A production portfolio website hosted on AWS and built as the first completed phase of my wider Cloud Resume Challenge journey.
🌍 Live Website • 📁 Repository • 🏗️ Architecture • 🧠 Engineering Challenges
✅ Website Phase 1 Complete
🔄 Cloud Resume Challenge Ongoing
☁️ AWS Hosted
🔐 HTTPS / Custom Domain
⚡ Serverless Visitor Counter
📊 Project Delivery Board
🌐 Portfolio: Responsive multi-page website · Dedicated project pages · Certification verification
☁️ Cloud: S3 · CloudFront · Route 53 · ACM
⚡ Serverless: API Gateway · Lambda · DynamoDB visitor counter
📨 Integration: Formspree contact handling
📋 Delivery: Kanban project board · Architecture · Decision & lessons-learned documentation
The live website uses a serverless AWS architecture for secure content delivery and the persistent visitor counter.
Website: Route 53 → CloudFront → S3
Visitor Counter: API Gateway → Lambda (Python) → DynamoDB
Security: ACM · HTTPS
Contact: Formspree
View the detailed architecture documentation →
☁️ AWS: S3 · CloudFront · Route 53 · ACM · API Gateway · Lambda · DynamoDB
💻 Development: Python · HTML · CSS · JavaScript
🔧 Tooling & Integration: Git · GitHub · Formspree
This project records the engineering decisions and troubleshooting behind the finished portfolio — not just the final result.
- Persistent visitor counter — replaced browser-only storage with API Gateway, Lambda and DynamoDB
- HTTPS & domain configuration — implemented CloudFront, ACM and Route 53 correctly
- Portfolio restructuring — evolved the site into dedicated project pages with a Kanban delivery board
- Contact handling — separated the contact experience while maintaining reliable form submission
- Responsive development — improved navigation and layout as the portfolio expanded
- **- Production source-of-truth & cache troubleshooting — reconciled diverged local and production website content, re-established the local repository as the canonical source, redeployed the site and traced an apparent production mismatch across S3, CloudFront, Route 53 and browser caching
Read the engineering challenges → · Decision log → · Lessons learned →
The most useful stories from Website Phase 1 are documented in docs/challenges.md.
Examples include:
- Replacing a browser-only visitor counter with a persistent AWS-backed service.
- Correctly configuring HTTP-to-HTTPS, CloudFront, ACM and Route 53 domain behaviour.
- Separating the contact form into a dedicated page while retaining reliable submission handling.
- Restructuring the Projects area into a portfolio index with dedicated project pages and a Kanban-style delivery board.
- Building a certification page that separates earned credentials from in-progress goals and provides verification links.
- Improving navigation and responsive behaviour as the site expanded.
- Reconciling local and production versions of the website, establishing a clear source of truth and diagnosing stale browser responses through the S3 → CloudFront → Route 53 delivery path.
Website Phase 1 was delivered through tasks WEB-01 to WEB-21, establishing the production portfolio and its AWS-backed functionality.
The wider Cloud Resume Challenge continues beyond the completed website phase. Only genuinely completed work is marked as complete.
The next evolution of the portfolio will introduce the London Cloud Experience, including:
- Full-screen London-at-night welcome experience
- Explore Portfolio, Download CV and Ask RonBot visitor routes
- Professionally presented downloadable CV
- RonBot integration and contextual AI-powered portfolio features
- Continued evolution of the existing Phase 1 portfolio rather than replacement
The repository contains the reviewed website source alongside the engineering documentation created during development.
📁 Website source: website/
🏗️ Architecture: docs/architecture.md
🧠 Engineering challenges: docs/challenges.md
📝 Decision log: docs/decision-log.md
💡 Lessons learned: docs/lessons-learned.md
The
backend/directory is reserved for the real deployed visitor-counter Lambda source once it has been exported and reviewed. No backend implementation is fabricated for the repository.