So my background before taking on this challenge is a day to day IT Support guy, who usually resolves 80% of IT-related issues by switching the device on and off, ring a bell? Umm maybe let's add another 10% to that 80%, that's where I am at this point.
But, within the past year, I have been looking a the cloud and the different opportunities it offers and I've been gravitating primarily towards AWS, this lead me to create a free tier AWS account to explore the different capabilities of the cloud. I would fairly say I have been playing around with AWS services for almost a year now, all at personally capacity not "professional" whatever that means...
I came across the cloud resume challenge while digitally smoking on the web, oh I mean I was scrolling through twitter from Forrest Brazeal At a glance, the steps looked simple I naively thought I would complete it in a day or two since I already had used some AWS services before and I already had some familiarity with HTML, CSS, and I had been teaching myself python and definitely knew how to SSH into an EC2 instance however that wasn't the case. This was a step into uncharted territory.
This was way challenging and it pushed me to step out of my comfort zone, and by comfort zone, I mean the 2nd page of a Googe search. A birds-eye view of the challenge consisted of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python, UnitTests, NoSql database (DynamoDB), Source Control, CI/CD, and IaC(Serverless Architecture Model, SAM) was the preferred method to define your application infrastructure.
I started off by building my front-end the HTML, and CSS part it's needless to say aesthetics are not my strongest suit as you can see the finished product here but I came up with something that suited the purpose, despite still having room for improvement, Next up was dynamoDB, Lambda, and API gateway which had to be built with SAM. This took me to places I have never been to before, multiple browsers tabs scrapping, scavenging the web, and watching tutorials for a couple of nights, the euphoria I felt when it finally worked cant be explained. Moving on was unit tests, something I always heard about, now I thought through all the hustle I had gone to get my barely functionally python code work for the Lambda, now I had write more code to test if my code was working? Sigh
Surprisingly finding resources that would see me towards the successfully writing tests was less tedious, with a few attempts it was all sorted. As for the CI/CD with Github actions, was not as grueling once I got the grasp of YAML syntax from the previous exercise of working with SAM.
Overall my experience taking this challenge pulled me out of my comfort zone, I got to work with cool technology and build my first serverless app, I learned quite a lot and got to be part community and meet some amazing people on his discord, hop onus we've Corey Quinn onboard and you're gonna wanna hear what he has to say I'd like to thank Forrest Brazeal for the initiative, looking forward to more challenges, more learning, and experiences.
The architecture of my site
