Over the past few years, I found myself occasionally writing the same boilerplate: manually packing bits of application state into tight, heavily character-limited strings. It ended up with me creating a library for it called kencode. But first it's story time... and then a little explanation of the underlying tech of why kotlinx.serialization is so cool and THEN I'll go over kencode. It all started with URL callback links on an integrated Search Engine Results Page (SERP). In a previous project at Theca , we had built a search engine embedded directly into a client's website. When users clicked a search result, the link first redirected to our servers so we could register telemetry for the click before finally sending them to the actual target page. This is standard tracking infrastructure stuff. But if enough state can be encoded directly into the URL, the tracking server can bypass an expensive database lookup entirely.…