https://battlecode.org/ is in January, I look forward to it every year.

This is awesome! I can't believe I've not heard of it before. Thanks for sharing!

Building a cheaper DMARC service with no ssotax. https://dmarcdefender.io

Base health counter for Star Wars Unlimited https://blog.c0nrad.io/posts/swu-health-counter/

I do security Capture The Flag (CTF) writeups on YouTube. It's been fun, I've learned a lot, just published my 100th video.

https://youtube.com/@SloppyJoePirates

Not sure if this is interesting to the HN crowd, but some challenge writeups from a recent security Capture the Flag competition.

Going back to school for Physics (age 30). It'd be cool to understand why the universe exists before I die.

> It'd be cool to understand why the universe exists before I die.

I'm affraid physicsts aren't interested in this question (as it can't be answered by science).

Might be able to get enough understanding as to "what we have" (if not "why we have it") to be content for a human lifetime, though.

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)

> 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.

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

Thanks for the insight!

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.

(Profitable Solo founder)

Thankfully lots of tools do most of the heavy lifting. I use k8s, GKE does most of the work for me. It's very nice to have autoscaling for traffic spikes. Same with database (MongoDB Altas), dead simple autoscaling. I would never run my own k8s nor database.

I wrote more details about some of the Ops stuff I do here in a previous similar question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26204402

Coincidentally I also wrote some architecture notes about a new product last night: https://blog.c0nrad.io/posts/slack-latex/

I think everyone's milage will very, but as general principles, staging is nice, reading docs saves time overall, tests help you sleep at night and make it easier to make changes 6 months in the future, simple health checks (or anything on a critical path) help you catch the real issues that need immediate attention.

Good luck!