Building a live electricity dashboard as a first-semester CS student

Hi everyone, I’m Tariq Mehmood. I’m currently in my first semester as a computer science student, and for the past few months, I’ve been building my first major production project: a Finnish electricity price-tracking website Sähkötänään. In my university classes, we are diving deep into C++, memory management, and core algorithms. But applying those foundational concepts to a live web application with real-time data fetching has been an entirely different beast. I wanted to share a bit about the architecture hurdles I’m facing and see how more experienced devs handle the transition from "student projects" to scalable tools. The Project Sähkötänään is designed to help Finnish consumers track fluctuating exchange electricity (spot) prices. The core feature is a live data dashboard that pulls hourly pricing via API and feeds that data into interactive calculators (e.g., calculating the exact cost of running a sauna or home heating based on the current hour's rate). The Architecture Hurdl