About Snipr

Snipr is a minimal URL shortener built as a full-stack engineering project. Its goal is not growth hacking or feature bloat — it is deliberate systems design.

Why Build a URL Shortener?

On the surface, shortening a link looks trivial. Underneath, it touches core distributed systems concepts:

• Deterministic ID generation and encoding strategies
• Collision avoidance and database indexing
• Redirect latency optimization
• Caching layers and hot key mitigation
• Abuse prevention and rate limiting
• Data modeling for analytics and observability

Snipr exists to explore these problems hands-on.

Current Focus

• Clean routing and redirect handling
• Hash + Salted shortcode, to prevent collisions, starts at 4 characters
• Simple and predictable API design

What This Project Represents

Snipr is a bit of an expirement to build out a full stack project with a focus on simplicity and clarity. It is not meant to be a production-ready URL shortener, but rather a learning exercise in building a clean and maintainable codebase that touches on important systems design concepts.

Roadmap

• Custom domain support
• Lightweight analytics (privacy-conscious)
• Horizontal scalability experiments

Snipr is an evolving systems laboratory — built to learn deeply, implement cleanly, and ship thoughtfully.