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THIYAGARAJAN varadharajan
THIYAGARAJAN varadharajan

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You Can't Build a Vault on Quicksand: Lessons from Rebuilding VibeVault's Backend

#django #architecture #backend #learning

You Can't Build a Vault on Quicksand: Lessons from Rebuilding VibeVault's Backend
I was halfway through building VibeVault when I realized something wasn't right.
The features worked. The UI looked decent. But my foundation? Shaky at best.
I had a choice: keep building and pray it holds, or stop everything and rebuild it properly.
I chose the painful option. Here's why it mattered.
The Problem with "Good Enough"
Like a lot of developers, I started with Django's defaults and basic setup. Get something working, then optimize later, right?
Wrong.
"Later" in software development is a trap. Technical debt compounds faster than you think, and architectural decisions made on day one echo through your entire codebase.
So I stopped. Deleted code. Started over.
The Three Pillars I Rebuilt

  1. Custom User Models (Not Optional) Django's default User model is great... until you need one more field. Then another. Then you're stuck. 
# Future-proofing from day one
class CustomUser(AbstractBaseUser, PermissionsMixin):
    email = models.EmailField(unique=True)
    # Space to grow without painful migrations
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The lesson: Migrate early or suffer later. Custom user models aren't over-engineering—they're survival.

  1. JWT Authentication (Stateless is King) When your React frontend lives separately from your Django backend, session-based auth becomes a nightmare. JWT tokens solved this:

Stateless authentication
Frontend-backend decoupling
Mobile-ready from the start

# Clean, secure, scalable
REST_FRAMEWORK = {
    'DEFAULT_AUTHENTICATION_CLASSES': [
        'rest_framework_simplejwt.authentication.JWTAuthentication',
    ],
}
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The lesson: Choose auth strategies that scale with your architecture, not against it.

  1. RESTful APIs with Django REST Framework Clean APIs aren't just nice to have—they're the contract between your frontend and backend. I focused on:

Clear, predictable endpoints
Proper HTTP methods
Serializers that make sense
Documentation that doesn't require archaeology

# Self-documenting endpoints
class VaultViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
    queryset = Vault.objects.all()
    serializer_class = VaultSerializer
    permission_classes = [IsAuthenticated]
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The lesson: If another dev can't understand your API in 5 minutes, refactor it.
What Changed After the Rebuild
Before: Fragile code held together with hope
After: Confident foundation ready to scale
Before: Scared to add features (what will break?)
After: Excited to build (structure supports growth)
Before: Portfolio project vibes
After: Production-ready architecture
The Real Takeaway
Architecture isn't about being fancy. It's about respecting future you.
Security and scalability aren't features you add later—they're decisions you make at the foundation level. Recruiters and senior engineers can spot the difference between tutorial code and production thinking.
The best code I've written isn't the cleverest. It's the code that made the next six months easier.
What's Next?
I'm documenting the entire VibeVault build process on GitHub—the good decisions, the refactors, and the lessons learned the hard way.
Because someone showed me their messy journey once, and it helped more than any polished tutorial ever did.
What architectural decision did you delay that came back to haunt you? Drop it in the comments—let's learn from each other's mistakes.

GitHub:https://github.com/thiyagu26v/vibevault

django #backend #jwt #api #webdev #python #architecture

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