Introduction

I started building a web application out of curiosity. I had always wondered about the technologies needed to make a production-grad website and the level of difficulty to do so. My starting point was a great tutorial by Awa Melvine. It taught me how to build a basic blog and deploy it on my local device. I later adapted the code to be deployed on cloud infrastructure, specifically on Azure with App Service and a MySQL database. Azure App Service was a good choice for my test website because of its free tier; even though the free tier resulted in high latency, it allwed my test website to be kept available to be public for free so that others could learn from it. I've linked my test website here (but note that the page load time can be as long as a minute).

Build

Once I completed my test website, I set out to create a personal website to share some of my projects, ideas and experiences. I chose to deploy it on AWS Lightsail primarily because it was a more cost effective, production-grade option for the scale expected for my website. To adapt the base code of the test website for my personal website, I spent a lot of time on styling (primarily with CSS) and on integrating Javascript to address mobile users. While AWS Lightsail was fairly easy to use, and allowed me to migrate my application from Azure, there was however a bit of a learning curve to figure out the AWS Lightsail networking configurations and to address the handling of HTTPS requests.  

I hope you enjoy my website and please don't hesitate to contact me if anything is of interest.