Building a Cloud Resume on Azure (and Then Refusing to Stop)
Eight years into a DevOps career, the author had never built a personal site despite architecting dozens of IaaS environments and reviewing CI/CD pipelines. The Cloud Resume Challenge by Forrest Brazeal provided the impetus: a 16-step gauntlet to create a serverless portfolio on Azure Static Web Apps with Cosmos DB. The initial result was rlwilliamson.dev, but the author continued iterating, adding a blog, custom subpages, an A-grade security posture, and easter eggs. The README became "ambitious in scope." The post serves as a build log, detailing the journey from knowing cloud services architecturally to deploying them hands-on. The project highlights the difference between theoretical knowledge and practical deployment, a common gap for experienced engineers.
Bridges the gap between cloud architecture theory and personal deployment experience.