Blog

1. 01 27 Sep 2026

   Load-Testing a URL Shortener (opens in a new tab)

   Part 2 · Medium

   Pushing the linkpulse redirect path with k6 until something gave. A fixed VU test measures concurrency, not throughput, and at 3,000 requests a second one Node process ran out of CPU while Redis and Postgres sat at about 25%.

   • Programming
   • Node.js
   • Performance
2. 02 27 Sep 2026

   Building a URL Shortener: Six Design Decisions and the Alternatives I Rejected (opens in a new tab)

   Part 1 · Medium

   Six decisions behind a URL shortener that runs in public, each with the alternative I rejected: a 302 rather than a 301, caching misses as well as hits, a sliding window rate limiter in Lua, and refresh tokens with reuse detection.

   • Redis
   • Node.js
   • Programming