The Why
Every developer has built a link shortener at some point. It's like the "Hello World" of web apps. But I wanted to build one that's actually useful AND serves as a playground for trying out some AWS services I've been meaning to explore.
The Stack
AWS Lambda
Serverless compute for the redirect logic
DynamoDB
NoSQL storage for the URL mappings
API Gateway
REST API for creating and retrieving links
CloudFront
CDN for fast redirects at the edge
The Over-Engineering
- Custom short codes (not just random strings)
- Click analytics with timestamp tracking
- QR code generation for each link
- Expiring links support
- Rate limiting because why not