Designing a Rate Limiter for a Bit.ly Clone – My Jedi‑Level Token Bucket Adventure
The Quest Begins (The “Why”) Picture this: I’m hunched over my laptop at 2 a.m., sipping cold brew, trying to get a tiny URL‑shortening service to survive a sudden traffic spike from a viral TikTok clip. The service works fine when a handful of devs ping it, but as soon as a few thousand requests hi






