This Website

Overview

This website is an ongoing engineering project designed to explore modern software development practices while documenting the decisions, architecture and infrastructure behind the platform itself.

Rather than treating the website as a finished product, I wanted to build something that could continue to evolve alongside my career. Each new feature, service and deployment is an opportunity to explore new technologies while capturing the reasoning behind the implementation.

The documentation throughout this section is intended to explain not only what has been built, but also why particular technologies and approaches were chosen.

Project Goals

The project has been built around a small number of guiding principles:

• Build a production-style application rather than a static portfolio.
• Manage infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code with Terraform.
• Automate validation and deployments using GitHub Actions.
• Document architectural decisions and engineering trade-offs.
• Continue expanding the platform with new projects and integrations.

Current Architecture

The current platform consists of a containerised Next.js application deployed to AWS ECS Fargate behind an Application Load Balancer.

%% title: Public request flow
flowchart LR
    Browser[Browser]
    DNS[Route 53]
    ALB[Application Load Balancer]
    ECS[ECS Fargate]
    Next[Next.js]

    Browser --> DNS
    DNS --> ALB
    ALB --> ECS
    ECS --> Next

The contact form is processed entirely server-side before emails are delivered using Resend.

%% title: Contact workflow
flowchart LR
    Visitor[Visitor]
    Next[Next.js Route Handler]
    Resend[Resend]
    Owner[Portfolio Owner]
    Confirmation[Visitor Confirmation]

    Visitor --> Next
    Next --> Resend
    Resend --> Owner
    Resend --> Confirmation

Current Capabilities

The platform currently demonstrates the following technologies and engineering practices:

Next.js TypeScript Docker AWS ECS Fargate Application Load Balancer Route 53 AWS Certificate Manager Terraform GitHub Actions AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store Resend

What You'll Find

The following chapters explore different aspects of the platform, including:

• System architecture
• AWS infrastructure
• Containerisation
• Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD)
• Security
• Engineering decisions and trade-offs
• Future roadmap

Each chapter focuses on a single aspect of the project, allowing the documentation to evolve alongside the platform as new capabilities are introduced.

Current Status