Henry Gadgets - Academic ecommerce with payments and auth

The scope

Academic project during my Full-Stack Web Development Program at Henry: a complete ecommerce - catalog, cart, checkout with payment integration, Google Login, role-based dashboards for admins and customers, newsletter with mailing integration.

What made it useful

First project where I touched the full stack on my own: auth, persistence, payments, emails. Ten different third-party integrations in one sprint - the kind of forced learning that accelerates everything after.

Takeaway

Academic projects aren't production-grade and shouldn't pretend to be. What matters is the shape of what you touched. This one had all the moving parts of a real app, just simpler.