Changing Databases 5 Times in 48 Hours Boosted Our Launch to 35,000 Views

The way this story begins is about as wacky as its title. I started Integrated Reasoning in 2021 to find out what would happen if arbitrary precision integers could be used when solving knapsack problems (e.g. 9, 33, and 65 bit registers). My thinking was that a flexible word size would make pseudo-polynomial time algorithms for solving knapsack problems more efficient. In short, it does help, but the largest gains come from pipelining.

Fast-forward to mid-April 2024. We’d just started developing IRX, an optimization-as-a-service platform, to serve as the interface to Integrated Reasoning’s hardware accelerated solvers. We planned a MVP that essentially moved the experience of running open-source solvers like HiGHS from the command line into the browser. The selling point being that these processes can take months or longer to complete, and not having to wrangle them would help our users focus on optimization instead of the infrastructure required to run optimization.

Pushing logs in real-time from AWS to the browser was something I’d never done before. I figured it was roughly similar to the problem of streaming text from an LLM, something I’d never done before either, which has seen tons of recent development. On one hand, real-time log events might be overkill for an MVP. On the other hand, rendering logs in real-time looks beautiful and would help us provide a user experience that’s as smooth as the command line. We went for it.

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