About this site

I'm starting this website to expand my knowledge of web development and as a place to show off fun projects. I have a few ideas for projects I've wanted to explore, but first there's a few key items I have to work out first.

Infrastructure

I plan to host this in AWS for sure, but the question is how to run this website with keeping costs low. AWS has many ways to host a static websites and I've dabbled in the more expensive options for what I do day-to-day. I need to do more research, but initially I've thought about doing something with Lambda similar to what's mentioned here. The main problem with that solution is that API Gateway is expensive, but I could use an ALB instead. Another option is hosting the website through S3.

All Infrastructure will be IaC using Terraform of course.

CI/CD

I want CI/CD to be as cheap as possible, if not free. I get extra free runtime minutes for GitHub actions with their Pro membership, so I'll do as much as I can with those. I've heard Harness recently added a free membership, so I might explore that too! We'll see...

Actual Website

I already decided to use Next.js with Tailwind as the framework for this website, mostly because that's what we use for projects I'm on for work and would like to be able to better understand how I can help our developers.

I took advantage of a template that Next.js provides for building a blog, since frontend design is not my passion. Not currently sure what else I'll need in terms of frameworks and tools, but we'll see how it goes!