A GitHub Search App Showed Me What I Actually Want to Build. React + API.

I built a GitHub search app. React frontend, GitHub API. Search users, browse repositories, see stats. Pretty standard portfolio project. But halfway through building it, I realized something. I was building tools for developers. That was the moment. The app was straightforward: type a username, hit the GitHub API, display their profile. Repositories listed with stars, forks, and language breakdowns. Debounced search so I was not hammering the rate limit on every keystroke. Pagination for users with hundreds of repos. Clean, functional, useful. But what I noticed while building it was that I did not care about making a pretty consumer app. I cared about search efficiency, API rate limiting, data presentation for technical people. That pull - toward developer tooling, toward infrastructure, toward making other engineers more productive - is what eventually led me to DevOps. I did not sit down and decide to become a DevOps engineer. My side projects decided for me. Every time I had a free weekend, I was gravitating toward tooling, APIs, automation. That pattern meant something I had not said out loud yet. DevOps is developer tooling at infrastructure scale - and that realization…