Kecil, part 0 - motivation and plan

Kecil means small in Indonesian, which is the whole joke: the app makes links smaller. It is a link shortener built from scratch with HTML, CSS and vanilla JS on the front, Node.js and MySQL on the back, and no framework doing the thinking for me.

I picked a link shortener because it is small enough to finish and complete enough to teach the whole stack. Auth, a database, an API, a redirect path, a server, a domain, TLS. Nothing exotic, everything necessary.

The plan

1. Project set-up
2. Database creation
3. Database management helpers
4. Frontend
5. API endpoints and redirection
6. Connecting the frontend to the database
7. User accounts and sessions
8. Theme
9. Deploy to a Digital Ocean droplet
10. Domain and HTTPS

The code for each part lives on its own branch, so you can start anywhere and still have something that runs.