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Hi everyone! This project scratches an itch I've had for awhile now (ok, maybe 5+ years). I used to love using goo.gl in the past. It was an easy way to colle
by dougbarrett 5y ago
Hi everyone! This project scratches an itch I've had for awhile now (ok, maybe 5+ years). I used to love using goo.gl in the past. It was an easy way to collect analytics for links that I would share around, and was accurate in it's reporting where other services like bit.ly were not.
I couldn't find anything that would do a few things I was looking for:
- Allow me to create a short URL, and instantly have a dashboard
- Give me basic geo, browser and referrer information like goo.gl did
- Not require me to make an account for this information.
I understand bullet point three is a feature that could go both ways, but the point is that I wanted something where I can get up and running with a shareable link as quickly as possible.
As for the tech stack, I tried to use some technologies that I haven't used before, and some that I have.
- It's written in Go, I'm very familiar with the language and have used it at scale.
- Hosted on AWS Beanstalk - again I'm familiar with hosting software here, and Beanstalk has the opportunity to use arm64 machines which I was eager to test out, so it was just a matter of me compiling a linux/arm64 compatible binary to push out. I'm on the smallest instance available at a cost of ~$3.60/mo.
- Uses dynamodb for meta data - I've used Mongo in the past, but I wanted to use something I didn't need to manage, and Aurora was cost prohibitive for a project that may never see the light of day.
- Uses Timestream for analytical data - Again, I didn't want to use MySQL to track this data, I wanted to find something scaleable and I knew timeseries databases were all the rage. I saw that this is a pay-as-you go solution and a zero-maintenance service.
Hopefully someone else that misses the simplicity of goo.gl will find this useful!