Sharing urls using QR code is a common use case nowadays.

You might have seen restaurants sharing links to their menu or loyalty programs using QR code. A conference speaker might have lots of links to share during their talk, and it's not always practical to share long links in their presentation slides. Using QR code would help, but QR code creation is a mysterious process.

There are various websites and services that lets you generate QR codes. However, these services sometimes aren't free, or they might serve ads on the website. What's even worse, sometimes these services would mask your url with a their own url shortener or domain. Users will hesitate to scan your QR code if it is not clear where it's taking them to.

Do we really need to use these services in order to accomplish simple thing like generating an image?

Let's reverse engineer these services and see how we can build our own using Python and Django.

Learn how to build your own version of QR code generator and URL forwarder service in this talk.