Westgate Pension

Overview

Westgate Pension is a full stack pension administration platform that simulates real-world member and employer portals used by pension consulting firms. The system features two distinct role-based portals — employees can log in to view their pension details, run new calculations based on salary and contribution rate, and track their full calculation history. Administrators have access to an organization-wide dashboard showing all members, their profiles, and calculation histories. Built with .NET 10 Web API on the backend and React with TypeScript on the frontend, the application uses Entity Framework Core for database management with SQL Server, JWT authentication for secure access, and BCrypt for password hashing. The project is fully deployed on Azure with a CI/CD pipeline via GitHub Actions that automatically deploys on every push to main.

Challenges & Solutions

One of the main architectural challenges was resolving a circular reference issue caused by the one-to-many relationship between Employee and PensionCalculation entities during JSON serialization. I solved this using [JsonIgnore] and a nullable navigation property, though I identified DTOs as the production-grade solution. Setting up the production deployment on Azure required configuring SQL Server firewall rules, running EF Core migrations automatically on startup, managing environment variables for JWT secrets and connection strings, and configuring CORS to allow requests from the deployed frontend. Switching from LocalDB to Docker for local development and then to Azure SQL for production required careful connection string management using .NET User Secrets locally and Azure App Service environment variables in production.

What I Learned

• 1Built a RESTful API with ASP.NET Core following a layered architecture — controllers, services, and data access layers with clear separation of concerns.
• 2Implemented JWT authentication with role-based access control, allowing employees to access only their own data while admins can manage the entire organization.
• 3Used Entity Framework Core code-first migrations to manage database schema changes across local Docker and production Azure SQL environments.
• 4Designed a relational database schema with a one-to-many relationship between employees and pension calculations, applying normalization principles.
• 5Built a reusable React component library with Tailwind CSS design tokens, keeping components under 100 lines and following single responsibility principles.
• 6Implemented custom React hooks to separate data fetching logic from UI components, improving maintainability and reusability.
• 7Configured a full CI/CD pipeline using GitHub Actions for automatic deployment to Azure App Service and Azure Static Web Apps on every push to main.
• 8Managed sensitive credentials using .NET User Secrets locally and Azure App Service environment variables in production, keeping secrets out of source control.
• 9Applied mobile responsive design using Tailwind CSS breakpoint utilities ensuring the app works across all device sizes.

Deployment Process