Dev Builds Laravel Marketplace with PostgreSQL, Tackles React State Bugs Along the Way

A developer documented their hands-on experience building a Laravel-based marketplace application backed by PostgreSQL, covering routes, controllers, Blade templating, and form validation. The project's database schema was designed around four user roles and two core business rules: sellers cannot purchase their own products, and new listings require Admin or Moderator approval before going live. Debugging a missing PHP intl extension and working through Laravel migration concepts — including cascading deletes versus nullable foreign keys — proved as instructive as writing the code itself. On the React side, the developer worked with useState and useEffect to fetch data from the TVMaze API, learning that fetch does not reject on HTTP errors and must be handled explicitly with response.ok checks. A stale closure bug, where state logged as the old value immediately after a setter call, offered a practical lesson in how React's re-render cycle and closures actually behave.