2025.03 - 2025.08
Java/Spring Study and First Backend Project
Studied Java and Spring for one semester, then owned the backend of a career-advice service in a social-problem hackathon.
What I did
I joined a Java/Spring study group in the university-wide IT club AMiCOM after becoming interested in object-oriented programming. With only basic Java syntax and no web-development experience, I spent a semester working through Spring Boot, dependency injection, REST APIs, and JPA.
During the summer social-problem hackathon, our team built LinkUp, a platform where teenagers could book career conversations with working professionals. I owned the Spring Boot backend and implemented the MVP's mentor registration, mentor lookup, reservation, and other CRUD APIs.
The endpoints ran, but I was still trying to finish code without understanding which data each screen needed or how the client would turn a response into state. That gap showed me that framework knowledge alone was not enough; I needed to understand the data flow from the interface a user actually touches.
I chose mobile UI as my next learning step and began Flutter for its cross-platform development model. I present this first, immature backend as the turning point that taught me to treat API, screen, and state as one feature rather than disconnected implementations.