Bird Dropper

A full-stack web app for logging and sharing bird sightings — user accounts, photo uploads, and an interactive feed of what people have spotted.

The interesting constraint was treating it like something that had to actually run somewhere rather than a demo on localhost. That meant REST APIs designed to be scaled rather than to be convenient, Postgres schemas that wouldn't need rewriting the first time a feature landed, secure auth, and media stored in the cloud instead of on the box.

It's containerized with Docker and deployed to Render, which forced every environment assumption out into config where it belongs. Most of what I learned here was operational: the gap between "it works on my machine" and "it works when someone else runs it" is almost entirely about the things you didn't write down.