A lot of CI/CD tutorials show a simple “Hello World” app and a Jenkins job that prints Build Successful. That never felt close to how systems work in real environments. At least, they never helped me.
So I decided to build a small University Management Spring Boot monolith application with JWT authentication and protected APIs, and then build a complete pipeline around it — from source control to deployment, quality checks, security scans, artifact management and validation. Since I'm not a developer, the code itself isn't great it was just me exploring a new language along with some help from AI (Needless to say!)
The application itself is intentionally simple:
JWT-based authentication (/auth/login)
Protected APIs (/students)
