Welcome to my first blog post!

Earlier this month, I published the initial version of my website. It was straightforward in terms of functionality, a single web page that acted as a more aesthetically pleasing version of my professional resume. It was also something I had wanted to accomplish for a few years. Getting it done and seeing it work was a surreal feeling that reminded me of college projects finally compiling correctly after hours of debugging.

Building off that momentum, once it deployed successfully and was shared with others, I wanted to continue building and creating. The natural choice was to build a blog.

Why am I doing this?

This year, I’ve felt the urge to create, build, and learn like never before. You might assume these are typical New Year’s resolutions, but the exciting part is that this year, I’ve put pen to paper (or, in this case, code to a webpage) and taken action to accomplish a lot of what I set out to do.

Capturing and recording my thoughts was another major motivation. I haven’t done much reflection or writing in the past few years, and I want to get better at it, mostly by doing.

Will I be upset if no one reads these? Not in the slightest. Would it be cool to build a following and connect with others? Of course!

What makes this blog special?

Anyone can go to Substack and spin up a blog in seconds, but that’s the opposite of what I wanted to do. Last month, I passed the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam (a story for another post) and wanted to apply many of the concepts I learned. This was the perfect use case.

I’m happy to share that this is essentially a Substack replica that I built by hand in AWS including tools such as S3, DynamoDB, IAM, API Gateway, Lambdas, SES, Amplify, and Route 53 (yes, AI helped with the front-end and troubleshooting).

The Tech Behind It

I plan to share a deep dive later into the blog feature, the tech stack, and how I built it. There were a few pieces of functionality I wanted to ensure were part of the solution:

• An admin console within my site where I could easily generate, edit, and delete posts

• Authentication and authorization for the admin console

• Image storage

• A subscription feature

All of these have been included and are working!

What’s Next?

I have ideas for regular programming, but mostly I plan to use this space to share my ideas at a whim. I’ll mostly stick to technology, business, personal finance, and whatever other deep thoughts I feel like exploring at the time. I don’t foresee getting into divisive or hot topics.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in the next post!