🚀 The day I stopped 'practising' and started really coding | Lau

Final Project · UpgradeFood · From student to developer

There is a moment in every bootcamp when the excuses run out.

“It is only an exercise” or “this is not real” no longer works.
The Final Project arrives and, suddenly, you are building something that has to work. Properly. With a real database. With a deployment. With users. With real errors.

That is how UpgradeFood was born.

A full-stack application for managing restaurant bookings with authentication, roles, separate panels and email confirmations.

And no, it was not a gentle stroll.

🧠 What is underneath (spoiler: a lot of things)

This time it was not just a pretty frontend.
I set up a complete architecture where every piece had to talk to the next one without breaking:

Frontend: Angular
Backend: FastAPI (Python)
Database: MySQL on Railway
Images: Cloudinary
Emails: Resend
Frontend deploy: Firebase Hosting
Backend deploy: Railway

🔗 Live project

👉 Deployed application:
https://upgradefood.web.app/

🔗 Source code

👉 Backend (FastAPI + MySQL + JWT):
https://github.com/LauMontironi/UpgradeHub_final_project_Backend

👉 Frontend (Angular):
https://github.com/LauMontironi/UpgradeHub_final_project_Frontend

💥 The day I deleted the backend repository

Yes. It happened.

With the backend running on Railway.
Database connected.
Frontend talking to the API.
Emails going out.

And I deleted the GitHub repository.

That silence… is real.

That is when I understood something important:

Git is not a formality. It is your safety net.

Luckily I had it locally. Railway kept working because the deployment was already done. I was able to reconnect the remote, restore the structure and push everything again.

It was not pretty.
But it was the moment when I stopped feeling like a “student” and started feeling like a developer.

🛠️ The times I broke everything (and why it was necessary)

I have had:

CORS badly configured and Angular blocked.
Environment variables that “were fine” (they were not).
500 errors in production because of a badly renamed import.
Emails that only reached me because I had not verified the domain on Resend.
Builds that broke because of the bundle size.
Deployments showing “Page Not Found” even though locally it worked perfectly.

And every time I learned something.

Because the final project is not about writing pretty code.
It is about solving real problems under pressure.

🔐 Features that do work (and work well)

Real authentication with JWT

Registration
Login
Route protection
Separate roles (admin / customer)

Complete booking management

Availability validation
Real CRUD against the database
Automatic email confirmation

User panel

Editing details
Changing password
Booking history

Admin panel

Table management
Menu management
Viewing bookings

Separate, clean architecture

Decoupled backend
Services in Angular
Typed interfaces (goodbye any)
Independent frontend/backend deployment

🎓 What I really learned

The final project does not only teach you to program.

It teaches you:

Not to panic when something that was working stops working.
To read logs instead of guessing.
To understand that “it works on my machine” is worthless if it does not work in production.
To work with real environments (Railway, Firebase, Cloudinary, external APIs).

I have gone from doing isolated exercises to connecting a frontend deployed on Firebase with a backend on Railway, using a cloud database and external email services.

That is not “practice” any more.

That is real development.

💬 Conclusion

You do not need to know everything to build something big.

You need:

Solid foundations.
Patience.
And the ability to get back up when you break something.

Today I do not feel like I am “learning to program”.

I am programming.

And even though I have deleted repositories, broken deployments and fought with CORS…

Here I am. Building.