David Liu Software engineer
Toronto --:--
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Tethos

Nonprofit Dev Studio

Federally incorporated student-run dev studio. Founded 2024 at Western, expanded to UBC. tethos.ca

The Tethos team in front of a Western University building
Tethos, Western chapter

Context

Why

Bridge between student devs and real-world software needs.

Pro-bono builds for community orgs that can't afford dev shops.

Backing

Morissette Institute of Entrepreneurship at Ivey.

Chapters

Western (founding, 2024).

UBC (2025).

Build

Tethos Island

2026 – Present

The member portal: a cozy multiplayer 3D island in the browser, built solo.

Members fish, catch bugs, fill a museum, study in a café and hang out under the real sky of London, Ontario.

Colyseus multiplayer in shards of up to 40. A server-authoritative economy in Postgres functions.

59 API routes, five tiers of role-based access, and a recruiting dashboard with 240+ applications.

Standalone FastAPI service indexing Google Drive + Notion into pgvector.

OpenAI text-embedding-3-small, 1536-dim.

Two-signal delta re-indexing, top-6 similarity search, cited responses.

Four LLM query modes.

Auth & Infra

Supabase SSR auth with PostgreSQL RLS policies. Zod API validation.

CI/CD pipeline with GitHub Actions, Docker, GHCR. Game server on VPS.

Client Work

20+ pro-bono projects shipped.

SettleIn for International Rescue Committee: a mobile app serving refugees.

World Vision: an agentic AI discovery pipeline.

London Children's Museum: an interactive space glove exhibit (225,000+ annual visitors).

Impact

Members

250+ devs and an 80+ person exec team across 2 chapters.

Community reach

3,000+.

Projects shipped

20+.

Client value

$500k+ saved for nonprofits.

Stack

Frontend

Next.js 16, React Three Fiber, Tailwind CSS.

Backend

FastAPI, Supabase, PostgreSQL, pgvector.

Infra

GCP Cloud Run, Docker, GitHub Actions, Hetzner, GHCR.

AI

OpenAI text-embedding-3-small. LangChain.