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Thu, Jun 11, 20267:00 PM - 8:00 PM PDTSession ended

URL Shortener (TinyURL)

Base62 aliases, cache-aside redirects, and async analytics

About this session

A 90-minute live deep-dive into designing a Bit.ly/TinyURL-style shortener: compact unique alias generation, distributed ID generation, a cache-aside redirect hot path tuned for read-heavy traffic, and asynchronous click analytics that never slow the redirect. A clean, high-signal interview classic.

Course Syllabus

Course Overview

Format:
Live Zoom, 90 minutes (75 min teaching + 15 min Q&A)
Audience:
Junior to Senior engineers building system-design fundamentals
Prerequisite:
Basic understanding of databases, caching, and hashing

What You Will Learn

  1. Generate short aliases that are compact, unique, and scalable across many servers (Base62 vs hashing).
  2. Serve redirects fast on a read-heavy hot path using cache-aside.
  3. Store URL mappings so lookup is reliable and scales horizontally.
  4. Collect click analytics asynchronously without slowing the redirect.
  5. Reason about the ID-generation-vs-hashing and sync-vs-async tradeoffs out loud.

What This Course Is NOT

  • Not a full ads/attribution platform — analytics is intentionally lightweight
  • Not custom vanity-domain management

Pre-Class Preparation (24 hours before)

Read the problem framing only (10 min):

Design a URL shortener like Bit.ly or TinyURL. Users create a short link and are redirected from it to the original URL. Read traffic (redirects) vastly outnumbers writes (creations). Aliases must be compact, unique, and generated across many servers, and basic click analytics should be collected without slowing redirects.

Think about (don't research yet):

  • How do you make aliases unique across many write servers without coordination per request?
  • What's on the read path for a redirect, and how do you make it sub-millisecond?
  • How do you count a click without adding latency to the redirect?

Come to class with an alias-generation approach you can defend.

Lecture: author of showoffer

Tony

ShowOffer Coach

Engineering Manager: Over 12 years of industry experience with 6 years in engineering leadership, building and scaling tech infrastructure teams that deliver end-to-end large-scale distributed systems.

Reviews

5.0(1)

  • Reviewer 0WLX

    Jun 15, 2026

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