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Cover image for Part One: Building a Static Site in S3
A Black Lady Tech Blog
A Black Lady Tech Blog

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Part One: Building a Static Site in S3

In my previous post, I mentioned the Cloud Resume Challenge. I was splitting my time between a Python course and studying for another AWS certification (Solutions Architect Associate), but ultimately decided to get some practical skills and experience using both Python and AWS. I'm spending as much "free" time as possible between my job as a Product Manager and life (which amounts to about 5 hours a week).

Since I've already taken and passed my AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam back in 2021 (a prerequisite for the challenge), I was able to get right into building my resume website.

I began building the site in AWS using S3, Route53, Certificate Manager, and CloudFront:

  • Route53 for domain registration
  • S3 to host the site files
  • Certificate Manager and CloudFront to deliver the site's content to visitors quickly and securely over HTTPS

For the front end design, I leveraged HTML and CSS design elements from a few website templates and combined these with a reworked version of my PDF resume. For the site's visitor counter, I googled and hacked together some JavaScript (this took awhile to grasp, and I plan to tweak the presentation a bit as I get further into the challenge).

I ran into some blockers of course since I'm not a front-end developer (google and Reddit are my friends). I also tapped some developer friends for guidance with HTML and CSS. VS code is a great IDE, especially since I've been working in different languages for this challenge so far.

I had some false starts and needed to do some reading to grasp some of the AWS concepts as I moved through the steps, but I am pleased with what I've built so far. This phase of the challenge took me about six weeks to complete.

NEXT UP: Part two...Dynamo DB, Lambda, and configuring an API Gateway in AWS. Stay tuned for my next post!

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