About the Project
Our team StackUnderflow worked on the Reliability Engineering Quest with the goal of building not just a functional system, but a resilient one.
We began by developing a RESTful URL shortener API using Flask, Peewee, and PostgreSQL. The core functionality (creating, retrieving, and managing shortened URLs) was relatively straightforward. However, as we expanded our testing, we encountered issues with invalid inputs, missing data, and edge cases. This marked a shift in our focus: from simply “making it work” to making it reliable.
A significant part of our process involved systematically identifying failure points. We introduced strict input validation, consistent error handling, and appropriate HTTP status codes,
To verify this, we implemented both unit and integration tests using pytest, covering individual components as well as full API workflows.
We also integrated continuous integration (CI) to automatically run tests on every commit.
On the infrastructure side, we containerized the application using Docker and configured restart policies to handle unexpected failures.
The Advanced Challenges were a bit tricky to figure out, but very engaging and entertaining. Also, frustrating lol (see: a branch called "arggh")
Overall, this project helped us learn about the reliability aspect of Production Engineering.
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