Dev.to
7/10/2026

The original title is about building personal projects beyond CRUD to validate architecture, cloud, and automation skills.
Original: Beyond CRUD: building personal projects to validate architecture, cloud, and automation
Short summary
The author argues that traditional CRUD portfolio projects fail to demonstrate architectural thinking and proposes building small but richly structured projects instead. These projects should showcase domain modeling, event-driven architecture, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, observability, and decoupled AI integration. The approach treats each project as a software engineering laboratory that answers a specific technical question rather than just displaying a UI.
- •CRUD apps don't demonstrate architectural decision-making or real-world system design skills
- •Proposes small-scope projects that showcase domain modeling, event-driven architecture, IaC, and AI integration
- •Each project should answer a clear technical question and include ADRs, tests, and CI pipelines
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