---
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

### [How Mike Lyndon is using Supabase to accelerate development of AllPullTogether](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-mike-lyndon-is-using-supabase-to-accelerate-development-of-allpull.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Published: May 26, 2022
- Type: Explainer

A collection of case studies outlines how diverse engineering teams adopt Supabase across various infrastructure, authentication, and database workloads. Companies like Good Tape and Shotgun achieved substantial cost reductions between 60% and 83% by migrating to Supabase managed Postgres and authentication services. For security and data access control, Quilia reduced development time by 75% leveraging Supabase Data API alongside Row Level Security features. In machine learning applications, organizations such as Firecrawl, Berri AI, and Quivr utilize Supabase Vector for PostgreSQL vector embeddings rather than standalone vector databases. Additional migrations include Mobbin transferring 200,000 users from Firebase for authentication, while teams like Replenysh implemented one-time password workflows in under 24 hours.


### [Logbook - 2022-05-26](https://yomu.fyi/post/logbook-2022-05-26.md)
- Company: [Fly.io](https://yomu.fyi/company/fly-io.md)
- Published: May 26, 2022
- Type: Announcement

The May 26, 2022 changelog records product, reliability, documentation, and web UI changes made while work continued toward the Fly Machines launch. Users can configure proxy protocol v2 headers, while Fly HA Postgres instances become read-only and fail health checks at 90% volume usage, creating time to respond before full disks cause crashes. The GraphQL API now names missing apps directly, API telemetry is more selective, and fixes address certificate and volume deletion errors, region-code mutation, DNS validation context, and delayed organization invitations. Documentation covers the Machines API, its reference and FaaS usage, fly.toml updates, and PlanetScale Portals, while redesigned dashboards, app and organization pages, paid plans, documents, and app-level views update the web interface.


### [Implementing Equality in Ruby](https://yomu.fyi/post/implementing-equality-in-ruby.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: May 26, 2022
- Type: Explainer

Ruby has several equality and comparison mechanisms, so custom classes need explicit implementations when instance identity is not the intended meaning. The post distinguishes value objects, whose equality depends on all attributes, from entities, whose equality depends on an explicit identifier; its Point and Employee examples also use class checks, while an entity with a nil ID is unequal to other entities. It defines reflexivity, symmetry, and transitivity as properties to preserve, notes NaN as an exception to reflexivity, and explains #equal?, #eql?, #hash, and #===. For ordered values, #<=> returns -1, 0, 1, or nil, while Comparable supplies relational operators and useful methods including #min, #sort, #between?, and #clamp.


### [Graphcore and Hugging Face Launch New Lineup of IPU-Ready Transformers](https://yomu.fyi/post/graphcore-and-hugging-face-launch-new-lineup-of-ipu-ready-transformers.md)
- Company: [Hugging Face](https://yomu.fyi/company/hugging-face.md)
- Author: Sally Doherty
- Published: May 26, 2022
- Type: Announcement

Graphcore and Hugging Face expanded the range of machine learning modalities and tasks available in Hugging Face Optimum. Developers can now access ten transformer models optimized for Graphcore IPUs across natural language processing, speech, and computer vision. The available architectures include BERT, ViT, GPT-2, RoBERTa, DeBERTa, BART, LXMERT, T5, HuBERT, and Wav2Vec2, complete with IPU configuration files and ready-to-use pre-trained or fine-tuned weights. The integration supports the Bow IPU processor, which uses 3D Wafer-on-Wafer stacking to achieve up to 350 teraFLOPS of AI compute. Optimum also integrates with the Poplar SDK 2.5, enabling compatibility with frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, Docker, and Kubernetes.


### [Introducing Pull Requests and Discussions 🥳](https://yomu.fyi/post/introducing-pull-requests-and-discussions.md)
- Company: [Hugging Face](https://yomu.fyi/company/hugging-face.md)
- Author: Victor Mustar
- Published: May 25, 2022
- Type: Announcement

Hugging Face Hub released pull requests and discussions under a new community tab for all repository types, including models, datasets, and Spaces. This feature enables community members and repository owners to interact directly, propose model card updates, report biased generations, and contribute files. The pull request implementation departs from traditional Git hosting platforms by avoiding forks and standard branches. Instead, contributors push to custom ref branches stored directly on the source repository to bypass creating heavy forks for large machine learning artifacts. Furthermore, the Hub treats discussions and pull requests without hard distinctions, listing them together to streamline collaboration across machine learning assets.


### [Fly Machines: an API for fast-booting VMs](https://yomu.fyi/post/fly-machines-an-api-for-fast-booting-vms.md)
- Company: [Fly.io](https://yomu.fyi/company/fly-io.md)
- Published: May 24, 2022
- Type: Explainer

Fly Machines are virtual machines exposed through a fast REST API, with boot times of about 300ms, intended to support cost-effective standby capacity and scale-to-zero applications. Creation is deliberately separated from starting: it performs a centralized database preflight, reserves host capacity through NATS, records the machine, and prepares the OCI image locally. A later start request goes to the nearest regional API, which sends a direct message to the known host, avoiding database coordination and image pulls; examples cite roughly 10ms locally and 150ms across regions. Processes can exit when idle to leave machines intact for clean restarts, while fly-proxy can start them for incoming HTTP requests. The design trades simplicity for hardware pinning, so capacity or host failures may require fallback machines and redundancy; stopped machines currently incur image-storage charges, such as about $0.15 per month for a 1GB Docker image.


### [Our Favorite Moments From RailsConf 2022](https://yomu.fyi/post/our-favorite-moments-from-railsconf-2022.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: May 24, 2022
- Type: Explainer

RailsConf 2022 returned to an in-person format at Portland’s Oregon Convention Center after a two-year gap, with three days of keynotes, tutorials, and talks on technical and workplace topics. The 16th edition announced three new Rails Core team members, including Shopify’s Jean Boussier, and two new committers, while recurring themes included company investment in Rails, security, Active Records, “build vs buy,” diversity, and burnout. Shopify’s 15 Rails speakers contributed sessions and keynotes, and the recap gathers highlights on open-source staffing, long-term maintenance, developer wellbeing, Rails upgrades, supply-chain attacks, and modularization for “Big Rails.” Specific examples included regexp DOS risks, typosquatting and combosquatting, Rails upgrade automation, Ruby Archaeology, and the history of women in computer science. Because concurrent sessions and hallway conversations limited attendance, a virtual home edition and recordings were scheduled to make more talks available afterward.


### [Lessons Learned From Running Apache Airflow at Scale](https://yomu.fyi/post/lessons-learned-from-running-apache-airflow-at-scale.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: May 23, 2022
- Type: Explainer

Shopify describes operating Apache Airflow 2.2 on Kubernetes with the Celery executor and MySQL 8 for data extraction, machine-learning training, Iceberg maintenance, and DBT modeling. In its largest environment, Shopify runs over 10,000 DAGs, averages over 400 tasks running at a given moment, and executes over 150,000 runs per day, while facing slow file access, metadata growth, ownership tracking, DAG-author control, traffic bursts, and resource contention. The authors describe replacing per-pod GCSFuse access with an in-cluster NFS volume synchronized to GCS, retaining GCS as the user-facing source of truth; they also use 28-day metadata retention, a YAML manifest, DAG policies, and scheduling controls including pools, priority weights, and Celery queues. These measures are presented as ways to improve file performance, limit database growth, identify owners, enforce constraints, and reduce workload interference, though the retention policy does not support durable history-dependent features such as long-running backfills.


### [Efficient Table Pre-training without Real Data: An Introduction to TAPEX](https://yomu.fyi/post/efficient-table-pre-training-without-real-data-an-introduction-to-tape.md)
- Company: [Hugging Face](https://yomu.fyi/company/hugging-face.md)
- Author: Qian Liu
- Published: May 23, 2022
- Type: Problem & solution

Conventional language model pre-training relies on massive natural text corpora and general-purpose objectives like masked language modeling, leaving a substantial gap when applied to structured table tasks. To bridge this gap efficiently, TAPEX (Table Pre-training via Execution) pre-trains a language model, such as BART, by learning a neural SQL executor over a synthetic corpus. The system pairs web tables with systematically sampled executable SQL queries and gathers target execution outputs via an off-the-shelf SQL engine. During downstream fine-tuning, the model consumes natural language questions and flattened tables to predict answers. TAPEX achieved new state-of-the-art results across four benchmark datasets, including WikiTableQuestions and TabFact, while achieving a pre-training speedup of nearly 50 times over TaBERT.


### [Asynchronous Communication is the Great Leveler in Engineering](https://yomu.fyi/post/asynchronous-communication-is-the-great-leveler-in-engineering.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: May 20, 2022
- Type: Explainer

After Shopify became a remote-first company in March 2020, globally distributed engineering teams had to replace office habits and spontaneous context-sharing with remote-focused ways of working. The article presents a spectrum of synchronousness, ranging from video calls and pair programming through chats, recorded video, email, written documents, wikis, and READMEs, with increasing permanence toward the asynchronous end. It argues for writing as a primary communication mode, replacing meetings where possible, recording and rebroadcasting events, documenting decisions, maintaining a single source of truth in the Vault, and defining team norms for overlap, deep work, code review, and shipping across time zones. It also cautions that not everything should become asynchronous: synchronous meetings, pair programming, social activities, and intentional in-person gatherings preserve human connectivity, while asynchronous practices provide flexibility, equal access to information, and durable archives.


### [An Introduction to Q-Learning Part 2/2](https://yomu.fyi/post/an-introduction-to-q-learning-part-2-2.md)
- Company: [Hugging Face](https://yomu.fyi/company/hugging-face.md)
- Author: Thomas Simonini
- Published: May 20, 2022
- Type: Tutorial

Q-Learning serves as a foundational off-policy reinforcement learning method for finding optimal action-value functions before advancing to deep reinforcement learning. The approach employs a tabular Q-function that updates state-action pairs at each step using temporal difference learning. Action selection balances exploration and exploitation via an epsilon-greedy strategy, where epsilon progressively decays as training proceeds. Updates compute a temporal difference target combining the immediate reward and the discounted maximum value of the subsequent state under a greedy policy. This discrepancy between the exploratory acting policy and the greedy updating policy classifies Q-Learning as an off-policy algorithm, enabling agents to learn optimal policies in environments like Frozen Lake and autonomous taxi navigation.


### [How Sempre Health is leveraging the Expert Acceleration Program to accelerate their ML roadmap](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-sempre-health-is-leveraging-the-expert-acceleration-program-to-acc.md)
- Company: [Hugging Face](https://yomu.fyi/company/hugging-face.md)
- Author: system
- Published: May 19, 2022
- Type: Problem & solution

Sempre Health handles thousands of inbound patient text messages daily to manage medication adherence and prescription discounts. Although an existing rule-based system caught around 80% of inbound texts, the team required statistical machine learning to improve message parsing and reduce manual workload. Collaborating with Hugging Face through the Expert Acceleration Program, the engineers received guidance on labeling strategies, problem formulation, and model selection. They deployed a natural language processing pipeline into production to automatically classify and respond to incoming messages or initiate automated actions like refill requests. Since deployment, the new NLP system automatically handles nearly 20% of incoming messages that previously required operational support tickets.


### [Putting ethical principles at the core of the research lifecycle](https://yomu.fyi/post/putting-ethical-principles-at-the-core-of-the-research-lifecycle.md)
- Company: [Hugging Face](https://yomu.fyi/company/hugging-face.md)
- Author: Lucile Saulnier, Siddharth Karamcheti, Hugo Laurençon, Leo Tronchon, Thomas Wang, Victor Sanh, Amanpreet Singh, Giada Pistilli, Sasha Luccioni, Yacine Jernite, Margaret Mitchell, Douwe Kiela
- Published: May 19, 2022
- Type: Announcement

Machine learning research risks introducing algorithmic biases, privacy violations, and malicious applications when ethical considerations are omitted from project lifecycles. To address these challenges, Hugging Face's multimodal learning group established an ethical charter at the inception of their multimodal project with input from ethics and governance experts. The charter defines content policies barring detrimental activities, the generation of personally identifiable information, and incautious applications in high-risk fields like medicine, law, and finance. Guiding values emphasize transparency, fairness through data and model bias reviews, self-critical curation, open reproducibility, and proper licensing attribution. Because ethical values like open data sharing and personal privacy can conflict, the team plans to iteratively evaluate trade-offs and track document revisions on GitHub.


### [Double Entry Transition Tables: How We Track State Changes At Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/post/double-entry-transition-tables-how-we-track-state-changes-at-shopify.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: May 18, 2022
- Type: Explainer

Shopify needed a reliable way to count merchants using Shopify Balance over time, where usage requires both an active Shopify Balance account and an active Shopify account. The data team built accounts\_transition\_facts with double entry transition tables, a format that represents each state change as a -1 row for the previous state and a +1 row for the new state. Individual attribute tables use account\_id, transition\_at, and an index that breaks timestamp ties; the pipeline merges attributes, carries forward missing values, and generates net\_change rows. Because net\_change is additive, queries can sum it while filtering statuses, group results by date, or feed daily aggregates, while additional attributes can be added without rewriting existing SQL or PySpark. The initial build required substantial effort but produced a reporting structure intended to scale with Shopify Balance’s growing complexity.


### [An Introduction to Q-Learning Part 1](https://yomu.fyi/post/an-introduction-to-q-learning-part-1.md)
- Company: [Hugging Face](https://yomu.fyi/company/hugging-face.md)
- Author: Thomas Simonini
- Published: May 18, 2022
- Type: Explainer

Value-based reinforcement learning centers on finding optimal policies indirectly through value functions. In these methods, practitioners define policy behavior manually, such as using greedy or epsilon-greedy policies, rather than training the policy directly. Value estimation relies on two primary formulations: the state-value function, which outputs expected returns from a state, and the action-value function, which evaluates state-action pairs. Because summing all future rewards across an entire trajectory is computationally demanding, algorithms adopt the Bellman equation alongside learning strategies like Monte Carlo or Temporal Difference (TD) learning. Monte Carlo updates value functions only after complete episodes using actual returns, whereas one-step TD learning bootstraps updates at each individual step using immediate rewards and discounted estimates of subsequent states.


### [Search architecture revamp](https://yomu.fyi/post/search-architecture-revamp.md)
- Company: [Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab.md)
- Author: Lipeng Zhang
- Published: May 17, 2022
- Type: Problem & solution

Before 2021, Grab’s Deliveries search architecture used an inverted index for textual matching, leaving it unable to account for user intention, context, or non-textual recall methods. Queries such as “Roti Prata” could prioritize merchant names over dishes, while the same query could imply different objectives by time or location; merging Ads and organic results at the Deliveries API layer also discarded recall-stage data. The revamped flow adds boosting, multi-recall, and ranking, enabling intent recognition, query expansion, embedding-based and graph-based recall, and joint ranking across business verticals. A platform-defined framework assembles service-team plugins through configuration, separating core flow from application logic and allowing components such as Ads and Mart recall to be reused across Food, Mart, and universal search flows. The resulting platform provides intent recognition, semantic search, mixed Ads-and-organic ranking, and simpler onboarding, while making new search modules and use cases easier to add.


### [Machine Learning Experts - Sasha Luccioni](https://yomu.fyi/post/machine-learning-experts-sasha-luccioni.md)
- Company: [Hugging Face](https://yomu.fyi/company/hugging-face.md)
- Author: Britney Muller
- Published: May 17, 2022
- Type: Explainer

Research scientist Sasha Luccioni discusses her work on evaluating the environmental, societal, and ethical impacts of machine learning models. Her research includes measuring and reducing artificial intelligence emissions through initiatives such as CodeCarbon, regional grid selection, and the BigScience carbon footprint working group. BigScience aims to make large language models transparent by curating multilingual datasets, assessing manufacturing and compute costs, and analyzing participant workloads. Luccioni also emphasizes expanding model evaluation criteria beyond standard accuracy metrics to encompass efficiency, emissions, and subset-level fairness across demographics and data features. Overall, these efforts aim to democratize artificial intelligence and encourage deliberate trade-offs between model performance and computational resource demands.


### [Announcing the Hugging Face Fellowship Program](https://yomu.fyi/post/announcing-the-hugging-face-fellowship-program.md)
- Company: [Hugging Face](https://yomu.fyi/company/hugging-face.md)
- Author: merve, Omar Espejel
- Published: May 17, 2022
- Type: Announcement

Hugging Face announced the launch of the Hugging Face Fellowship Program to support and empower prominent contributors across the open-source machine learning ecosystem. The initiative provides selected fellows with personalized resources according to their project goals, including computing power, merchandise, and official recognition from Hugging Face. Candidate selection operates on an ongoing basis through nominations made by Hugging Face team members or existing fellows, evaluated primarily on past contributions toward democratizing machine learning. Eligible open-source activities span model releases on the Hub, documentation translations, library tooling improvements for frameworks like TensorFlow and Keras, and community hackathons. Participation does not constitute employment with Hugging Face, though the program serves as a platform to scale grassroots community impact across diverse machine learning domains.


### [Shopify Invests in Research for Ruby at Scale](https://yomu.fyi/post/shopify-invests-in-research-for-ruby-at-scale.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: May 16, 2022
- Type: Announcement

Shopify says it has invested nearly half a million dollars over the past year in academic research directed toward Ruby and the needs of its community. The work is intended to make programming-language developments account for Ruby’s metaprogramming, loose C extension API, and large-scale workloads with frequent redeployments, rather than assuming long virtual-machine warmup periods. Collaborators include Laurence Tratt, who is investigating hardware meta-tracing and basic-block stitching to generate a just-in-time compiler from the Ruby interpreter; Steve Blackburn, whose group is putting the MMTk garbage-collection toolkit into Ruby; and Stefan Marr, who is studying interpreter speed and startup and warmup time. The program also connects these researchers with Shopify’s Ruby engineers and complements internal work on YJIT and TruffleRuby, with more research and academic papers planned.


### [Gradio 3.0 is Out!](https://yomu.fyi/post/gradio-3-0-is-out.md)
- Company: [Hugging Face](https://yomu.fyi/company/hugging-face.md)
- Author: Abubakar Abid
- Published: May 16, 2022
- Type: Announcement

Gradio 3.0 introduces a ground-up redesign of the Gradio library to improve machine learning demo development and browser performance. The frontend has been rebuilt using modern technologies such as Svelte, resulting in smaller payloads, faster page load times, and cleaner visual designs suitable for embedding in blog posts. Component updates include revamping the Dataframe component to support CSV drag-and-drop, introducing new UI elements like Gallery, and adding the TabbedInterface class to group demos under distinct tabs. Developers also gain access to Gradio Blocks, a low-level Python API enabling custom layouts, multi-step interfaces, dynamic component property modifications, and complex data flows. A competition called the Gradio Blocks Party has been organized through the end of May to encourage community adoption.


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