Why
Bridge between student devs and real-world software needs.
Pro-bono builds for community orgs that can't afford dev shops.
Tethos
Nonprofit Dev Studio
Federally incorporated student-run dev studio. Founded 2024 at Western, expanded to UBC. tethos.ca
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
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.