A stored token is not the same thing as a live session. This React app restored auth state by reading a token from localStorage, verifying it against the Rails API, and rebuilding the UI from that response.

The harder part of a search UI is not rendering results. It is keeping search terms, filters, pagination, and list updates from drifting out of sync. This React app used Redux thunks to keep those pieces moving together.

Scraped school data changes from page to page. I used PostgreSQL jsonb in a Rails API so the app could store uneven school details without constant schema changes, while keeping the response format simple for the frontend.

A fixed form is straightforward. A UI that lets people edit unknown key-value pairs is not. This React app sat on top of a schema-flexible Rails API, and the hard part was managing state while the shape of the data kept changing.

Atlas Obscura's API needed to be more than a set of Rails controllers. It needed predictable errors, sane account-linking rules, and tests the app team could trust.

A small profile feature turned into a nice full-stack problem: query the right countries, render a reusable stamp component, and expose the same data to the app.