I've read a number of articles on Go (for example) but never used it. Similarly, I have never used MongoDB before, so when I stumbled across an article on how to create a URL shortener, I figured creating my own URL shortener using Go and Mongo.
It's pretty simple - there are two API endpoints
POST an HTTP request to the api/v1/ endpoint with a URL in the request's body.
curl -X POST -d '{"url": "http://google.com"}' https://jaeurls.herokuapp.com/api/v1/In the returned response payload, there will be a Url field that contains the shortened URL.
Make a GET request (using a browser, for example) with the shortened URL and (hopefully) you'll be redirected to your input URL!
I keep track of an ID for each input URL. I also use a set of characters as part of my hashing strategy. Given this set of characters and an ID for a given input URL, I hash the ID into some string of characters, which are now used to produce the shortened URL.
When I receive a GET request, I parse out the hash, translate the hash into an ID, lookup the ID in my persistence layer, get the URL associated with that ID, and then redirect to that URL.