I need to generate room codes for a Flask project, in a similar style to how https://jackbox.tv/ does it.
These room codes will serve as the primary key in a DynamoDB table, and as such will need to be unique.
One option is to use UUIDs, however these are very large and are not user-friendly to type in. Is there a way to generate short (~4-8 character), unique-ish codes without repeatedly querying the DB?
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Answer
You can use base36 representation of current timestamp which will be 8 characters long and probability of repeated will be very low. in practice this works good.
import base36 from datetime import datetime key = base36.dumps(int(datetime.utcnow().timestamp() * 1000))