---
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

### [Slack Consolidate: a slackbot built with Python and Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/post/slack-consolidate-a-slackbot-built-with-python-and-supabase.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: Rodrigo Mansueli
- Published: Aug 9, 2022
- Type: Tutorial

Slack Consolidate is a Python Slackbot that watches configured Slack channels and reposts messages to destination channels according to routing rules stored in Supabase. The tutorial sets up Slack app permissions from a manifest, installs the Python SDKs, configures environment variables for Supabase and Slack tokens, and creates slack\_channels and slack\_watcher PostgreSQL tables. Its polling loop loads channel mappings, fetches up to 20 recent messages, converts Slack timestamps to ISO-compatible values, inserts messages into the watcher table, builds message links, and posts through a bot client; it waits 1.4 seconds between channel processing and rescans channel configuration hourly. Public-channel posts contain a link, while private-channel posts include the message text as well. The project also provides a Google Colab notebook for trying the example.


### [Six Tips for Staying Technical as a CTO](https://yomu.fyi/post/six-tips-for-staying-technical-as-a-cto.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Aug 9, 2022
- Type: Tutorial

The article examines how a CTO can remain technically credible after moving from the individual contributor track into leadership. It argues that leadership inevitably reduces technical depth because performance reviews, one-on-ones, organizational communication, and other people responsibilities limit time in code, making the transition an intentional choice for those who value managing people. Its recommended practices include voracious reading, coding as a hobby, participating in hackathons, learning directly from more technical colleagues, maintaining a private network of technical advisors, and aggressively clearing bugs, incident-remediation work, and backlog. The author illustrates hands-on learning with Shopify’s Spin environment, which provisions a cloud development instance and opens a repository in about 30 seconds, and concludes that controlling operational issues preserves time for innovation and technical leadership.


### [Volume Expansion and Snapshot Restores](https://yomu.fyi/post/volume-expansion-and-snapshot-restores.md)
- Company: [Fly.io](https://yomu.fyi/company/fly-io.md)
- Published: Aug 4, 2022
- Type: Announcement

Fly.io introduces two improvements to its persistent storage volumes: extending an existing volume and restoring a regular volume from a snapshot. Previously, increasing capacity required provisioning an empty volume and copying data, whereas the new fly volume extend command resizes it after the attached app restarts; regular apps restart automatically, while Machines VMs require manual restarts. Individual restores are available from flyctl v0.0.363 by supplying --snapshot-id when creating a new volume, after listing snapshots and selecting the desired ID. Snapshots are taken daily, stored in object storage for five days, and can restore data only to a volume at least as large as the source.


### [Spin Cycle: Shopify’s SFN Team Overcomes a Cloud-Development Spiral](https://yomu.fyi/post/spin-cycle-shopify-s-sfn-team-overcomes-a-cloud-development-spiral.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Aug 4, 2022
- Type: Problem & solution

Shopify’s Fulfillment Network (SFN) worked to run its monolithic Rails application in Spin, a cloud-based development tool that provides on-demand Kubernetes containers instead of local service environments. Because SFN glues together Shopify and many external services, the team had to decide whether to run, mock, or share each dependency, while frequent changes to SFN, Spin, and those dependencies created regressions. The three-engineer team identified a human feedback dynamic: painful Spin experiences discouraged adoption, which allowed more Spin-specific breakage, while regular use could expose regressions before merge. To break that spiral, the team prioritized basic functionality for common validation flows, fixed disruptions there, and asked developers to use Spin daily and add missing capabilities; the intended outcome was a self-reinforcing “Loop of Happy Equilibrium,” though the transition is described as a hypothesis.


### [Supabase Beta July 2022](https://yomu.fyi/post/supabase-beta-july-2022.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: Ant Wilson
- Published: Aug 3, 2022
- Type: Announcement

Supabase published its July 2022 beta update alongside the announcement of Launch Week 5 scheduled for August 15-19. Key feature releases include a developer preview of Flutter SDK 1.0 with an emphasis on developer experience and Auth Helpers supporting server-side rendering environments like SvelteKit. The team introduced pg\_jsonschema, an experimental 10-line Postgres extension created with pgx to enforce structure on json and jsonb columns. Security and identity features were expanded with an hCaptcha integration in authentication settings to block bot attacks. Additionally, email one-time passwords now accommodate lengths between 6 and 10 digits, while the GenerateLink method returns explicit verification metadata.


### [Supabase Flutter SDK 1.0 Developer Preview](https://yomu.fyi/post/supabase-flutter-sdk-1-0-developer-preview.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: Tyler Shukert
- Published: Aug 2, 2022
- Type: Announcement

Supabase released the Developer Preview of version 1.0 for its Flutter SDK, prioritizing improvements to developer experience across Dart applications. The new version eliminates the need for boilerplate state classes, automating authentication state persistence and deep link processing directly after initialization. To better align with Dart conventions, the SDK now throws exceptions across auth, storage, and Postgrest instead of returning error objects, while also deprecating the .execute() method for database queries. Switching to the app\_links library expands deep linking support to macOS and Windows alongside existing mobile and web platforms. Supabase also introduced a companion Auth UI library for prebuilt authentication interfaces and announced plans to integrate the Multiplayer Realtime engine in the stable release.


### [Mastering React’s Stable Values](https://yomu.fyi/post/mastering-react-s-stable-values.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Aug 2, 2022
- Type: Explainer

React stable values are values, often returned by hooks, that retain the same value across renders, and the post explains why their identity matters in effects, callbacks, memoization, and component rendering. useState and useReducer update functions and useRef objects are stable, while array literals, object literals, and anonymous functions are recreated on each render; useCallback and useMemo can produce stable values under appropriate dependencies. Unstable dependencies prevent useEffect behavior from remaining limited to intended changes and stop useCallback and useMemo cached results from being reused, while an unstable callback passed to useFocusEffect causes repeated unsubscribe and resubscribe cycles. The post also contrasts invoking an inline helper with rendering it as a component, explains why the latter can rebuild a React Native subtree on every render, and recommends defining components outside other components and using React.memo or callbacks judiciously.


### [10 Tips for Building Resilient Payment Systems](https://yomu.fyi/post/10-tips-for-building-resilient-payment-systems.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Jul 28, 2022
- Type: Explainer

The post distills lessons from five years working on Shopify’s payment infrastructure into guidance for building systems that tolerate failure and large-scale traffic. It frames the advice partly around onboarding developers who were new to payments or Shopify’s scale, and notes that load testing for BFCM 2021 began in July with globally distributed load generation. It recommends low timeouts across HTTP clients and data stores, circuit breakers such as Semian, and capacity reasoning with Little’s Law, rate limiting, and load shedding. Monitoring should cover latency, traffic, errors, and saturation, while structured, machine-readable logs make centralized records searchable; load tests use benchmark gateways that mimic production partner latency and capacity. For incidents, Shopify uses defined roles, Slack-based coordination, and retrospectives that turn incorrect assumptions into safeguards and training material.


### [SQLite Internals: Pages & B-trees](https://yomu.fyi/post/sqlite-internals-pages-b-trees.md)
- Company: [Fly.io](https://yomu.fyi/company/fly-io.md)
- Published: Jul 27, 2022
- Type: Explainer

SQLite stores table rows as encoded byte arrays, and understanding that representation explains how a simple database preserves compact records and supports efficient growth. Using a sandwich table as an example, the post decodes a row’s varints, type values, UTF-8 text, IEEE-754 floating-point value, and integer count, then examines 4KB pages, cell-pointer indexes, and page headers. SQLite’s b+tree places records in leaf pages and key-range indexes in interior pages; page splits add levels as the database grows, while searches traverse only one page per tree level. The examples estimate that a depth-four tree can hold about 500³ leaf pages, or roughly 476GB, while requiring four page reads for a lookup. The discussion concludes that integer storage is more space-efficient than floating-point storage and that internals such as record encoding and PRAGMAs become less opaque when understood.


### [Launching Laravel Bytes](https://yomu.fyi/post/launching-laravel-bytes.md)
- Company: [Fly.io](https://yomu.fyi/company/fly-io.md)
- Published: Jul 26, 2022
- Type: Announcement

Fly is launching Laravel Bytes, a new publication focused on Laravel and on deploying Laravel applications across the globe. The announcement frames the site as a place for future discussions of global-user-base considerations, along with Laravel tips, strategies, how-tos, and coverage of Livewire and real-time apps. Laravel is supported by the fly launch command, and the documented quick start is to enter an existing Laravel app directory and run fly launch. A more comprehensive guide covers running Laravel on Fly with Redis, MySQL, queue workers, and cron tasks, while the post directs readers to deployment documentation and says a Laravel app can be launched in a few minutes.


### [Data-Centric Machine Learning: Building Shopify Inbox’s Message Classification Model](https://yomu.fyi/post/data-centric-machine-learning-building-shopify-inbox-s-message-classif.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Jul 21, 2022
- Type: Problem & solution

Shopify Inbox needed to classify millions of monthly customer messages so merchants could prioritize responses and guide product decisions. The team adopted a data-centric approach, improving the dataset rather than primarily changing model architectures. An initial prototype used Universal Sentence Encoder embeddings, UMAP and HDBScan clustering, semi-supervised labeling, and a neural classifier, but reached about 70% accuracy with 35% high-confidence coverage. For version 2.0, the team created a more explicit taxonomy, used human-labeled data and fine-tuned DistilBERT, while addressing privacy and class imbalance through data handling and targeted annotation. In production, version 2.0 achieved about 90% accuracy and 80% high-confidence coverage, although the taxonomy and training data require ongoing updates as conversation trends change.


### [5 Steps to Bounce Back from a Negative Performance Review](https://yomu.fyi/post/5-steps-to-bounce-back-from-a-negative-performance-review.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Jul 20, 2022
- Type: Tutorial

An unfavorable performance review can feel like failing an exam, but it can also identify a clearer path to success when treated as feedback about role expectations rather than a judgment of personal worth. The five-step process is to avoid taking the review personally, adopt a growth mindset, clarify expectations with a lead, define measurable success, and establish a feedback loop. The author illustrates the approach with feedback about taking too long to ship code, which led to using smaller incremental improvements, and recommends tying goals to KPIs or other tangible metrics, supported by a lead or mentor. Regular check-ins, an up-to-date brag doc, and documented accomplishments can reduce surprises at the next review and help connect feedback to quarterly goals and observable progress.


### [How LiveView Took on a Life of Its Own](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-liveview-took-on-a-life-of-its-own.md)
- Company: [Fly.io](https://yomu.fyi/company/fly-io.md)
- Published: Jul 19, 2022
- Type: Explainer

Phoenix LiveView began as an attempt to build dynamic server-rendered applications without writing JavaScript, using the server for interactions such as realtime reservation updates. Its initial design used stateful Phoenix Channels, a WebSocket connection, client event bindings, and full template re-renders sent back as HTML, a model that worked but produced redundant server work and large payloads. Adding Phoenix PubSub let LiveViews subscribe to reservation events and update all connected browsers through ordinary Elixir callbacks, without client changes. The implementation then evolved around diffing dynamic values, shared static template references, and cached live component templates, reducing transferred data and avoiding growing client bundles. The post concludes that this programming model sidesteps HTTP for dynamic features, with compact payloads and less client-side code.


### [Implementing "seen by" functionality with Postgres](https://yomu.fyi/post/implementing-seen-by-functionality-with-postgres.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: Victor
- Published: Jul 18, 2022
- Type: Benchmark

Tracking unique post views within Postgres presents trade-offs between counter accuracy, row bloat, and concurrent write performance. To evaluate options under an architecture constraint preventing external dependencies, a benchmark suite generated synthetic users, skewed post distributions, and replayed view actions. The benchmark tested four implementations: a naive counter column, an hstore key-value approach, an association table, and HyperLogLog (HLL). Benchmark results demonstrated that simple-hstore achieved the lowest average latency among deduplicating approaches at 2.15 milliseconds, closely followed by HLL at 2.16 milliseconds. Despite hstore's raw performance in prototypes, HLL is recommended for production because it circumvents row bloat as view counts grow while avoiding expensive row counts.


### [Logbook - 2022-07-18](https://yomu.fyi/post/logbook-2022-07-18.md)
- Company: [Fly.io](https://yomu.fyi/company/fly-io.md)
- Published: Jul 18, 2022
- Type: Announcement

This Logbook entry records Fly.io product, platform, documentation, and interface changes on 2022-07-18. Highlights include $99 in usage credits for the Pro Plan, SOC2 compliance, persistent-volume expansion through fly volumes extend, SFTP access to apps over 6PN and WireGuard, and routing changes intended to improve latency. flyctl gained debug JSON formatting, expanded machine-app deployment and status commands, preserved mounted volumes during deployments, and added rolling deploys that wait for each VM to start. The entry also describes fixes for autoscaling, the Fly Redis image, GraphQL validation, Phoenix launches, and dashboard presentation, alongside updated Laravel and persistent-volume documentation and improved Heroku token-failure emails.


### [Spin Infrastructure Adventures: Containers, Systemd, and CGroups](https://yomu.fyi/post/spin-infrastructure-adventures-containers-systemd-and-cgroups.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Jul 15, 2022
- Type: Incident / postmortem

Spin’s infrastructure team investigated instance instability after Kubernetes nodes experienced frequent failures, including roughly five nodes per day, and instances showed memory use that could exceed their assigned limits. Spin runs instances as Kubernetes pods, with systemd inside each container managing initialization and processes, and the team compared resource behavior across kubectl exec and Spin shell sessions. Stress tests showed that processes started through kubectl exec entered the kubepods cgroup hierarchy, while processes launched through Spin shell entered a hierarchy with an effectively unlimited memory limit, causing usage to appear on the node rather than the pod. Experiments comparing containerd, Docker, and Podman identified systemd cgroup delegation as the relevant difference: Podman isolated systemd and its child processes correctly, while the production setup used cgroupfs. The team identified switching COS to the systemd cgroup driver as the forthcoming fix, while noting that the bind-mounted cgroup filesystem enabled the escape.


### [Revamped Auth Helpers for Supabase (with SvelteKit support)](https://yomu.fyi/post/revamped-auth-helpers-for-supabase-with-sveltekit-support.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: Andrew Smith
- Published: Jul 13, 2022
- Type: Announcement

Supabase has released an updated version of its framework-specific Auth Helpers libraries, introducing official support for SvelteKit alongside existing React and Next.js tooling to simplify server-side rendering authentication. The updated libraries transition from the @supabase/supabase-auth-helpers namespace to @supabase/auth-helpers within a dedicated monorepo managed by Turborepo. Structuring the codebase with Turborepo and changesets enables publishing isolated packages per framework through GitHub Actions, ensuring each helper contains only its own relevant dependencies. Versioning has also been reset to sub-0.x to reflect early framework lifecycles like pre-1.0 SvelteKit and manage expectations for future breaking changes. Meanwhile, the team has documented migration steps from previous packages and announced that Remix Auth Helpers are currently in active development.


### [How we automated FAQ responses at Grab](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-we-automated-faq-responses-at-grab.md)
- Company: [Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab.md)
- Author: Preeti Karkera
- Published: Jul 13, 2022
- Type: Problem & solution

Internal engineering on-call engineers at Grab spent substantial working hours handling repetitive questions in Slack channels, such as how-to inquiries and access permission requests. To resolve this without building an in-house tool, the team conducted an anonymized vendor comparison and selected OneBar through an employee voting process and a phased proof-of-concept. Initial rollouts were restricted by contract to 20 channels, leading the team to prioritize deployment based on Slack message volume and member counts. Populating the knowledge base required roughly a quarter of consistent updates alongside tech talks, while a targeted crowdsourcing campaign among new onboarders expanded the glossary and grew usage to approximately 3,000 users.


### [SOC2: The Screenshots Will Continue Until Security Improves](https://yomu.fyi/post/soc2-the-screenshots-will-continue-until-security-improves.md)
- Company: [Fly.io](https://yomu.fyi/company/fly-io.md)
- Published: Jul 7, 2022
- Type: Explainer

Fly.io’s SOC2 certification prompts an explanation of what the audit measures, when companies should pursue it, and what security value customers should assign to it. The post characterizes SOC2 as an accounting-style audit of documented company security processes, centered on an auditor-customized Document Request List (DRL) and screenshots, rather than adversarial product testing. It distinguishes Type I’s point-in-time snapshot from Type II’s multi-month confirmation and recommends doing the engineering work early, while delaying certification until customer demand justifies it. Fly.io prepared for more than a year and describes controls including Google SSO, certificate-based SSH access through Teleport, VPN gating, GitHub SSO, and session audit logs. The resulting certification improved processes but remains a weak positive security signal: SOC2 can miss much of a company’s technical security model, so penetration tests and clear security reporting still matter.


### [Shopify’s Technical Interview Process: What to Expect and How to Prepare](https://yomu.fyi/post/shopify-s-technical-interview-process-what-to-expect-and-how-to-prepar.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Jul 7, 2022
- Type: Explainer

Shopify’s guide outlines the interview process for individual-contributor technical roles, while noting that stages can vary by role and team and that leadership hiring may add team-specific interviews. Candidates may have a one-hour recruiter “Life Story” conversation, a 40-minute CoderPad coding exercise, a 75–90-minute remote pair-programming session, and a 60-minute Technical Deep Dive focused on previous projects. The coding exercise assesses algorithmic thinking and problem solving, while pairing emphasizes communication, implementation, edge cases, scalability, limitations, and testability. The deep dive asks candidates to discuss impact, architecture, technical decisions, trade-offs, failures, successes, lessons learned, teamwork, and mentorship; the guide also recommends clarifying questions, running code early, using permitted references, and choosing projects they know well.


[Newer posts](https://yomu.fyi/posts/page/205.md) · [Older posts](https://yomu.fyi/posts/page/207.md)