Building an internal QA & debugging workflow tool while learning backend engineering

I’ve been working on a small internal tool called TrackQA and it’s slowly turning into one of the most useful projects I’ve built.

Originally, I didn’t set out to build a product. I just wanted a better way to track bugs, refactors, and debugging investigations across my projects. Notes and to-do lists weren’t enough because debugging work isn’t linear — you investigate something, find another issue, refactor something else, test again, and so on.

So I started building a simple workflow tool where tickets move through stages like:
Open → In Progress → Testing → Verified → Closed

But while building it, I kept running into real engineering problems:

• A blank page caused by routing and rendering issues
• State persistence problems with local storage
• Workflow logic getting complicated as statuses increased
• Thinking about how this would work with multiple users
• Planning a future backend API instead of local-only storage
• Logging and error tracking improvements for debugging visibility

At some point I realized the tool itself wasn’t the most interesting part — the interesting part was all the debugging, refactoring, and system design decisions that happened while building it.

So I started documenting everything as case studies:

• Backend architecture refactor
• Debugging a blank page issue in React
• Local storage persistence and state sync problems
• Workflow UI design decisions
• Planned backend migration
• Multi-user workflow expansion
• Logging and error tracking improvements

It turned into a small site where I document backend refactors, debugging investigations, internal tools, and system improvements.

I’m not sure yet if TrackQA will become a SaaS or just remain an internal tool, but it has already been one of the best ways for me to learn debugging, architecture, and system design by solving real problems instead of just building tutorial projects.

Curious if anyone else here has built internal tools that ended up teaching them more than their main projects.