CloudSynth

Learn AWS CDK by shipping real infrastructure projects

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Hey Product Hunt 👋 I'm Hamza, the solo founder of CloudSynth. Two things got me here. The first was watching Boot.dev prove that people will genuinely learn a hard skill if you make them build things and get graded on them, rather than watch videos and answer quizzes. The second was my own last two years going deep on AWS, and the last one specifically on CDK. Somewhere in there it clicked: you can skip most of the traditional backend framework layer entirely. No server to babysit, no container to keep warm, no split between "the app" and "the infra." You describe the whole system in TypeScript, it compiles to a CloudFormation template, and AWS runs it. That's an enormous amount of leverage for one person — and almost nothing teaches it the way you'd actually do it at work. Every CDK course I tried graded me on multiple-choice questions, or on code in a browser sandbox that never touched AWS. You can finish those and still have no idea whether the stack you just wrote has a public S3 bucket in it. So CloudSynth grades the infrastructure. You write real CDK in your own editor, git push, and the engine synthesizes your stack and checks it against security and correctness rules — roughly the review a senior engineer would give you, on every push. The content comes in two shapes, and the split matters: **Concepts** are short, standalone explainers of one idea — what an IAM wildcard finding is actually telling you, why an S3 website endpoint can't do HTTPS and what that means for CloudFront. Along the way, they provide real interaction with the grading engine. **Projects** are the graded builds, where those concepts show up as things you have to get right in your own code. Each checkpoint pairs the prose with starter code and a synth-time assertion gate. There are three Concepts and a Project for users to try out. The approach changed a lot along the way. It started as a course with a nice progression system on top. Then I realized the grading engine was the actual product and the course was the thing wrapped around it, and I rebuilt in that order. Being straight about where it is: two projects and seven concepts are live, going into various aspects of aws-cdk development. The content is growing and improving everyday. There's also a free browser playground if you just want to paste some CDK and see what it synthesizes to, no signup. I'd love to hear: what's the AWS lesson you only learned by breaking something in production? Those are the ones I want to turn into projects.