Hello, World: Building This Site

Welcome to my corner of the internet. This first post doubles as a test of the site's MDX pipeline, so you can see exactly how each kind of content renders.

Why I built this

I wanted one place to write about backend engineering, cloud infrastructure and the projects I build. Instead of a CMS, the content lives in this repository as MDX files, which means posts are versioned, reviewed and deployed like code.

What you can expect

• Deep dives into backend architecture
• Notes from studying for and using AWS
• Write-ups of projects, including mistakes I made

A small code example

Here is a tiny FastAPI application with a health check endpoint. The syntax highlighting is generated at build time by Shiki.

from fastapi import FastAPI
 
app = FastAPI()
 
@app.get("/health")
def health_check() -> dict[str, str]:
    return {"status": "ok"}

Architecture at a glance

This diagram shows the layered structure I like to use for services: the router handles HTTP, the service layer holds the business logic, and the DAO talks to the database.

Choosing tools

The table below compares a few of the tools I reach for most often.

What is next

I will keep adding posts here as I learn. If you want to follow along, the next posts will cover database indexing and deploying containers on AWS.