Challenge Accepted

Have you heard of the Cloud Resume Challenge? It's a cloud project spec created by Forrest Brazeal as a way to demonstrate your skills and get a job in cloud computing.

I have over a decade of experience as a System Administrator but I'm ready to transition into more of a cloud native engineering role. My favorite part of working in IT is learning about and building new things. I've learned a lot about things like AWS, CI/CD, IaC, containers, etc and it's time to put it all together by building something that demonstrates my skills and helps me get a job using them. Cloud Resume Challenge accepted!

The tl;dr of the challenge is to create your resume in html and host it on one of the major cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure). Sounds easy right? Yes and no. Here are the 16 steps in the challenge (AWS version):

1. Pass at least the Amazon Cloud Practitioner exam.
2. Write your resume in HTML.
3. Style your resume with CSS.
4. Host the HTML and CSS with an S3 bucket.
5. Use HTTPS to server the site with CloudFront.
6. Point a custom DNS domain at the CloudFront distribution.
7. Create a page visitor counter using Javascript.
8. Store the visitor counter data in DynamoDB.
9. Create an API for the Javascript to talk to DynamoDB.
10. Use Python for the Lambda function in your API.
11. Write tests for the Python code.
12. Define the API, DynamoDB table, API Gateway and Lambda function in the AWS Serverless Application Model.
13. Create a GitHub repo for the backend API code.
14. Use GitHub Actions to test your API code and push to AWS.
15. Create another GitHub repo for the frontend HTML and CSS code and use GitHub Actions to push changes to the S3 bucket.
16. Create a blog post about your project and what you've learned.

Time to get building!