Building an Air Quality Advisor for Delhi — Solo, with Spring Boot and AWS. Building an Air Quality Advisor for Delhi -Solo, with Spring Boot and AWS The problem Every day, Delhi's air quality swings between "fine" and "hazardous," but a raw AQI number like "312" doesn't tell most people what to actually do. Should you send your kids out? Skip your evening run? I built a small app that answers one question directly: should I step outside right now? What it does Pick your area in Delhi, and the app pulls live air quality data and returns a plain-language verdict — based on the official Indian AQI categories (Good through Severe) - along with specific, practical advice for that level. The stack Backend: Java + Spring Boot, exposing a single /api/aqi endpoint Data source: the WAQI (World Air Quality Index) API, which aggregates real CPCB/DPCC station data Frontend: a lightweight HTML/JS page — no framework overhead, just a dropdown, a button, and the result Deployment: AWS Elastic Beanstalk, running on Corretto (Java) What fought back Building this solo meant hitting (and fixing) a few real issues along the way: a corrupted pom.xml that silently broke every dependency download, a classic Elastic Beanstalk port mismatch (the platform expects port 5000 internally, not Spring Boot's default 8080), and discovering that AWS App Runner had stopped accepting new customers mid-project — which meant pivoting the entire deployment plan to Elastic Beanstalk instead. Each of these taught me something concrete about how these platforms actually behave under the hood, beyond the happy-path tutorials.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.