Beyond Hello World: A Practical Introduction to Node.js

From simple, utilitarian services that take those long, cumbersome URIs and shorten them into a human readable link for posting on Twitter, to novelty services that allow you to personalize and track clicks for measuring impressions, there are no shortage of URL shortening services today on the web. While the APIs and user experience for these services are very simple, have you ever wondered about the design considerations and capabilities required? For instance, the ability to quickly generate a unique URL, manage state of the URI resource, including capturing clicks, timestamps, etc. while scaling to potentially hundreds if not thousands of concurrent requests is a simple, but interesting problem domain. In this talk, we'll look at why Node.js is the perfect framework for building a fast, slick little URL shortening service that is easy to maintain and scales really well on the web. We'll look at a few persistence options while focusing on a test-first approach to designing the API and who knows, we might just write the next killer URL shortening service!