Slack LaTeX

63 points by c0nrad 4 years ago | 13 comments

paxys 4 years ago |

I have had a lot of trouble in the past with Lambda cold starts timing out Slack slash command requests, so you may actually be better off without it.

orf 4 years ago |

Given the fairly stateless nature of slack apps like this, what does mongodb give you that dynamodb doesn’t? Seems like you could fit into the free tier quite easily.

c0nrad 4 years ago | |

Disclosure: I used to work at MongoDB, left 2 years ago.

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.

freedomben 4 years ago | |

Not OP, but being open source and platform agnostic is a huge value to me of Mongo over Dynamo.

lindig 4 years ago |

On my Safari 14.1.2 the hero image (demo) on the landing page does not show properly. The URL is https://slacklatex.com/static/media/demo_img.5ddca5f3.webp and I assume the format is a bit too esoteric.

c0nrad 4 years ago | |

Ah thanks for the heads up. We'll wrap it in a html picture block. (Google's https://web.dev/measure/ recommends webp, but I should have done more research)

collegeburner 4 years ago |

Interesting article. How much requests can you support for 20/month before losing money with this stack?

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?

steve_adams_86 4 years ago | |

I think he says the partner created the front end using React, doesn't he?

> 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.

c0nrad 4 years ago | |

> Interesting article. How much requests can you support for 20/month before losing money with this stack?

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.

NmAmDa 4 years ago | | |

Teams with this number of physicists exists only in CERN which uses self-hosted mattermost. Don't worry from that for now.

gcr 4 years ago |

this is a great idea! i'm all for making math typesetting more accessible and useful!

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.

doppp 4 years ago |

This is awesome, thanks for sharing. I'm currently building a Slack app myself and this is very useful information.