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February 28, 2026 • SIF-LAT_V24.0 VERIFIED

Detroit Automation Academy Registration Live: From Zero to Cloud Run in One Session

Tonight we shipped the Detroit Automation Academy Registration from a broken build to a fully deployed, publicly accessible system in a single engineering session. Here’s what that actually looked like.

Starting Point: Five Consecutive Build Failures

The deploy.sh script existed. The Docker images existed. What didn’t exist: a working build.

The first failure was a Go syntax error in backend/main.go — a raw newline embedded inside a string literal:

// Broken
fmt.Printf("Detroit Automation Academy Registration Backend starting on port %s...
", port)

// Fixed
fmt.Printf("Detroit Automation Academy Registration Backend starting on port %s...\n", port)

Go doesn’t allow unescaped newlines inside string literals. The fix was one character.

IAM Permission Cascade

With the backend building, the push to GCR failed:

denied: gcr.io repo does not exist. Creating on push requires the
artifactregistry.repositories.createOnPush permission

The Compute service account had artifactregistry.admin but the Cloud Build service account didn’t have roles/editor. We granted it to both SAs and the build cleared.

The Missing Frontend Scaffold

The React frontend had App.tsx and EnrollmentForm.tsx — but no public/index.html, no src/index.tsx, and an invalid tsconfig.json. react-scripts build requires all three.

We also caught a TypeScript error: inside an if (view === 'enroll') early-return block, TypeScript narrowed view to the literal type 'enroll', making view === 'admin' a dead comparison (TS2367). Fixed by refactoring to a single return with conditional rendering.

Replacing Terraform with Direct Deployment

The deploy.sh script ended with terraform init && terraform apply — but Terraform wasn’t installed and the infra directory didn’t exist. Rather than block, we replaced it with direct gcloud run deploy calls. Both backend and frontend were live in 60 seconds.

Firestore Persistence

The original backend stored students in memory — wiped on every cold start. We rewrote handlers/students.go to use Firestore with a graceful in-memory fallback:

  • Collections are tenant-namespaced: students_DAA-CORE, students_BGC-METRO
  • If Firestore is unreachable, the handler falls back to thread-safe in-memory storage
  • The /health endpoint now reports "storage":"firestore" or "storage":"memory" so you can tell which is active at a glance

What’s Running Now

ServiceURL
Backend API (Go + Firestore)daa-crm-backend-87748455115.us-central1.run.app
Registration Portal (React)enroll.detroitautomationacademy.com

The admin dashboard is now protected by a PIN gate — staff enter the passcode once per session, stored in sessionStorage. The registration form remains fully public.

The Detroit Automation Academy cohort begins March 8, 2026 at The Station @ Michigan Central.