I've been on a sabbatical for a few months and started feeling like it was time to find a new job. I carefully selected a dozen companies, made a sorted list starting with the ones I like the most and started applying to a few at a time.

One of these companies asked me to complete an assignment: creating a URL shortener. This was just a screening task and, therefore, a tiny project. The requirements made it optional to create a UI or use a real database. I set out to do something lightweight but got carried away and ended up making something I could actually put in production. 🙈

I decided to try a novel framework called Fresh for this project, but soon started running into the kind of weird problems that appear when the tooling you're using isn't yet mature. To make sure I wouldn't blow the deadline debugging and fixing esoteric errors, I decided to stick to the good ol' Next.js running on Vercel combo.

The good news is I still found a way to sneak in some technology I hadn't used it in this project. This seemed to be the perfect opportunity to try out a key-value store such as Redis. I chose Upstash for the job, a company providing durable storage with Redis for serverless applications. And I must say it was a breeze to integrate, somehow even easier than Mongo Atlas.

You can find the app running at https://s.dooart.dev. Here's the code.

A final note: it is kind of cool to have my own URL shortening service, but what is even cooler is being able to go from git init to production in just a few hours. Software development for the web has come a long way!