Building a Blazing-Fast URL Shortener in Go 🚀

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:

1. Minimalist design — Keep it simple, clean, and functional.
2. 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:

1. Slug Generation: Creating unique, short slugs that look clean but also avoid collisions.
2. Redirect Speed: I wanted to optimize server response time, so I spent time refining database queries and ensuring the server responds in milliseconds.
3. Minimalist UI: It’s easy to over-design, but keeping things minimal was a fun challenge.

Key Learnings 📘

1. 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.
2. Efficient Database Access: Integrating MongoDB taught me the importance of optimizing database connections and queries for high-performance applications.
3. 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.

Source code

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!