypts values on demand, leaving stored data encrypted on disk and in backups, and users can create additional keys with pgsodium.create\_key(). Vault uses Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data, binding the associated column to the authentication signature, and is positioned for API keys, access tokens, and environment variables rather than larger PII datasets.


### [Realtime: Multiplayer Edition](https://yomu.fyi/post/realtime-multiplayer-edition.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: wenbo,stas
- Published: Aug 18, 2022
- Type: Announcement

Supabase announces the general availability of Realtime’s multiplayer features, Broadcast and Presence, alongside a new channel-based architecture and supabase-js support. Realtime originally used Postgres logical replication, rather than LISTEN/NOTIFY, to avoid the latter’s 8,000-byte payload limit and the latency of querying each change from the database. In the new design, Channels act as rooms that support ephemeral publisher/subscriber Broadcast messages, shared Presence state, and Postgres change events; Presence uses Phoenix Tracker, a delta-based CRDT, for eventually consistent synchronization and removes disconnected users automatically. Realtime now runs as a distributed Elixir and Phoenix cluster on Fly, with clients connecting to the nearest node and nodes communicating across a backbone network to improve connection speed, stability, and latency. Free-plan active projects and projects created from August 18 have access, while other projects are scheduled for migration over the following weeks.


### [How We Enable Two-Day Delivery in the Shopify Fulfillment Network](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-we-enable-two-day-delivery-in-the-shopify-fulfillment-network.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Aug 18, 2022
- Type: Explainer

Shopify Fulfillment Network (SFN) enables merchants to offer two-day delivery across the United States by balancing inventory across Shopify-certified warehouses and choosing suitable carrier services. Shopify’s platform adds GraphQL APIs that let any third-party logistics provider upload pre-computed delivery dates, while storefront and checkout surfaces display them to buyers. SFN calculates schedules using inventory proximity, product weight, dimensions and hazard constraints, warehouse calendars and capacity, carrier pickups, closures, capacity limits, and time-in-transit data. It groups SKUs with shared inventory locations and characteristics into reusable schedules, maps each SKU to one, and supports direct delivery-date lookups in under 100 milliseconds; the selected date is returned to SFN for fulfillment routing.


### [Supabase is SOC2 compliant](https://yomu.fyi/post/supabase-is-soc2-compliant.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: inian,joel
- Published: Aug 17, 2022
- Type: Explainer

Supabase reports achieving SOC2 Type 1 compliance and later updates the announcement to say it is SOC2 Type 2 compliant. The post explains SOC2’s five Trust Services Criteria and distinguishes Type 1’s point-in-time audit from Type 2’s observation period, while framing customer expectations and data stewardship as the main reasons for pursuing certification. Supabase used Vanta to monitor controls and collect evidence, selected an auditor familiar with SaaS companies and Vanta, and formalized practices covering device security, access control, policies, logging, monitoring, vendor reviews, and repository protection. The process still required substantial manual evidence, and the company found that audit scope and auditor expectations mattered more than achieving a perfect automated-tool score. Supabase also launched a security center and identified HIPAA certification as a next step.


### [Instant Performance Upgrade: From FlatList to FlashList](https://yomu.fyi/post/instant-performance-upgrade-from-flatlist-to-flashlist.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Aug 17, 2022
- Type: Announcement

Shopify’s React Native Foundations team created FlashList as a faster, easier alternative to React Native’s FlatList, targeting frame drops, blank cells, and high memory use across a wide range of devices. FlatList creates new views during updates, while FlashList recycles already-allocated cells and moves some layout operations to native, using a 250-pixel default buffer to reduce memory footprint and load times. Its API is nearly the same as FlatList, so an existing list can be swapped by changing the component name and optionally adding estimatedItemSize, with features such as type-specific recycling, flexible column spans, and FPS and blank-cell metrics. Extensive Android testing found performance of 60 FPS or greater even on low-end devices, and Shopify Mobile uses FlashList as its default while Shop moved search to it.


### [supabase-js v2](https://yomu.fyi/post/supabase-js-v2.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: inian,alaister
- Published: Aug 16, 2022
- Type: Announcement

Supabase announces supabase-js v2, a release focused on developer quality-of-life improvements and designed around incremental changes rather than a large rewrite. Its type system uses CLI-generated database definitions at the client level, while authentication adds explicit signInWithPassword() and signInWithOtp() methods, makes most Auth operations asynchronous, and moves server-side methods under auth.admin. Data mutations return minimal by default unless select() is appended, constructor options are scoped by library, and Edge Functions automatically detect request and response content types. The release also introduces typed errors, a channel() interface for presence and PostgreSQL change subscriptions, and a preparatory path toward multiplayer features; older realtime syntax remains supported for now. Developers can install v2, consult updated documentation and migration guidance, while v1 continues receiving security fixes and maintenance patches for three months.


### [Supabase CLI v1 and Management API Beta](https://yomu.fyi/post/supabase-cli-v1-and-management-api-beta.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: soedirgo,qiao
- Published: Aug 15, 2022
- Type: Announcement

Supabase CLI v1 is moving out of beta with capabilities for managing database migrations and generating TypeScript types, alongside a beta Management API. The CLI can manage organizations and projects, link projects locally, run schema and manual migration workflows, support CI/CD through local and GitHub Actions workflows, and generate types from local or remote databases. Migration changes include improved manually written migrations, an experimental migra-backed db diff that is faster and produces more concise DDL, and local branching for testing DDL without data loss; the source notes that generated scripts are not perfect. The REST-based Management API, previously called the Admin API, is consumed by the CLI and exposes programmatic management of organizations, projects, Edge Functions, and more, with endpoints intended for CI/CD and test-environment creation.


### [How we store and process millions of orders daily](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-we-store-and-process-millions-of-orders-daily.md)
- Company: [Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab.md)
- Author: Xi Chen
- Published: Aug 15, 2022
- Type: Problem & solution

The Grab Order Platform processes millions of food and mart transactions daily, requiring high throughput, fault tolerance, and reduced cloud costs across transactional and analytical workloads. To meet these demands, the engineering team decoupled their database architecture by using Amazon DynamoDB for critical OLTP queries and MySQL RDS for historical OLAP queries. DynamoDB handles online order lifecycles with strong consistency, utilizing sparse Global Secondary Indexes for ongoing orders and TTL configurations to limit storage growth. Updates propagate asynchronously to MySQL RDS through a Kafka ingestion pipeline backed by Amazon SQS retries and timestamp-based version checks. This dual-database approach isolated core transaction availability from analytical queries and delivered significant cloud cost savings.


### [Building an In-Browser IDE the Hard Way](https://yomu.fyi/post/building-an-in-browser-ide-the-hard-way.md)
- Company: [Fly.io](https://yomu.fyi/company/fly-io.md)
- Published: Aug 15, 2022
- Type: Tutorial

This tutorial builds a personal remote development environment: an in-browser IDE for Elixir/Phoenix work, deployed as a Fly Machine from a Dockerfile and managed with command-line tools. The image uses an official Elixir base, adds code-server, flyctl, build dependencies, and the Elixir Language Server extension, while a multi-stage build copies in Tired Proxy. A persistent volume holds working files, and the startup configuration can clone a repository, launch code-server behind HTTPS, and arrange for the machine to sleep after an hour without HTTP requests. From the IDE terminal, the walkthrough then creates and deploys a separate Phoenix hello-world application backed by SQLite, setting its secret and provisioning storage. The resulting setup can wake on browser access, but random HTTP traffic or an active code-server terminal may keep it running, and stopping or destroying the apps limits costs.


### [Supabase Series B](https://yomu.fyi/post/supabase-series-b.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: Paul Copplestone
- Published: Aug 12, 2022
- Type: Announcement

Supabase announced an $80 million Series B in May, bringing total funding to $116 million, and reported growth to more than 150,000 hosted PostgreSQL databases and 110,000 developers. Community metrics also increased, with Discord membership rising from 4,000 to 8,000, Twitter followers from 18,000 to 37,000, and GitHub stars from 19,000 to 36,000. The round is led by Felicis, with Coatue, Lightspeed, and Square Peg Capital joining, while Supabase describes its open-source support through contributor payments, maintainer hiring, sponsorship, and community collaboration. The company is moving into its third phase, focused on cloud-native PostgreSQL capabilities including branching, scalable storage, distribution, ephemeral compute, snapshots, and time travel. It invested $500,000 in OrioleDB and hired a developer to work on it, while stating that OrioleDB is not currently used on the Supabase platform and that the company will not run a PostgreSQL fork.


### [Rate limiting with Redis](https://yomu.fyi/post/rate-limiting-with-redis.md)
- Company: [Ramp](https://yomu.fyi/company/ramp.md)
- Author: Kwuang Tang
- Published: Aug 11, 2022
- Type: Problem & solution

Rate limiting at Ramp must handle third-party API quotas, globally paced Celery tasks, and inbound API traffic limited by authenticated application identities rather than only mutable IP addresses. Celery’s per-worker controls were insufficient for global limits, while queue prefetching could let rate-limited tasks block workers and stall queues. The team created a general framework for comparing algorithms and evaluated fixed-window, sliding-window, leaky/token-bucket, and Generic Cell Rate Algorithm (GCRA) approaches. They selected GCRA for implementation simplicity and compute and memory efficiency, storing a theoretical arrival time in Redis and using a Redis lock to prevent races. The implementation also uses floating-point timestamps, Redis server time, key expiration, unit tests, and manual testing; it has been introduced gradually across the three use cases, with monitoring, while additional algorithms remain planned.


### [When is JIT Faster Than A Compiler?](https://yomu.fyi/post/when-is-jit-faster-than-a-compiler.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Aug 11, 2022
- Type: Explainer

JIT compilation can outperform ahead-of-time compilation or interpretation for highly dynamic languages such as Ruby by optimizing runtime behavior under assumptions that static approaches cannot safely make. Ruby permits redefining operators, equality, iteration, hashing, and other behavior at any time, even from a background thread, forcing an interpreter to check whether definitions changed and limiting AOT code to conservative behavior. YJIT addresses this by compiling frequently used methods with assumptions about current definitions, then invalidating and discarding compiled versions when those assumptions become false; later calls can run interpreted code until a new version is compiled. The post presents this speculative optimization and de-optimization model as the reason a JIT can be faster, while noting that YJIT had known bugs in Ruby 3.1 and was expected to be closer to production-ready for some uses in Ruby 3.2.


### [Launch Week 5 Hackathon](https://yomu.fyi/post/launch-week-5-hackathon.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: Ant Wilson
- Published: Aug 10, 2022
- Type: Announcement

Supabase’s Launch Week 5 Hackathon invites individuals and teams of up to five to build a new open-source project using Supabase during a 10-day event. It starts at 8:00am PT on Friday 12 August 2022, with submissions due by 11:59pm PT on Sunday 21 August; projects may use any language or framework and must be created during the event. The best overall project receives $1,500 in GitHub sponsorship paid as $500 per month for three months, while the listed category prizes include Gold Supabase Caps, with winner and runner-up prizes and caps for every winning team member. Supabase-js v2.0 and Flutter SDK v1.0 are announced during Launch Week, and using them earns extra credit; the supabase-js release candidate is installable with npm install @supabase/supabase-js@rc.


### [How SQLite helps you do ACID](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-sqlite-helps-you-do-acid.md)
- Company: [Fly.io](https://yomu.fyi/company/fly-io.md)
- Published: Aug 10, 2022
- Type: Explainer

SQLite’s rollback journal provides atomicity, isolation, and durability by preserving database state before a transaction changes the main file. Without journaling, an interrupted 4KB page write could corrupt the database; the journal instead records original pages, then permits recovery if commit steps fail. A journal header stores a nonce, the database’s pre-transaction page count, sector size, and page size, while each page record includes its page number, a copy of prior contents, and a 32-bit checksum. The mode allows concurrent readers but makes writers wait for readers and blocks new readers, using SHARED, RESERVED, and PENDING filesystem locks. Its simplicity brings a concurrency bottleneck; WAL and wal2 provide better support for concurrent readers, which the post says will be covered next.


[Newer posts](https://yomu.fyi/posts/page/204.md) · [Older posts](https://yomu.fyi/posts/page/206.md)