Diderot – Course Platform at Carnegie Mellon University
Backend, frontend and AWS operations for Diderot, the course platform developed at Carnegie Mellon University under Assoc. Prof. Umut Acar.
- Client
- Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, USA)
- Industry
- Higher education
- Period
- Jun 2022 – Jan 2024
- Engagement
- Agency team under a CMU services agreement
Key Results
20 months as the platform's engineering team: rebuilt AWS environments, upgraded the stack and shipped new teaching features during live semesters
The Challenge
Diderot brings course books and notes, a class schedule, discussion posts and Codelabs, its autograder, into one platform for Carnegie Mellon courses. It is run by an academic research group, so it needed an engineering team that could keep the infrastructure current and ship features without disrupting courses in progress.
Our Solution
From June 2022 we worked as Diderot's engineering team, with backend, frontend and project-management roles. We upgraded the AWS Elastic Beanstalk platform and Python version, introduced Celery for background jobs, and rebuilt the staging and production environments. On the product side we built the integration between books and the course schedule, schedule cloning and current-week and five-day views; improved Codelabs error handling and submission management; and added leaderboard CSV export, preferred names, and a refactor of how posts and comments track what each student has read.
The Outcome
The engagement ran through January 2024 and covered AWS operations, dependency upgrades and new features while courses were running on the platform.
Highlights
- Elastic Beanstalk and Python platform upgrades
- Celery background jobs; staging and production rebuilt
- Books–schedule integration with cloning and weekly views
- Codelabs autograder improvements
- Leaderboard exports, preferred names, read-tracking refactor
Related Projects
Property Search Platform for Finland – Web & iOS
A property search website and iOS app that gathers rental, sale and new-build listings from across Finland into one fast, searchable place.
Oplist – Automated Shift Scheduling for Hospitals
Shift-scheduling SaaS with an optimization engine that builds fair, rule-compliant rosters for hospital departments.
Planard – Budgeting & Financial Planning SaaS
A cloud budgeting and financial-planning product for mid-size and large companies, built from scratch. Planard was Smart Maple's first client.
Interested in Web Development Services?
Learn more about our web development capabilities and see how we can help with your project.
Explore Web Development ServicesHave a Project in Mind?
Let's discuss how we can bring your vision to life with a custom solution.
Start Your Project