I enjoy being involved in side projects. I believe the benefits far outweigh the time invested in them. So I was contemplating one that would allow me to delve into as many diverse yet interconnected areas as possible. I thought, what was better than a short and functional project like a URL Shortener. It could simply be very simple (as it is right now) or very sophisticated in its’ future.

Neshaani (which means Address in Persian) is an open-source URL Shortener that’s backed up by its’ own API, hosted on github and is using the Slim Micro framework for Php. Pulling in Laravel was sort of an overkill for the scale of the project and although I knew there would be challenges ahead setting things up with Slim, I took it as an opportunity to learn more about this concise framework.

The goal was to build an API that’s extensible and fast, even if that’s reinventing the wheel, to some degree. I had the opportunity to learn a ton, to get to know more about APIs, manage another droplet on DigitalOcean, setting up Let’s Encrypt on it and brush up on other stuff like rebasing in Git and many more.

Last but not least, Neshaani is still a work in progress. I think I’d add a NodeJS based client to it and implement it using a NoSQL database (most probably MongoDB) in the coming weeks.