--- title: upi.link - Progress Update 1 author: Rohan Verma type: post date: 2019-02-17T12:38:24+00:00 url: blog/2019/02/14/progress-update-1-upilink categories: - upi.link --- ## What am I building, in a sentence? ๐Ÿ”—upi.link: A programmable shortlink generator based on UPI (universal bank2bank payments service in ๐Ÿ‡ฎ๐Ÿ‡ณ) sharable via social media & chat. ## What did I complete till now? ### Highlights #### Deployed at [upi.link](https://upi.link) I used AWS Free tier to deploy this website to reduce cost for hosting this. It uses AWS Lambda Functions to generate shortlinks which are stored inside Redis with a TTL of 3 Days. Authentication is implemented using a postgres backend along with secure cookies for sessions. I will port the lambda functions I wrote for shortlink generation out of AWS Lambda to my custom backend written in Golang as authentication. This is because I have seen that the cold start for Lambdas is pretty slow for my use case and takes about 5-6 seconds which for the users seems like 10 seconds. The frontend is written using Nuxt.js which is a Universal app framework on top of Vue and is similar to what Next.js is for React. This was a neccessity for this use case as I need the links shared on social media as well as chat with HTML OG (Open Graph) tags to be populated dynamically based on their content. The only other option was to write a static website served through templating either in Go (Go templates) or Python (Django/Flask using Jinja templates), but then I would not be able to utilize the rapid development offered by Vue/Nuxt. Also, I can now separate my API and frontend, maybe totally host the API proxied via Apex/Up and the frontend via S3 buckets to reduce the cost to host the site. #### Created a roadmap I shared this project with a few friends and groups and lots of feature requests as well ideas propped up. To keep a track of all these I created a public Trello Board. You can email to the board for adding more feature requests. ### Features #### Donation Campaigns One of the major features this week, I added a campaign collection feature. The first campaign to be hosted is the #BharatKeVeer campaign which was launched to collect funds for contributing to the wives of the CRPF Soldiers who lost their lives during the Pulwama terrorist attack. #### Temp Link Generator I updated the temporary link generator on the home page. Now you don't need to bother with the Long Link and you can directly see the page. #### Whatsapp/Telegram Share buttons Buttons for sharing on Whatsapp and Telegram were added below the generated shortlink #### UPI App compatible QR Code QR code with the embeded Deeplinking Intent is now displayed on the redirect page for people who open the link on their laptops/desktops so that they can simply scan the link from their phone. #### Emails via AWS SES My SES request for sending emails was approved, I added the email button behind authentication. ### ๐Ÿ“ŒMisc #### Progress Blogs Well, this blog, honestly, I wanted to have a blog where I could track the progress on this project but I did not want to have another setup on say Ghost/Wordpress. So again Nuxt came to my rescue and now I just have to add a page to my Nuxt folder and it handles everything else such as routing etc. #### Recorded demo video ๐Ÿ“น You can view this video on [youtube](https://youtu.be/USK4UOn1Xkw)