Hi Jorge, nice to see this at HN front page. Wish you guys all the best.
Launch HN: GoLinks (YC W19) – Internal short links for teams
91–97 of 97 posts
Re: Launch HN: GoLinks (YC W19) – Internal short links for teams
#92I think this is super useful and you're totally right about how go spreads. At Netflix we ended up rewriting go at least three times. Every time someone new took it over, they rewrote it. Having a go service with no work is super useful.
I set it up but didn't look carefully -- is there an export function? And an API? I think I could get around most of my concerns if I could just get a CSV each day of all the current links, just in case something happens to you guys.
Another source of comfort would be if you could give me a lambda function that I could deploy into my own AWS that would just resolve go links. So all the management would happen on your platform, but the actual resolution would be on my side so I would be in control of its reliability. I know that at Netflix we built go to be highly reliable because in an outage, go was actually essential infrastructure to get us to the tools and dashboards we need most.
Thanks for making this!
Re: Launch HN: GoLinks (YC W19) – Internal short links for teams
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Grandparent asked about outage. Not about going out of business.
Outages are definitely a risk every company encounters. Whether it's a third-party hosted solution or an internal solution, unfortunately, servers do go down. We run all our services on AWS which provides an uptime SLA of at least 99.99%, so uptime shouldn't be a problem, but we do recognize the concern.
Services can also go down when the infrastructure is up too.
Self hosted solution can give that responsibility away though.
Re: Launch HN: GoLinks (YC W19) – Internal short links for teams
#94If you want a simple (but bare-bones) self-hosted version of this service, check out the open source version I made a couple years back: https://github.com/Detry322/redisred Here’s a hubot plugin for slack: https://github.com/Detry322/hubot-redisred We use this extensively at MIT for HackMIT and the MIT Pokerbots competition, and best of all, it’s free. The deploy to Heroku button should “just work”.
Was thinking to try this out as a self hosted solution but requires a domain.
Demo looked ok.
Re: Launch HN: GoLinks (YC W19) – Internal short links for teams
#95I think this is super useful and you're totally right about how go spreads. At Netflix we ended up rewriting go at least three times. Every time someone new took it over, they rewrote it. Having a go service with no work is super useful. I set it up but didn't look carefully -- is there an export function? And an API? I think I could get around most of my concerns if I could just get a CSV each day of all the current…
We do plan on creating an API that will allow users to create links, and view links through integrations, but it isn’t built currently. That’s an interesting solution for resolution, but I can definitely see the utility in having the resolution be in a lamda function, to ensure reliability. We don’t have a daily export function, but can provide links to companies in the rare event that something happens to us.
Re: Launch HN: GoLinks (YC W19) – Internal short links for teams
#96I think our company has a policy against using shortened URLs, namely because: - If the company goes out of business, then our documentation and business logs have a lot of dead, useless links that can't be fixed after the fact. If it's a business critical use case, then you just shot yourself in the foot. - Related to the above, it's not human-parseable. If you're on a mailing list and you send out a hyperlink, you…
To address the first concern, anyone in the company can modify any link, so they will never go stale. We do this to solve that exact problem where documentation may contain dead links. With GoLinks your links will always be up to date as long as people are using them. Your company is the owner of the links, not an individual. The second, our links are actually more human-parsable. go/customer-feedback is much more re…
Your product is a really smart idea. I wonder if adding an on premise solution would help sales with larger orgs. Sort of like what GitHub did with GitHub Enterprise.
Re: Launch HN: GoLinks (YC W19) – Internal short links for teams
#97I think you have something useful here. This is something I've seen a number of large companies build/deploy internally because they've been burned hard on content migrations. In the enterprise noone is going to set up a .htaccess redirect unless it's for the CEO's document repository. Whether it can sustain a company larger than 1-2 people is a larger question. * Have pages listing available links go/hr could take y…
You pretty much just listed out our current backlog. Great minds think a like! For the first item though, we plan to implement “tags”. The sub directory format actually causes links to be siloed under a specific subname, so if 2 links should exist across 2 sub directories, it would need to be duplicated. With tags, you can tag the link and aggregate the links with the tag. For the 4th point about someone using anothe…
I'm not sure on the best solution. From the security perspective many enterprise customers like want the intermediaries removed so that they can see the real final destination. If the destination changes at some point you should update to the new destination, but it might be interesting to record the change when your system checks link validity.