What Building Wanderly Taught Me About Real-World Development

Wanderly began with a straightforward idea: build a platform where users could discover destinations and manage travel bookings.

As the project evolved, the problem became much bigger than creating a few screens. Booking systems need structured data, reliable APIs, authentication, payment handling, seat management, and a clear flow between the frontend and backend.

Then came the AI side. Instead of building a chatbot that simply generates generic answers, I explored a RAG-based approach so the assistant could work with custom travel information and provide more context-aware responses.

The biggest lesson was that adding more features does not automatically make a project better. Good software is about how those features work together.

Wanderly taught me to think beyond individual components and start thinking about the complete user journey and the system supporting it.