How and Why I Built a Personal Website

About me

I have a background in software engineering.

The problem I wanted to solve

I wanted to put an Angular 2 application into production.

Tech stack

I used Angular 2, Nginx, Amazon Web Services, Twitter, and Bootstrap. I chose Angular 2 because I like its concepts, Nginx is fast, Amazon Web Services is popular, and Bootstrap is also very popular.

The process of building a personal website

I needed to download and set up Node.js and get Angular CLI set up. I used the basic project that Angular CLI set up and modified as needed to create my website. I then set up an Amazon instance and deployed the application first on Apache, then on Nginx.

Challenges I faced

Lack of documentation for Angular Universal and how to deploy it to production. I also had truoble building Apache from source and getting the application to run on startup on Amazon Linux.

Key learnings

I learned more about Angular Universal, and Amazon Linux.

Tips and advice

Make sure your website is secure. Don't use Amazon Linux because it doesn't work with some things the way you would expect it to. Angular Universal is a pain to get working in production. I used Angular Universal to handle bots from search engines.

Final thoughts and next steps

I may continue with this project if I can learn something new.