A Makefile, Dockerfile and docker-compose file are provided in the project repository to enable building image which may be useful when developing. To build a development image and run the compose version:
make up
Once the docker-compose version is ready, the service will be available at http://127.0.0.1:80. Additionally, the API documentation is available at http://127.0.0.1:80/docs.
The project was built using FastAPI framework and were deployable using Docker as a service. Redis was used as a key-value store and caching server. I used FastAPI because it helped me develop an MVP fast given these time constraints, Redis because it was fast and powerful where it had built-in functionalities to cache and expire values out of the box, Docker because it could encapsulated a lot of the complexities of the build and deploy.
For the extension problem, 3. Add a "like" API endpoint that increases a counter for a snippet. Liking extends expiration by 30 seconds., I thought that instead including a counter, I could use a time-to-live value (TTL) since a counter alone wasn't that meaningful while a TTL gave context to the extended expiration.
When deploying in production, I would want to have a managed Redis cluster so I don't have to manage my own and also will deploy the service using Kubernetes instead of Docker Compose for multi-node deployments running on AWS/GCP.
There are many things to be improved but here are some of them that I think will give us a better ROI: having a better configuration management system, adding more details error handling, supporting logs, having a deployment pipeline.