High-Speed URL Shortener

Overview

This seeded project represents a compact backend service for creating, resolving, and tracking shortened URLs. It emphasizes predictable latency, safe redirects, and simple operations over unnecessary platform complexity.

Role

Nguyen's representative role is backend engineer responsible for API design, persistence modeling, cache strategy, and deployment readiness. The implementation keeps the public redirect path small and measurable.

Problem

Redirect traffic is read-heavy and sensitive to latency. A direct database lookup on every request would be easy to build but expensive under bursty traffic, while unsafe destination handling could create security and abuse issues.

Solution

The service stores canonical URL records in PostgreSQL and keeps hot redirect mappings in Redis. Short codes are generated through a collision-checked strategy, public redirects validate destination rules, and write APIs keep analytics events separate from the critical redirect response path.

Outcome

The seeded service demonstrates a cache-first read path, stable fallback behavior when cache entries miss, and a small operational surface that can be load-tested and deployed with Docker.