May 2025 - First Steps

Month Overview

May marked the official start of the transition from network engineering to full-stack development. After years of configuring systems, it was time to build them.

Key Milestones

May 31: Casa_Digital_Personal

The first commit. A full-stack learning project to understand:

  • React fundamentals

  • Next.js routing

  • Database design basics

  • Authentication patterns

Tech Stack:

  • Next.js (Pages Router initially)

  • JavaScript (not TypeScript yet)

  • PostgreSQL

  • Basic CSS

Environment

Development Setup:

  • Windows 11 Pro

  • WSL2 (Ubuntu)

  • PyCharm Professional

  • Node.js via nvm

Why PyCharm? Coming from network engineering, IDEs felt safer. Syntax highlighting, debugging, and integrated terminals were familiar territory.

Learnings

  1. Package management is complex - npm, yarn, pnpm — each has tradeoffs

  2. React’s mental model - Components, props, state — different from procedural scripting

  3. Database relationships - Foreign keys, joins, migrations

  4. The JavaScript ecosystem moves fast - Documentation often lags releases

Commits Summary

Project Commits

Casa_Digital_Personal

Initial setup, basic CRUD operations

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