True, it probably would have made sense to stay completely within AWS. If I didn't know MongoDB very well, I would have used DynamoDB.
But I know MongoDB well, and MongoDB Atlas (the hosted platform) also has a free tier, and it's hosted in ec2, and you can setup VPC peering (so network speed _should_ be comparable to dynamo, but not sure).
Also, Atlas (MongoDB's Cloud Platform) has a really nice "charts" product (sort of like a built in web based tableau) which I use for my internal dashboards (it takes <5 minutes to setup, for stuff like "how many customers do I have", "at what stage in the pipeline are they", "how many renders does each customer average", etc), and they have a nice web based "query explorer", which I randomly use when debugging something, when I don't feel like connecting with terminal.
But yeah, if I wasn't already biased, I would have used DynamoDB.
Also, I am curious though, what does his partner do usually if not frontend stuff? Unusual to go into business with a frontend engineer who then does 0 frontend work, no?
> My partner built the frontend. It’s very nice having someone to help with the frontend work!
> She built it using React, no special libraries.
> We setup a makefile so she can one command deploy to s3 and invalidate the cache. Developing at lightspeed.
Ha, I haven't profiled it yet. I'm not too sure. But, I think a decent amount. If a slack team with 10000+ physicists signs up, I may need to talk to them offline.
I do plan on doing some stress testing in the future for fun, I'll try to remember to reply here.
> partner frontend
Yep, to repeat what steve_adams_86 said, she did the frontend completely. Usually I'm forced to do the frontend, it was very nice having someone else just do the whole thing without me.
i am wondering why they use a headless to render from KaTeX though. Is there an advantage to doing that compared to, say, shelling out to xetex? You'd get better compatibility with potentially useful libraries like tikz that way (and potentially higher throughput/lower costs), at the cost of investing some thought in sandboxing. Curious about the considerations behind that decision.
