System Architecture
API Flow
CI/CD

PE Hackathon — URL Shortener

"Shorten URLs. Survive anything."

Inspiration

Most hackathons end the moment the demo works on your laptop. I wanted to build something that survives after the demo — something that handles bad input, recovers from crashes, and never shows a user a Python stack trace. That's the real world, and that's what this project is about.

What I Built

A production-hardened URL shortening service built on Flask and PostgreSQL, engineered from the ground up for reliability.

How I Built It

Flask + Peewee ORM for a lightweight, simple backend
PostgreSQL for persistent, consistent storage
pytest for 23 tests covering unit and integration scenarios
GitHub Actions CI that blocks any deploy if tests fail
Docker with restart: always for automatic crash recovery

Challenges

Getting the CI pipeline to spin up a real PostgreSQL instance for integration tests took more config than expected
Writing tests before the feature was done felt uncomfortable at first — but it caught real bugs early
Balancing coverage targets with actually meaningful tests, not just hitting lines for the sake of the metric and code that's reliable is entirely in the safety net around it
Chaos engineering isn't scary — killing your own container on purpose at 2pm beats getting paged at 3am
Documentation is part of the product, not an afterthought