This blog documents how I built and continue to evolve my retro-inspired AWS Cloud Resume. Each post walks through a specific part of the stack – from S3 hosting and CloudFront, to the visitor counter API and CI/CD pipeline.
Resume Challenge Part 1 - Building the Static Site with HTML and CSS
Dec 13, 2025
Mark Twain once wrote, "the secret of getting ahead is getting started." Lao Tzu also wrote, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." I could go on with other motivational quotes I found from my Google search, but maybe we should take this wisdom to heart and dive right into the first part of completing my Cloud Resume Challenge.
The first task of the challenge is technically to acquire the AWS Cloud Practitioner certification, but we're going to brush over that. I doubt anyone would want to read about my riveting exam prep process, so we’ll just be going straight into the actionable steps of the project. Hands-on learning is the idea.
Aside from the certification, the (real) first step of the challenge is to write a resume in HTML
and style it with CSS. For a while, I’ve been flirting with the idea of designing my resume site
with a retro early 2000s feel, because
~ n o s t a l g i a ~.
I grew up exposed to the internet in the early 2000s, so the aesthetic of site design from that era sure does take me back to the good ol' days. After some time browsing on webdesignmuseum.org I found a few screencaps that I felt were suitable to use as models for my own site. They had layouts that seemed suitable for a resume and, more importantly, they hit me in those childhood feels.
I really liked the look of the old Newgrounds site from around 2000. I thought the game icons on the right could be easily converted into links, and each of the boxes of text below the main hero could contain the different sections of my resume (skills, certifications, past employment, etc.).
Once I was sufficiently inspired, it was time to fire up VSCode and get to building the site with HTML. I used ChatGPT to generate a general template of the home page using a screenshot of the Newgrounds page I found. I popped that over to my VSCode file, opened a preview, and got to work on customizing the site.
After a couple hours, I had the home page of my site complete, full with my resume information and links to my GitHub, LinkedIn, and YouTube pages. Instead of going into the nitty gritty details of the HTML file here, I have linked a video in which I break down all the different sections and explain why I made certain choices. That video can be viewed here. To just view my index.html file, you can click here.