Hey, Dev Community!
After spending some time honing my skills with Go, I decided to tackle a fun and practical project: creating a URL shortener! Inspired by Chapter 8 of a system design book, I wanted to build something that’s fast, efficient, and minimalistic. So, here it is: https://url.tanelt.com 🎉
The Idea 💡
I’ve always been fascinated by systems that handle high traffic with minimal latency, so I wanted to apply that principle to a small-scale project. URL shorteners are a perfect use case: they need to be fast, lightweight, and designed to handle lots of quick database lookups. I set out with two main goals:
- Minimalist design — Keep it simple, clean, and functional.
- Optimized for speed — Implement a Go backend that minimizes response times.
The Stack 🛠️
- Backend: Go
- Database: I went with a simple data store to keep things light. For this project, MongoDB worked well for fast lookups and ease of use.
- Frontend: Just HTML/CSS for a simple, distraction-free design. Go templates kept things neat and quick.
Challenges Faced 🧗♂️
Building this involved a few interesting challenges:
- Slug Generation: Creating unique, short slugs that look clean but also avoid collisions.
- Redirect Speed: I wanted to optimize server response time, so I spent time refining database queries and ensuring the server responds in milliseconds.
- Minimalist UI: It’s easy to over-design, but keeping things minimal was a fun challenge.
Key Learnings 📘
- API Dev with Gin: This project deepened my experience with Gin, a popular HTTP web framework for Go. Gin's speed and simplicity made it a perfect choice for building a responsive API. I learned a lot about routing and error handling, which were crucial for making the app’s performance snappy.
- Efficient Database Access: Integrating MongoDB taught me the importance of optimizing database connections and queries for high-performance applications.
- Balancing Design and Functionality: With a minimalist UI, every element on the page has to serve a purpose. This taught me to focus on usability above all.
Try It Out! 🎉
If you’re interested, check it out here: https://url.tanelt.com.
If you’re curious about the code, optimization tricks, or design decisions, let’s chat in the comments! I’d love to hear your thoughts or suggestions for further improvements.
Happy coding!
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