Objective

Your assignment is to implement a URL shortening service using Ruby. You can use any framework you want (or no framework at all, it is up to you).

There are also 4 questions at the end of the README, please, provide your answers to them in a separate file.

Brief

ShortLink is a URL shortening service where you enter a URL such as https://codesubmit.io/library/react and it returns a short URL such as https://short.est/GeAi9K .

Tasks

• Implement assignment using Ruby.
• Two endpoints are required
  • /encode - Encodes a URL to a shortened URL
  • /decode - Decodes a shortened URL to its original URL.
• Both endpoints should accept and return JSON. Successful payloads are described below, you can pick any format you want for errors.
• There is no restriction on how your encode/decode algorithm should work. You just need to make sure that a URL can be encoded to a short URL and the short URL can be decoded to the original URL.
• Your application needs to be able to decode previously encoded URLs after a restart.
• Do not build any authentication mechanisms.
• Provide detailed instructions on how to run your assignment in a separate markdown file.
• Provide tests for both endpoints (and any other tests you may want to write).
• You need to think through potential attack vectors on the application, and document them in the README.
• You need to think through how your implementation may scale up, and document your approach in the README. You do not need to build a scalable service for this challenge but you need to document how you would approach building a scalable version of it..

Encode Endpoint API

URL: POST /encode

Request Body

{
  "url": "https://codesubmit.io/library/react"
}

Success Response

Code : 200 OK

Content example

{
  "url": "https://codesubmit.io/library/react",
  "short_url": "https://short.est/GeAi9K"
}

Decode Endpoint API

URL: POST /decode

Request Body

{
  "short_url": "https://short.est/GeAi9K"
}

Success Response

Code : 200 OK

Content example

{
  "url": "https://codesubmit.io/library/react",
  "short_url": "https://short.est/GeAi9K"
}

Evaluation Criteria

• Ruby best practices
• API implemented featuring a /encode and /decode endpoint
• Completeness: did you complete the features? Are all the tests running?
• Correctness: does the functionality act in sensible, thought-out ways?
• Maintainability: is it written in a clean, maintainable way?
• Security: have you through through potential issues and mitigated or documented them?
• Scalability: what scalability issues do you foresee in your implementation and how do you plan to work around those issues?

Open-Ended Questions

1. Please, explain your own words how you understand the DRY principle — Don't Repeat Yourself.
2. What is your least favorite recommendation in the community Ruby style guide? https://rubystyle.guide/ Please, explain if you have one.
3. Please, share a situation when you experienced working with a difficult coworker on a team. How was the coworker difficult and what did you do to resolve the situation to encourage the team's ongoing progress?
4. Please, explain what is a dependency injection (DI). What place may it have in a typical Rails app? How would you structure a rails app to utilize dependency injection? If you think DI is not useful in Ruby/Rails applications, please, explain why.

CodeSubmit

Please organize, design, test and document your code as if it were going into production - then push your changes to the master branch. After you have pushed your code, you may submit the assignment on the assignment page.

All the best and happy coding,