Built a comprehensive e-commerce platform to expand STEM education and technology access to underprivileged communities

For summer 2025, I challenged myself to build something bigger than I'd ever attempted - a complete foundation to expand STEM education and technology access to underprivileged communities. I believe deeply in democracy here at home and abroad, and I wanted to help create creators rather than renters in the digital space. As my capstone project before returning to my coursework at UCSD, I leveraged my full-stack development skills to build something truly comprehensive. The technical journey was incredible: implementing NextAuth.js v5 for authentication, integrating Stripe for payments and subscriptions, connecting the Printful API for made-to-order merchandise fulfillment, building webhook handlers to keep everything synchronized, and using Resend for professional email communications. I faced significant challenges like handling guest vs. authenticated user carts, implementing rate limiting to prevent abuse, and creating a seamless checkout flow that worked across all devices. The most rewarding part was building the donation system - seeing the first test donation come through and knowing that 50% of every purchase would go toward helping students access technology and STEM education made all those late nights debugging webhook integrations worth it. This project taught me that full-stack development isn't just about connecting APIs - it's about building systems that can genuinely make a difference in people's lives.