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Luqman Shaban
Luqman Shaban

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Building a Blazing-Fast URL Shortener in Go ๐Ÿš€

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 thatโ€™s fast, efficient, and minimalistic. So, here it is: https://url.tanelt.com ๐ŸŽ‰

The Idea ๐Ÿ’ก

Iโ€™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 โ€” Keep it simple, clean, and functional.
  2. Optimized for speed โ€” Implement a Go backend that minimizes response times.

The Stack ๐Ÿ› ๏ธ

  • 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 ๐Ÿง—โ€โ™‚๏ธ

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: Itโ€™s easy to over-design, but keeping things minimal was a fun challenge.

Key Learnings ๐Ÿ“˜

  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 appโ€™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! ๐ŸŽ‰

If youโ€™re interested, check it out here: https://url.tanelt.com.

Source code

If youโ€™re curious about the code, optimization tricks, or design decisions, letโ€™s chat in the comments! Iโ€™d love to hear your thoughts or suggestions for further improvements.

Happy coding!

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