URL Shortener

Steve — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 19:58:48 +0000

With a need to include shortened URLs on my resume as an alternative to the full URL that has the potential to fill several lines worth of premium real estate on a resume, I wanted to use an alternative to common services such as Bitly and TinyURL to eliminate the fear of having tight limitations on the number of short URLs I can have or with advertisements possibly being added by these companies when clicking the short URL as part of their free service plan. This project is an application hosted on my Azure cloud platform that helps me generate these shortened URLs.

I discovered a project that filled this need perfectly. With it, you receive a number of resources deployed on your cloud platform to accomplish this task, including a set of container apps to generate the links and storage accounts to hold the metadata. This project was great as it gave me a reason to practice using some tools that are somewhat new to me. For one, it got me to use Docker, which is something I’ve been wanting to do a deeper dive with. This was needed for deploying the project to my Azure site. Pairing with this, I also installed and used the Azure Developer CLI, running commands to perform the steps to deploy the project.

The cool thing about this tool is that you can incorporate your own custom domain name for your short URLs. I had some fun with this as it was a challenge to keep the domain name as short as possible, so including the top-level domain as part of the naming convention was a creative challenge. Inspirations are short URL domain names such as youtu.be and goo.gl. For mine, I created myurlz.one (my URL zone). Top-level domain '.zone' was nice but was too expensive for my budget but I noticed '.one' was available at a lower cost, had WHOIS privacy, in addition to a few other features I wanted that alternative TLDs didn't offer. With this, I added 'z' at the end of the domain name so 'zone' was written out as 'z.one'. Slickkkkkkkkkkk.

An example below is the shortened URL version which uses my own custom domain and has a clean vanity (the back half of the URL to the right of the forward slash) that helps describe the link versus a service such as Bitly that randomly generates numbers and letters. For this example, it takes you to my Azure Fundamentals certification (AKA, the AZ-900).

https://myurlz.one/az900

A previous project got me familiar with building my own GitHub profile and setting it up, but this project introduced me on the why and how to fork a repository, so it's another new subject to learn. Finally, this one got me to explore container apps, what each one does that deployed with this project, and how to use them. The documentation for the project helped with the basics, but then I used it as a jumping off point to explore further on my own in terms of their primary purposes in addition to checking out the resources in the Azure portal and seeing how they are constructed and any new insights I can discover. In the end, this project pairs wonderfully with the cloud resume challenge project plus I can use this service whenever I need to send someone a short link.

Cloud Resume Challenge (v1.0)

Steve — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 04:23:41 +0000

This blog post is to summarize my experience with this project and to give a little insight for its significance because on the surface it just looks like a personal website, but when you know what it's all about, it demonstrates what I can do with the cloud platform. This project is based the cloud resume challenge. I'll keep this post short and sweet.

After earning my Azure certification, I wanted to prove my knowledge for it with a project, and with it, adding my resume to the Azure cloud platform seemed like a great way to initially demonstrate my familiarity with some of its topics. Some areas were familiar but a lot were brand new and exciting to learn.

The frontend is a static webpage with a borrowed template (credit at bottom of the resume's page). It incorporates HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. For me, this is familiar territory as I worked on site design in the past both professionally and personally, so this got me back into the swing of it, modifying it for my resume and adding a few novelties to it from a formatting perspective. But web design isn't the primary topic as it's all about the cloud platform! The next areas discussed cover that.

I've worked on code in the past and used Visual Studio as the IDE for development, but Visual Studio Code is brand new to me. It's refreshing to see something like VS Code as an alternative, lightweight, multiplatform IDE that gives what you just what you need by adding extensions you need to get the job done. It also integrates with Azure! For this project, I added Azure related extensions such as Azure Storage. There's more Azure related tools in the screenshot below from my setup but some of those will be covered in the 2.0 project. VS Code is where I edited the HTML files.

I have my Azure account setup with the pay-as-you-go plan for subscriptions. Those subscriptions organize my projects within my account and is organized further by resource groups. With the code completed, I linked my Azure account to VS Code and uploaded my resume to one of my Azure subscriptions. During this same process from the Azure portal, I created a resource group, the storage account which houses the site, and have the static website piece enabled. Screenshot below shows part of it from the Azure portal.

This project also got me familiar with cloud repositories. For this, I used GitHub for my code. It integrates well into VS Code too and used the built-in terminal for CLI commands for GitHub like 'git push' to send my code up to the repository. Learned a lot related to this like to how to setup SSH keys for GitHub and enabling it in VS Code so it all works together.

I love what I was able to accomplish for the scope of this project, getting something posted live onto my account and have it be accessible for others to view. The cloud resume challenge actually has more involved with it such as having a backend with a database and some code linking the frontend to the backend for a function, so this is a version 1.0 of sorts as I was eager to get something up and running as soon as possible. In the near future there will be a fully-fledged 2.0 that reflects the whole challenge, so in the meantime, please see this 1.0 version showing my enthusiasm for learning this cloud platform, testing my knowledge with a live project, and having it be the first mile marker for my journey on this trail for becoming a cloud admin.

Resume's link:
https://azresumev1stract.z1.web.core.windows.net

DEV Community: Steve

URL Shortener

Cloud Resume Challenge (v1.0)