July Update 2026: Imagine Arcade and Open source

July was a month of turning good engineering into things people could actually use.

Across the team, we continued contributing fixes and improvements to open source projects used by developers around the world, while also experimenting with new ideas internally and putting them in front of real users. Some of that work happened deep inside the infrastructure of projects like Apache Superset and Prefect and some of it was as visible as turning a phone into a game controller.

Open Source Contributions

Open source remained a significant part of our engineering work this month. In July, the team merged 9 pull requests, with another 7 PRs currently open and progressing through review, bringing the team's total to 16 contributions across Apache Superset, Prefect, marimo, Strapi, Agenda, and Payload.

These contributions came from Abdul Rehman, Muhammad Sami, and Ahsan Farooq, with each of them working on issues ranging from security vulnerabilities and performance improvements to reliability, developer experience, and user-facing functionality.

Apache Superset

Apache Superset once again accounted for the largest share of our contributions, with four PRs merged this month.

We improved native filter performance by introducing smarter result caching, preventing dashboards with many filters from repeatedly executing expensive SQL involving joins and CTEs. The caching also automatically invalidates when datasets change and remains isolated across row-level security boundaries, ensuring users don't receive stale or cross-user results.

We also fixed first-run failures in scheduled multi-tab reports by ensuring tab links are persisted before the screenshot service attempts to access them.

Security was another important focus. We patched a SQL injection vulnerability in the Presto/Trino SQL Lab Jinja macro by restoring validation and escaping the injection vector, alongside regression tests to prevent the issue from returning.

Finally, we restored Swagger/OpenAPI "Try it out" functionality across all six export endpoints — dashboards, charts, datasets, databases, saved queries, and themes — resolving a long-standing issue that had caused 400 errors in the API documentation since April 2024.

This is the kind of open source work we value most: improvements that don't just make a codebase cleaner, but directly improve the experience, security, and reliability of a platform used by thousands of teams.

Prefect

Our Prefect contribution addressed a deployment-breaking ordering issue affecting module-based flows.

Previously, imports could happen before the flow's source code had been fetched, resulting in "module not found" errors. The fix ensures the repository is pulled before imports are attempted, making deployment and execution behave as users would reasonably expect.

It's a relatively focused change, but these are exactly the kinds of edge cases that can bring an otherwise healthy production workflow to a halt.

marimo

Two of our merged contributions went into marimo, focusing on both usability and reliability.

We enabled users to rebind the "Move Line Up/Down" keyboard shortcuts, which had previously appeared in the interface but could not actually be customized.

We also fixed PDF exports truncating long lines of code by enabling proper line wrapping, preventing content from silently disappearing from exported notebooks.

Strapi

Our Strapi contribution addressed a smaller but important localization issue. Success notifications shown after creating or editing roles were always falling back to English, regardless of the user's selected language.

The fix restores the expected localized experience for non-English users.

Agenda

In Agenda, we hardened job locking against race conditions that could occur during concurrent execution and shutdown.

We also added additional tests to ensure active and queued jobs retain their locks correctly, making job execution more predictable in situations where multiple operations happen at the same time.

Across all of these projects, the pattern is consistent: identify a real problem, understand why it happens, and contribute a fix that makes the software more dependable for everyone who uses it.

We turned our phones into controllers

July also gave us an opportunity to step outside our usual product work and simply build something fun.

Our founder, Hashir Baig, built Imagine Arcade, a multiplayer gaming platform that turns your phone into a controller, in just seven days.

The idea is intentionally simple. Open ImagineArcade.com on a laptop or TV, choose a game, scan a QR code with your phone, and start playing. No Bluetooth, no complicated connectivity setup, and no account required.

The project started as an experiment, but the response was encouraging.

More than 300 people visited Imagine Arcade and 200+ people actually played one of the available games.

That early traction has now turned Imagine Arcade into a platform shaped not just by what we build, but by what the community imagines.

We're now collecting "your imaginations" ideas for small games that people would love to see on the platform. The best ideas will be built first and published with credit to the people who came up with them.

For us, what makes the experiment particularly exciting is the fact that people can contribute ideas, see them become real, and potentially benefit from what they help create.

You can try it yourself at ImagineArcade.com and, if you have a game idea you'd love to see built, send it our way.

We're heading into the next month with more open source contributions in review, more ideas being explored, and hopefully a few more things worth sharing.