I was studying system design during the Christmas holidays of 2019, and while reading a blog post, I found a challenge that quickly caught my attention:
Given a (typically) long URL, how would you design service that would generate a shorter and unique alias for it?
That sounded like a very simple web application, but then, in the same blog post, a few questions where also made:
How to generate a unique ID for each URL? How would you generate unique IDs at scale (thousands of URL shortening >requests coming every second)? How would your service handle redirects? How would you support custom short URLs? How to delete expired URLs etc? How to track click stats?
After reading the questions above, I got excited, because it sounded reasonable enough to be built in a short period, but also very important questions were raised.
Long story short, I ended building something which a call Ulrfy.xyz, a URL shortening service. Some of the questions above are yet to implemented in the project, and the Trello board where I manage my backlog is open for the public.
This was a quick post to explain how and where I got this idea, in the next posts I will explain the implementation technical details.