Open Coding Society — Design-Based Research Capstone

OCS Communications

A communications platform for Open Coding Society: class-wide announcements, per-week discussion threads, and private direct messages, all running on one real-time backend. What started as three separate Sprint 1 tasks — host the Spring app, add chat to the CSA course page, build messaging — is really one product: give every OCS course a live communications layer instead of a static page.

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In Progress
Team Sathwik, Akhil (org Scrum Master), Skandan

EC2 / AWS Infra + Groups Page

The backend OCS Communications runs on

✓ AWS EC2 provisioning with a hardened security group and least-privilege IAM role
✓ CI/CD deploy pipeline: GitHub Actions to EC2 on every push to main
✓ Containerized, resource-limited sandbox for student code execution
✓ Groups management page kept working as chat-backed groups get created automatically
Spring Boot AWS EC2 Docker GitHub Actions nginx SQLite

About

Every piece of OCS Communications — announcements, week threads, DMs — is one Spring application away from actually being reachable. Right now it only runs locally; this team gets it onto a real, hosted deployment. Scope also covers the pre-existing Groups admin page, since the chat feature now auto-creates rows in the same table it manages.

Impact

Moves the whole platform from 'works on my machine' to a real hosted deployment
Groups admin page stays a reliable surface as automated group creation scales up
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Shipped
Team Samarth (Scrum Master), Akshaj, Tarun

Class & Week Chat

OCS Communications, shipped: live on the CSA course page

✓ Class-wide announcement channel at the top of every course page
✓ Isolated per-week discussion thread inside each sprint week card
✓ Channels auto-created on first use — no manual database seeding required
✓ Verified end-to-end against a real local Spring instance, not mocked
Jekyll STOMP over WebSocket SockJS Spring Boot JWT auth

About

The first real piece of OCS Communications, merged and live (PR #24): real-time channels built on the STOMP/SockJS backend — one announcement channel per course, one isolated thread per week — so students talk without leaving the lesson page. Actively being refined by Akhil since merge.

Impact

Answers a request that surfaced independently across multiple students' individual Sprint 1 live reviews: keep interaction in the lesson flow instead of a separate tab
The channel/message protocol the DMs team is extending rather than reinventing
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View on GitHub
Design Complete
Team Perry (Scrum Master), Syowns, Leon

Direct Messages

OCS Communications, next: private 1:1 conversations

✓ New backend domain (mvc/directmessages), not a repurposed group channel
✓ Access control enforced at the database query layer — non-negotiable for a private feature
✓ Reuses the existing /ws-chat STOMP broker under a new /topic/dm/{id} namespace
✓ Sender identity resolved from the authenticated session, not a client-supplied string
Spring Boot JPA / Hibernate STOMP over WebSocket JWT auth

About

The private half of OCS Communications, sitting next to the open-by-design class channels. Full technical design (issue #27) covers the entity model, REST surface, and the one hard requirement: only the two participants in a conversation can ever read it.

Impact

Completes the platform: broadcast (announcements), group (week threads), and private (DMs)
Establishes the query-time access-control pattern future private features can follow
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More on this project

📌 Sprint board 📋 Background & context 📝 Sprint summary 🗨️ Chat verification writeup 🔀 Chat feature PR 🧩 DM technical design