Last July, I passed the AWS Cloud Practitioner exam. I don't currently utilize AWS at my current job role, so I wanted to find a project I could use to practice using some of the services I had spent time learning. I came across the Cloud Resume Challenge, and felt like it was a chill, well rounded way to achieve that goal. Then I went full bore and wound up with a small website.

When starting the challenge, the first thing I did was find a suitable HTML template for my resume. The last time I did anything with HTML was a couple years ago for one of my college classes, but modifying the template to show my information wasn't difficult. I didn't make any changes to the CSS. Then, I created an S3 bucket, uploaded my webpage files, and configured the bucket for use as a static website. After that I registered a domain using Route 53, created a CloudFront distribution, and configured them both to provide the content of the bucket. At times, I had to stop and figure out why certain components weren't working, but it helped me gain a better understanding of how the services work together and how websites in general function.

I completed the first 6 conditions of the Cloud Resume Challenge and went live. The other steps involve adding more functionality to the basic webpage, but I wanted to spend time adding those components gradually over time.

Then I got to thinking: why stop with just a resume? Why not add a little more functionality to mold a little home base for all projects, not just web or AWS related?

My goal then became to fold the resume into a site for hosting blog posts. I found a few videos on YouTube that demonstrated how to set up a sidebar, as well as open source icon libraries like Boxicon and Font Awesome. I used some CSS resources to help with styling, and modified a few things to better suit my sense of design. I incorporated the picture from my resume into the sidebar, and included links to my Github, LinkedIn, and Twitter pages. In the future, I know I want to add a search feature for future posts, but for now navigating the content is manageable. I'm trying to be mindful of file and folder structure so scaling isn't a huge pain. Automatically pushing code updates to the S3 bucket using Github would be cash money too, bro.

It's not much, but I feel that fuzzy feeling of accomplishment that motivates me to create and build things of my own. I look forward to the projects that are yet to come.