---
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

### [Accessibility and Real-time Apps: Clearing Fog and Picking Fruit](https://yomu.fyi/post/accessibility-and-real-time-apps-clearing-fog-and-picking-fruit.md)
- Company: [Fly.io](https://yomu.fyi/company/fly-io.md)
- Published: Apr 25, 2022
- Type: Tutorial

This post describes an initial accessibility pass on LiveBeats, a Phoenix LiveView reference app with real-time social features, focused on screen reader users before real-time updates are introduced. It recommends labeling meaningful controls and images with visible text, alt, SVG desc, or aria-label, while hiding decorative imagery with aria-hidden="true" or blank alt attributes. It then explains that semantic HTML such as button, main, nav, and article is preferable to ARIA roles where available, while named regions can improve navigation and orientation. Roles also create behavioral obligations: a role="button" control must support focus and Enter or Space activation, and role="application" can force focus mode, blocking caret-browsing conveniences unless the app supplies comprehensive interaction behavior. The initial work clears foundational accessibility issues, with later work reserved for presenting live changes accessibly.


### [Introducing Hugging Face for Education 🤗](https://yomu.fyi/post/introducing-hugging-face-for-education.md)
- Company: [Hugging Face](https://yomu.fyi/company/hugging-face.md)
- Author: Violette
- Published: Apr 25, 2022
- Type: Announcement

Hugging Face established an initiative to teach machine learning to 5 million people by the end of 2023. As machine learning expands across software development and impacts non-technical users, adapting workforce skills and assisting educators with ethical considerations become critical challenges. The educational framework provides browser-based model testing widgets, documentation on model biases, and free courses covering Natural Language Processing, Deep Reinforcement Learning, and interactive demo creation. Instructors receive free infrastructure to create Hub classrooms, alongside a multilingual toolkit spanning topics like Transformers and Gradio. Through ongoing global tours and free compute events, the organization supports collaborative machine learning education across diverse experience levels.


### [Supercharged Customer Service with Machine Learning](https://yomu.fyi/post/supercharged-customer-service-with-machine-learning.md)
- Company: [Hugging Face](https://yomu.fyi/company/hugging-face.md)
- Author: Patrick von Platen
- Published: Apr 25, 2022
- Type: Tutorial

Customer support teams often receive high volumes of messages that cannot all be answered manually. To prioritize urgent inquiries, support workflows can be modeled as a text classification task to identify the most unsatisfied customers. Using the Hugging Face ecosystem, an NLP pipeline is established by selecting the Amazon reviews multi dataset and fine-tuning a DeBERTa model for sentiment classification across five granular categories. Evaluation on test data shows that the model identifies roughly 95% of unsatisfied messages with an 11.7% false-positive rate on satisfied messages, potentially reducing human triage workload by 83%. For production deployment, performance can be optimized through hardware acceleration, lower precision arithmetic, open-source libraries like Optimum and ONNX Runtime, and inference servers.


### [Building a Business System Integration and Automation Platform at Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/post/building-a-business-system-integration-and-automation-platform-at-shop.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Apr 22, 2022
- Type: Problem & solution

Shopify needed a maintainable way to connect increasingly modular business systems whose interfaces ranged from SOAP and FTP to REST and GraphQL. The company evaluated Mulesoft but found that its proprietary XML and Java virtual machine stack isolated the team from Shopify’s development ecosystem and complicated access to internal services and infrastructure. It instead built a Ruby on Rails integration platform around minimal validation, transparent data transformations, flexible client support, security, reusable components, documentation, and request-level testing with WebMock. The implementation favors direct manipulation of JSON hashes because that keeps mappings visible, while acknowledging risks such as typos and complex mock management. After a year, the platform had 18 integrations, had migrated all Mulesoft applications, and enabled other teams to build integrations, with ongoing work on testing and onboarding.


### [CO2 Emissions and the 🤗 Hub: Leading the Charge](https://yomu.fyi/post/co2-emissions-and-the-hub-leading-the-charge.md)
- Company: [Hugging Face](https://yomu.fyi/company/hugging-face.md)
- Author: Sasha Luccioni, Zachary Mueller, Nate Raw
- Published: Apr 22, 2022
- Type: Tutorial

Training and deploying machine learning models produces greenhouse gas emissions determined by infrastructure runtime, hardware type, and energy grid carbon intensity. Hugging Face introduced mechanisms to measure, report, and filter models based on their carbon footprint to improve ecological transparency. Using the huggingface\_hub library, practitioners can query HfApi.list\_models with an emissions\_thresholds parameter to filter models by maximum or minimum carbon emissions measured in grams. In addition, installing the codecarbon package enables the Transformers Trainer to automatically attach CodeCarbonCallback and log training emissions to an emissions.csv file. Users can then publish these measured values directly into model card metadata under co2\_eq\_emissions for public tracking.


### [Works With Supabase - announcing our Partner Gallery](https://yomu.fyi/post/works-with-supabase-announcing-our-partner-gallery.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: Alaister Young, Shane Rice, Thor Schaeff
- Published: Apr 20, 2022
- Type: Announcement

Supabase launched its Partner Gallery to showcase integration partners and certified expert agencies assisting developers on the platform. The open-source gallery is built using the Supabase stack, featuring Postgres Full Text Search, next-image with Supabase Storage, and email triggers via Supabase Edge Functions. Initial agency partners include Morrow, a UK app development agency specializing in React Native and Supabase, alongside Quinence, a Singapore-based product development studio. Integrated tooling covers authentication systems like Clerk and Stytch, database and developer utilities like Prisma, Snaplet, Vercel, and pgMustard, and low-code builders including Appsmith, Draftbit, Plasmic, and Teta. These ecosystem integrations allow developers to manage Postgres workflows, secure user authorization, and build applications across web and mobile platforms.


### [Logbook - 2022-04-20](https://yomu.fyi/post/logbook-2022-04-20.md)
- Company: [Fly.io](https://yomu.fyi/company/fly-io.md)
- Published: Apr 20, 2022
- Type: Announcement

Fly.io’s April 20, 2022 logbook combines a recent changelog with an account of how the company produces updates for a distributed platform running apps in VMs on hardware around the world. It records added IAD capacity, backup regions disabled by default, flyctl releases with NuxtJS and RedwoodJS deployment support, and reliability improvements to postgres operations, failover handling, error reporting, builders, logs, and releases. The post says commits and status updates often fail to capture completed user-relevant work or its impact. It therefore asks engineers to write updates that explain both what changed and why it matters. Collection is automated through a Slack bot and an app that collates entries into feeds, while the team plans to cultivate stronger changelog habits.


### [Möbius: Shopify’s Unified Edge](https://yomu.fyi/post/mo-bius-shopify-s-unified-edge.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Apr 20, 2022
- Type: Problem & solution

Shopify had more than six traffic paths for its core, services, PII-restricted systems, and mTLS-authenticated APIs, making platform-wide features harder to deploy and traffic behavior harder to observe. Möbius and Shopify Front End (SFE) were designed together: Möbius terminates TCP and TLS near clients and forwards requests to SFE, while SFE routes them from regional clusters to application clusters. SFE uses nginx deployments with custom Lua and a centralized API fed by Kubernetes controllers, enabling routing and active/active or active/passive load balancing without DNS TTL delays. Möbius automates edge domain configuration, DNS ownership validation, and certificate acquisition through vendor APIs, so application owners generally only need to change DNS. The unified design standardizes edge protection and observability, supports future edge capabilities, and leaves exceptions for services whose dependencies could create crash loops.


### [How we reduced our CI YAML files from 1800 lines to 50 lines](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-we-reduced-our-ci-yaml-files-from-1800-lines-to-50-lines.md)
- Company: [Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab.md)
- Author: Jia Long Loh
- Published: Apr 19, 2022
- Type: Problem & solution

Grab's Cauldron Machine Learning Platform team managed continuous delivery across multiple pipelines by using nested GitLab CI configurations, but soon encountered platform limitations such as the 100-include ceiling and bloated 1,800-line YAML files. To address these constraints, the team implemented GitLab Dynamic Child Pipelines to programmatically create execution stages on the fly. They built a command-line utility in Rust that runs git diff against the base branch, extracts pipeline and stage metadata using configurable stop patterns, and applies a template to produce a dynamic CI definition. On the master branch, the tool fetches the diff artifact from the source branch through the GitLab API to execute identical generation logic. This architectural shift reduced the root CI file from 1,800 lines down to a constant 50 lines, allowing configuration size to remain stable regardless of repository growth.


### [Bring the Func Hackathon Winners 2022](https://yomu.fyi/post/bring-the-func-hackathon-winners-2022.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: Thor Schaeff
- Published: Apr 18, 2022
- Type: Announcement

Supabase announced the winners and runners-up of the 2022 Bring the Func Hackathon following their recent launch week. The event featured multiple project categories, showcasing applications built by community developers with Supabase tools. In the main showcase, mintbaseXsupabase won for an Instagram-like NFT browsing platform, while Pgm Dictionary served as runner-up with an UrbanDictionary clone built on Next.js, Mantine, and Supabase. The Edge Functions category highlighted Wen NFT for managing NFT community access and runner-up DocuPool for token-unlocked document sharing. Finally, AbileneX won the Most Fun or Visually Pleasing category for gathering feedback on ideas, alongside project management tool Kardow as runner-up.


### [Supabase Beta March 2022](https://yomu.fyi/post/supabase-beta-march-2022.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: Ant Wilson
- Published: Apr 15, 2022
- Type: Announcement

Supabase announced several major platform updates for March 2022, introducing global edge deployments for JavaScript and TypeScript functions developed and tested locally. Database querying expanded to support GraphQL through an open-source, portable Postgres extension. Supabase Realtime received support for multiplayer and presence to enable collaborative applications, alongside enterprise and scale capabilities including Point-In-Time-Recovery, SLAs, premium support, a Prometheus endpoint, and an observability dashboard. To enhance security, an integration with GitHub secret scanning automatically notifies developers and rolls exposed service\_role keys found in public repositories. Additional updates include the PostgREST 10 pre-release, Next-JS auth helpers, new OAuth providers, and full remote hiring across engineering, marketing, and human resources.


### [Code Ranges: A Deeper Look at Ruby Strings](https://yomu.fyi/post/code-ranges-a-deeper-look-at-ruby-strings.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Apr 14, 2022
- Type: Explainer

Ruby's string model supports mutable and immutable operations, per-object or per-file freezing, and more than 100 encodings, while permitting byte sequences invalid for their attached encoding. This flexibility helps legacy and unusual platforms but makes encoding checks, validity scans, and character-boundary handling part of many operations. To reduce repeated O(n) validation scans, Ruby implementations cache each string's state in a four-valued code range: unknown, 7bit, valid, or broken. The post explains how these values map to public methods, how MRI stores them in two header bits, and how JRuby and TruffleRuby represent them differently. It also describes code ranges as inputs to fast and slow paths and as useful but fallible cache information, especially for native extensions and string-heavy metaprogramming.


### [Machine Learning Experts - Lewis Tunstall](https://yomu.fyi/post/machine-learning-experts-lewis-tunstall.md)
- Company: [Hugging Face](https://yomu.fyi/company/hugging-face.md)
- Author: Britney Muller
- Published: Apr 13, 2022
- Type: Explainer

In this interview with Britney Muller, Hugging Face machine learning engineer Lewis Tunstall discusses his background, his book Natural Language Processing with Transformers, and tooling optimizations for deploying transformer models. Tunstall notes that large model parameter sizes often lead to high latency, making off-the-shelf transformers impractical for responsive applications like chatbots. To resolve this issue, he developed single-line export tooling within the transformers library to convert models into the ONNX format. This conversion enables engineers to run PyTorch models in TensorFlow or on specialized hardware, achieving faster latency and higher throughput. Tunstall also recounts co-authoring the O'Reilly book with Leandro von Werra and Thom Wolf, collaborating on the Hugging Face Course, and training a GPT-2 model named code parrot on Python code.


### [Habana Labs and Hugging Face Partner to Accelerate Transformer Model Training](https://yomu.fyi/post/habana-labs-and-hugging-face-partner-to-accelerate-transformer-model-t.md)
- Company: [Hugging Face](https://yomu.fyi/company/hugging-face.md)
- Author: Susan Lansing
- Published: Apr 12, 2022
- Type: Announcement

Training transformer models across computer vision, speech, and natural language processing tasks at scale often demands heavy compute resources, incurring significant time and financial expense. To address these bottlenecks, Habana Labs and Hugging Face partnered to integrate the SynapseAI software suite into the Hugging Face Optimum open-source library. This integration allows machine learning practitioners to accelerate transformer training workflows on Habana Gaudi processors using minimal code adjustments. Habana Gaudi hardware, featured in Amazon EC2 DL1 instances and Supermicro X12 servers, incorporates ten 100 Gigabit Ethernet ports per processor to scale from single units to thousands of chips. The combined hardware and software architecture supports TensorFlow and PyTorch while delivering price and performance metrics up to 40% lower than comparable training alternatives.


### [Leveraging Shopify’s API to Build the Latest Marketplace Kit](https://yomu.fyi/post/leveraging-shopify-s-api-to-build-the-latest-marketplace-kit.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Apr 8, 2022
- Type: Tutorial

Marketplace Kit version 2 provides boilerplate app code and documentation for third-party developers integrating with Shopify, implementing selected commerce features, and launching marketplaces across channels. The team moved away from using the Shopify CLI-generated Node app because CLI changes could affect their code and documentation, while its dependencies limited control over development practices. The new kit separates a full-stack merchant-facing admin app from a buyer-facing client app, using Express, React, NextJS, GraphQL, Apollo Client, and Apollo Server; open-source versions are publicly available. Its examples demonstrate JWT authentication through App Bridge and Shopify’s Node API, serving REST and GraphQL together with Express, and choosing REST for a product-listing count where a query offered no advantage.


### [How Kafka Connect helps move data seamlessly](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-kafka-connect-helps-move-data-seamlessly.md)
- Company: [Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab.md)
- Author: Wenli Wan
- Published: Apr 6, 2022
- Type: Problem & solution

Grab's real-time data platform team, Coban, implemented a managed Kafka Connect ecosystem on Kubernetes to streamline moving data in and out of Apache Kafka. To resolve dual-write consistency issues and capture pre- and post-change data, the team integrated Debezium connectors to capture MySQL binlog events and accommodate database DDL migrations. For disaster recovery and stream migrations, Coban deployed MirrorMaker2 connectors managed via Terraform to handle message mirroring and consumer offset translation across AWS regions. Additionally, they developed a custom converter utilizing Confluent Schema Registry to transform Protobuf-serialized Kafka records into JSON for ingestion into Azure Event Hubs. This architecture enabled zero-downtime cluster migrations and robust cross-region disaster recovery.


### [The Magic of Merlin: Shopify's New Machine Learning Platform](https://yomu.fyi/post/the-magic-of-merlin-shopify-s-new-machine-learning-platform.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Apr 6, 2022
- Type: Explainer

Shopify’s machine learning platform team redesigned its infrastructure to accommodate varied use cases, dependencies, data types, integrations, and production requirements. Merlin uses an open-source stack in which on-demand Merlin Workspaces run as short-lived Ray clusters on Kubernetes, while projects isolate code and dependencies in Docker-based environments. Its first iteration focuses on training and batch inference, with users moving from local or Jupyter-based prototypes to automated production workflows through the Merlin API, Airflow, or Oozie. Shopify validated the platform by migrating its product categorization workflows, using Ray Train for distributed TensorFlow training and Ray ActorPool for batch inference; planned extensions include online inference, model lifecycle management, and machine learning monitoring.


### [~Don't~ Repeat Yourself](https://yomu.fyi/post/don-t-repeat-yourself.md)
- Company: [Hugging Face](https://yomu.fyi/company/hugging-face.md)
- Author: Patrick von Platen
- Published: Apr 5, 2022
- Type: Explainer

Hugging Face's Transformers library intentionally departs from the traditional "Don't repeat yourself" (DRY) software design principle by adopting a single model file policy. This architecture places all code required for a model's forward pass into a dedicated file, avoiding centralized shared modules for components like attention mechanisms. Because machine learning research evolves rapidly and published model architectures remain static, isolating code protects individual models from breaking changes and lowers contribution barriers for the open-source community. To maintain consistency without manually syncing duplicated code across successor models, the library uses automated tooling driven by Copied from comments. While this approach complicates unified API enforcement and component-wide research integration, Transformers validates API consistency by running approximately 20,000 automated tests daily.


### [Hackathon: Bring the Func(🕺)](https://yomu.fyi/post/hackathon-bring-the-func.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: Thor Schaeff
- Published: Apr 1, 2022
- Type: Announcement

Following the conclusion of its fourth Launch Week, Supabase announced the ten-day community hackathon titled Bring the Func, running through April 10th. The competition highlights newly released platform capabilities, establishing primary prize tracks dedicated to Supabase Edge Functions and GraphQL projects powered by pg\_graphql. Participants can compete individually or in teams of up to five people, provided all design and code assets are built during the event and published as open-source repositories. Submissions require linking a repository detailing architecture, hosted demos, and Supabase feature usage across storage, authentication, realtime, or database access layers. Alongside category prizes and community swag, Supabase partnered with the Future Forest Company to plant a tree and issue a certificate for every completed project entry.


### [Supabase Realtime, with Multiplayer Features](https://yomu.fyi/post/supabase-realtime-with-multiplayer-features.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: Wen Bo Xie
- Published: Apr 1, 2022
- Type: Announcement

Supabase announced the third major release of Supabase Realtime, evolving the system from a single-tenant PostgreSQL change listener into a multi-tenant, distributed real-time platform. Built using Elixir and the Phoenix framework across a distributed node cluster, the new architecture decouples the database listener into an extension model and opens generic WebSocket functionality. New multiplayer capabilities include Presence, which uses Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) to track user connection states, and Broadcast, which distributes ephemeral messages across topics without writing to disk. The modular extension design allows listening to multiple PostgreSQL instances, external systems like MySQL, and financial or blockchain feeds, as demonstrated on a globally distributed 20-node cluster.


[Newer posts](https://yomu.fyi/posts/page/210.md) · [Older posts](https://yomu.fyi/posts/page/212.md)