Shipping Student Projects Like Production Systems

Treating student and personal projects like real products changed how I learn. It forces discipline: version control, documentation, testing, and deployment pipelines.

Real constraints, real discipline

I set fake but realistic constraints: small budgets, strict uptime requirements, and clear user personas. This pushes me to choose technologies and architectures that would also work for clients, not just for a demo.

A portfolio that tells a story

When each project has a README, deployment URL, and a short post-mortem, it stops being "just a school assignment" and becomes a case study. That is exactly what I want my portfolio to feel like.