My professional website project sets out to showcase information about me and my projects while broadening my skills in site development. I learned HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP, along with cloud infrastructure using Amazon Web Services (AWS).

While this project is considered outside my sector of engineering, there are many skills that translate. For example, my programming skills and adaptiveness. I made use of online resources like W3Schools and YouTube to study frontend and backend development. This gave me hands-on experience with languages and topics I had little prior knowledge of.

The website is hosted through an Amazon AWS EC2 instance. This gives me the flexibility to transfer my server volume to an instance type with greater computing resources. The traffic is managed by an AWS load balancer to maintain site security. This allows for it to have HTTPS encryption which is standard for web data protection.

The EC2 runs on the Linux operating system and is programmed using the Bash command-line interface (CLI). Apache HTTP server was installed and configured to display my web content. This included pages of HTML and CSS files written to create the display you see. Additionally, PHP was used to direct internal server routing. For example, removing the “.html” extensions in the URL. This, among other initiatives, gives the site a clean and unified look.

The site is pushed to a GitHub repository. This maintains secure backups and records the site’s development. The costs were kept minimal at less than 15 dollars per year to operate by leveraging AWS’s free tier resources.

The website “garretteng.com” is a fully functional website accessible globally. It is an inclusion on my LinkedIn that expands my online presence. It is hosted full-time asynchronously, and cloud computing allows me to update it from anywhere. While it lies outside of traditional mechanical engineering topics, it shows my ability to grow in any field. Learning web development from scratch improved my understanding of programming, problem solving, and professional communication, which are key skills in modern mechanical engineering.