UICS Connect: A Technical Walkthrough of the Alumni Partnership System

The alumni-partnership-system is a networking platform for the University of Ibadan Computer Science community. It connects students and alumni through profiles, posts, communities, jobs, direct messaging, notifications, and connection requests. It is a Next.js 14 App Router application that pushes a lot of behaviour to the client, uses Supabase as both database and auth boundary, and relies on React Query to keep the UI coherent while data changes quickly. A school community needs more than a directory. It needs identity, lightweight publishing, private conversation, and a way to move between social and career features without building separate systems. UICS Connect treats the authenticated user as the centre of every workflow: sign in, hydrate user state, fetch domain data, then keep the UI current with optimistic updates and realtime subscriptions. Architecture and Boundaries The repository has a clean split between routing, domain logic, and UI composition. app/ owns layouts and pa