AWS Cloud Resume Challenge

So I found this challenge from a Medium post. I had been unemployed for 4 weeks and I was looking for a project to do, something to learn and add to my resume in the meantime. I knew it was going to be devops plus some full-stack work, but I was eager to get into it.

I have had a nice document store in Notion for all of my notes for work and tooling, along with some personal language learning goals I have been tracking. I knew I was going to get some more experience with AWS and Python, 2 things I hadn't seriosuly worked with in a few years. Setting up my AWS root account, breaking out into prod and dev accounts were fairly quick, and once I had my S3 set up for document storage, I worked on building out a Github Action so that when I made a commit to my project, it would trigger a build and deploy to my S3 bucket. This work was done in a day, and then I set out on the rusty stuff: Python and Django.

Using python again was like relearning how to ride a bike. Once I got my feet back up under me, I was off to the races. I had the backend built and containerized in a Docker container with a Postgres database and a Django app in a couple days. There were a few changes to Django that threw me for a loop, but I was good after I spent an evening reading through the docs and falling asleep to a 13-hour Django tutorial on YouTube. Once all the pages and backend was built, it was on to the part of IT I've intentionally avoided the whole time: frontend HTML/CSS and Javascript.

It's not that I don't like frontend work, it's just that I know I'm not visually creative at all. You don't want me designing anything outside of something minimalistic. I can appreciate good design, but I can't do it myself. I like things simple and I want them to work, but anyone can throw up a basic webpage in Arial sans serif and call it a day. This was designed to be a challenge, so I did want to challenge myself and have it look good. I realized early how much AI can ruin your ability to learn something on my own. There were tools like Webflow that allowed you to export your HTML and CSS and not have to write it, aka understand what's actually happening yourself. As a security guy, I really can't let nefarious activities like that slide. Plus it's not a challenge if I just click a bunch of boxes and copy off a Youtube tutorial, so I decided to do it all by hand.

Me doing it live

Man, learning HTML and CSS was a beast. It was fairly simple to understand, but the amount of CMD+S, Alt-Tab, and refresh is insane. I definitely see the benefits of using something like Webflow in the future, but for now, I'm glad I did it all solo dolo. It makes sense to understand what UI/UX actually does after all, and getting a full grasp of all moving parts. Learning Javascript was a bit easier, but I also wasn't trying to do anything complicated this time, though I do have future plans to jazz up the photo page a bit more.

Meanwhile, during all this I'm still studying for the AWS Cloud Practicioner exam. I've been watching training videos on Youtube off and on, not really putting too much focus into it.

Wow, I spent an incredible amount of time trying to force feed myself everything I could about Kubernetes and Helm the last couple of days. I finally got my local Docker K8s cluster up and running, and I was able to deploy my Django app to it. I had to learn how to use Helm to deploy my app to the cluster, and I had an extreme amount of errors, mostly from things not properly passing off environment varibles down the line. My brain is great under pressure but I feel like I just tried to swallow a star. Next up is deploying this to AWS. I haven't decided yet between EKS and Farscape. I may try both just for the experience.