Re:Understanding How UUIDs Are Generated
by marcus_holmes on Thursday October 01, 2020 @04:35AM
(#24648752)
This makes a ton more sense than messing with the UUID itself.
Also, for most applications you can just add a timestamp record and sort by that.
You can easily prepend a unix millisecond timestamp to a UUID if you want time-sortability, i.e.
174e1da9377-d739f4ed-6aa1-4c99-a0bf-3b0b68e9ce77
where 174e1da9377 is a unix timestamp in milliseconds.
> short (26 chars)
Short == increased possibility of a collision. If you're okay with this possibility, you can just use UUIDv4 and truncate it.
> and nearly human readable
Convert your UUID into base26 or whatever you wish for human readbility.
> and good enough entropy/randomness
Subjective, if you are okay with "good enough entropy" you could arguably just use a random string of the number of bits you'd like.