Ship and Hand Over

Shipping is a verb you now know

Everything from this course converges in the final step: the build pipeline you understand, the environment variables you refuse to hard-code, the health check your API answers, the structured logs you will grep at 11pm, the migrations that run before the code, the rollback you can perform without drama. The capstone's last lesson is not about ServiceDesk — it is about handing ServiceDesk over.

Your shipping checklist, in order:

1. Build & config — the artifact builds from a clean checkout; every environment difference lives in env vars; a missing one fails fast at startup, not at first request.
2. Database — schema changes are migration scripts in version control, ordered, re-runnable; never a manual edit on the live database.
3. Deploy & verify — deploy, then check GET /healthz before declaring victory; watch the first real requests in the logs.
4. Document — a README that states what the app is, how to run it, what each env var means, and how migrations are applied. Write it for the teammate who joins Monday.

The audit you will be graded on

The capstone verification asks you to declare what you actually built: your authorization model, your validation layers, your API error contract, your accessibility pass, your migration strategy. False declarations fail — the grader asks pointed questions that only a real implementation answers. If you did not do the migration strategy, you will not be able to answer. That is the point: the verification cannot be gamed by guessing.

When you pass it, the sentence this course has been driving toward becomes true: I can build and engineer a real web application, not just follow tutorials.