URL Shortener Series: Scaling from CRUD to Production
Last updated: 2026-09-04
Series Syllabus & Roadmap
From a Simple CRUD URL Shortener to a Production-Grade System Handling 6,800+ Requests/Second
28 min readHow I took an old Express + EJS project and pushed it through concurrency, caching, queues, Fastify, clustering, observability, Docker, load testing, and a modern Next.js frontend.
MongoDB Indexing — How MongoDB Finds Your Data Faster
12 min readA deep dive into MongoDB indexing: COLLSCAN vs IXSCAN, B-Trees, Selectivity, Compound Indexes, and verifying queries with explain().
Your Click Counter Is Lying to You (And You Don't Know It)
10 min readHow a simple click counter introduced me to race conditions, atomic operations, and concurrent writes — and why MongoDB's $inc operator solved it.
I Added Redis to Make My App Faster. It Didn't Work — Until I Found the Real Problem
13 min readRedis was responding in fractions of a millisecond. My API was taking hundreds of milliseconds. The problem wasn't Redis.
What Happens When Your Analytics Worker Crashes?
14 min readMost developers design for success. Production doesn't care about your happy path. Here is how I handled worker crashes, at-least-once delivery, and idempotency.
Your Logs Are Slowing Your Server Down
12 min readI optimized my database. I switched frameworks. I still wasn't fast enough. Then I looked at my logs.