I finished a FastAPI tutorial a while back and felt good about it. Then I sat down to actually build something on my own, and almost nothing worked the way I expected.
Not in a "this is too hard" way, more like a hundred tiny things, one after another. A missing bracket here, a typo there, a function I named the same as another function so it just called itself forever. Things that look so small once you find them, but take forever to find in the first place.
For a few days it felt like every time I fixed one thing, something else broke. I'd get genuinely excited seeing my server start up clean, only for the very next request to throw a wall of red text. There were moments I wondered if I even understood anything from the course at all.
But something shifted somewhere in the middle of it. I stopped panicking at the error messages and started actually reading them, properly reading them, not just skimming and feeling defeated. And almost every time, the answer was right there. A typo. A wrong import. A missing parenthesis. Stuff that felt embarrassing once I saw it, but also weirdly satisfying to catch.
By the end, every single CRUD operation in my API worked. Create, read, update, delete, all of it, talking to a real PostgreSQL database, all of it built and broken and rebuilt by me.
What I didn't expect is how much more mine this feels compared to the tutorial project. The tutorial taught me the shapes of things. But fixing my own version, my own mistakes, made it feel like I actually understand why those shapes exist, not just that they do.
Next up is connecting this to a React frontend, which I'm sure will come with its own pile of small, dumb, fixable problems. Honestly, at this point, I'm kind of looking forward to it.
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