The Cloud Resume Challenge and Building the Blog

The where, why and how this blog started

This is the first post in a series of posts about how I attempted the Cloud Resume Challenge.

Intro: This post

Part 1: Starting the web application

Welcome to the blog.

There are two parts to building this and they sort of happened along a common thread:

• I discovered Forrest Brazeal’s excellent Cloud Resume Challenge through reading online
• I got really into a few side projects of mine that warranted longer-form writing - a Github README wasn’t sufficient

The challenge itself is designed for people looking to get into cloud infrastructure - many of the people who complete it go on to take jobs in cloud engineering and DevOps. It breaks down into a few pieces:

1. Get an introductory cloud certification
2. Build a static website with a resume using HTML/CSS
3. Serve it online in a public cloud (with HTTPS + DNS component)
4. Add a backend with serverless compute and a database to track visitor counts
5. “DevOps” stuff (infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD)
6. A blog post on a public site like DEV Community or Medium. <== we are here.

I’ve worked in technology for 15+ years, done a lot of the above before in my line of work, and am already multi-cloud-certified, so don’t fit into the entry-level audience. I was still looking to refresh a lot of skills and learn newer ones, so I’ve followed the basics, with a few differences:

1. The initial site was built with Django, a technology I’ve wanted to put into use for ages
2. Infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD were done from step 1 instead of the end
3. The whole site is an application hosted with Google Cloud Run
4. I built my own blog component using the Wagtail CMS
5. The database is an experimental combination of SQLite with Litestream, replicating to Google Cloud Storage.

This is just the first post to get the blog up and running. I’ll do this as a series of shorter posts!

Thanks for reading.