DeCiTeL: Democratic Citizenship Teaching & Learning platform
Full-Stack Developer & DevOps Engineer, Erasmus+ Teacher Academy
The digital platform of the DeCiTeL Erasmus+ Teacher Academy for democratic citizenship education. A React and NestJS application with a resource repository, communities of practice and virtual exchanges, shipped through QA and production pipelines.
Problem
The Teacher Academy needed one place where educators share learning resources, join communities of practice and run virtual exchanges between schools, available publicly under its own domain.
Solution
A TypeScript monorepo (React SPA plus NestJS API on PostgreSQL and S3-compatible storage) delivered with Docker Compose, a GitHub Actions pipeline to QA and production servers over Tailscale, and a Cloudflare Tunnel managed with Terraform for the public domain.
My contribution
- Developed the web application (React 19, TypeScript, Vite, Tailwind CSS) on top of a NestJS, Prisma and PostgreSQL API with JWT authentication and Swagger documentation.
- Built the delivery pipeline in GitHub Actions; every push to main deploys to QA and every RELEASE commit promotes to production over Tailscale SSH.
- Wrote the Terraform for the Cloudflare Tunnel, DNS, Access and SSL settings that serve the production domain, and the Tailscale Funnel tunnels used for QA.
- Added a scheduled health check with Slack alerts and a ClickUp sprint-analysis workflow.
- Full-Stack Developer, front end to cloud: React and Angular front ends in TypeScript and JavaScript, NestJS and Express APIs, shipped as containers to Kubernetes on AWS and Azure, with Terraform, GitOps (Argo CD), GitHub Actions CI/CD, security scanning and observability
Stack
React
TypeScript
Vite
Tailwind CSS
NestJS
Prisma
PostgreSQL
MinIO
JWT
Docker
GitHub Actions
Terraform
Cloudflare
Tailscale
Raspberry Pi
Angular
JavaScript
Express
Node.js
Redis
Kubernetes
Helm
Argo CD
AWS
Microsoft Azure
Prometheus
Grafana
OpenTelemetry
Trivy
PlaywrightLinks
Context
DeCiTeL (Democratic Citizenship Teaching & Learning) is an Erasmus+ Teacher Academy, co-funded by the European Union. The platform is its digital home: a public site plus a member area for educators, teacher educators, researchers and institutions.
Platform
- Learning resource repository: search, versions and file storage through pre-signed S3 URLs; authors submit resources for review and moderators publish them.
- Communities of practice: membership, profiles and partner suggestions.
- Virtual exchanges: the full lifecycle from proposal and expressions of interest to partners, delivery and completion.
- Roles: educators, teacher educators, researchers, institutions, moderators and administrators.
Delivery
- Environments: QA on every push to
main, production onRELEASEcommits, both on self-hosted servers reached over Tailscale SSH from GitHub Actions. - Public access: production runs behind a Cloudflare Tunnel whose routing, DNS, Access policies and SSL settings live in Terraform; QA uses a Tailscale Funnel.
- Operations: database migrations applied on container start, a health check every three hours with Slack alerts, and backups of the PostgreSQL and object-storage volumes.
