Quad: the campus our online degree doesn't have

Live: https://d3sky2k7b1uv30.cloudfront.net (click Try the live demo, no sign-up needed)

Quad is a community app that only verified students of the IIT Madras BS degree can join. The degree is fully online, with 30,000+ students spread across India.

• Verified sign-in with the student's IITM Google account. A Cognito trigger rejects anything outside @ds.study.iitm.ac.in. The batch is read from the roll number (23f2… → "2023 · Term 2").
• Reddit-style communities for courses, exam prep, hackathons, fests, clubs and city meetups. Posts have titles, up/down votes, Hot/New/Top sorting and threaded replies.
• Live group chat in every community, docked beside the feed, with file sharing (PDFs and images up to 15 MB).
• Direct messages, real-time notifications, search, and light and dark themes.
• ✨ Catch me up (Amazon Bedrock): TL;DR, highlights, deadlines, unanswered questions and key files from what you missed.
• ✨ Find teammates / study partners (Amazon Bedrock): describe what you need and get matching members, each with a reason.

Unofficial student project, not affiliated with IIT Madras. Built for the AWS Builder Center Zero to Shipped hackathon with Claude Code connected to AWS. See DEVLOG.md.

Architecture

CloudFront + S3 (site) · Cognito with Google federation and a pre-sign-up Lambda gate · API Gateway HTTP API (JWT authorizer) and WebSocket API · Lambda (Python 3.12, arm64) · DynamoDB single table · S3 presigned uploads · Amazon Bedrock (Nova 2 Lite) · Secrets Manager. All of it is defined in infra/quad_stack.py (AWS CDK, Python).

Path	What
backend/api.py	HTTP API: profiles, communities, posts, votes, threaded comments, chat, DMs, uploads, notifications, search, demo login
backend/ws.py	WebSocket connect/disconnect/watch, with one-time ticket auth
backend/catchup.py	✨ Catch me up (Bedrock Converse, strict-JSON output)
backend/teammates.py	✨ Find teammates / study partners (Bedrock)
backend/auth_trigger.py	Cognito pre-sign-up gate: student accounts only
frontend/	Dependency-free SPA (HTML/CSS/JS), light and dark themes
scripts/smoke_test.py	31 end-to-end checks against the live stack; cleans up after itself
scripts/seed.py	Starter communities, plus clearly-labelled sample content for the demo
scripts/quick_deploy.py	Code-only deploy without a CDK synth
scripts/setup_google_login.py	Connects Google sign-in (the OAuth secret stays out of the repo)

Deploy

python -m venv .venv && .venv/Scripts/pip install aws-cdk-lib constructs boto3 pymupdf requests websocket-client
cd infra
npx aws-cdk@latest bootstrap
npx aws-cdk@latest deploy QuadStack --outputs-file ../cdk-outputs.json
cd .. && .venv/Scripts/python scripts/seed.py
.venv/Scripts/python scripts/smoke_test.py

Settings live in infra/cdk.json: allowedDomains, modelId, appUrl, authDomain.