Personal Portfolio & CV Website

Project Description

This project proposes the design and deployment of a personal portfolio and CV website hosted on a cloud-based Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform, specifically Amazon EC2 running Ubuntu Linux with Apache as the web server. The website will serve as a professional online presence, presenting my background, technical skills, project work, and academic achievements to potential employers and collaborators.

The site will consist of several core sections: a homepage introduction, an about page detailing my education and background, a skills page listing technical competencies (including Linux administration, networking, and web development), and a contact section. The content will be written in clean, hand-coded HTML and CSS, demonstrating foundational web development skills alongside the server configuration knowledge gained throughout this unit.

On the infrastructure side, the project will make use of an Amazon EC2 t2.micro or equivalent instance provisioned through the AWS Free Tier. The server will be configured from the command line via SSH, with Apache installed and enabled to serve the static HTML files. Security groups will be configured to allow HTTP (port 80) and SSH (port 22) traffic. A basic understanding of Linux file permissions and web server directory structure will be applied to correctly deploy and serve the site.

The goal of this project is not simply to publish a website, but to understand the full stack of decisions involved in taking a web project from a local development environment to a live, publicly accessible cloud server. By completing this project, I aim to consolidate practical skills in Linux server administration, cloud infrastructure configuration, and static web deployment — all core competencies aligned with the learning outcomes of ICT171.

Future iterations of the project may include a custom domain name, HTTPS via Let's Encrypt, and additional portfolio entries as my studies and personal projects progress.

Chosen License

This website and its original content are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. This licence was chosen because it strikes a practical balance between openness and recognition of authorship. It allows anyone to share, copy, or adapt the content for any purpose — including commercially — provided that appropriate credit is given to the original author.

As a student building a public portfolio, sharing knowledge and work openly is both professionally valuable and consistent with the broader open-source culture of the web and Linux communities. The CC BY licence aligns with this ethos without imposing restrictive terms that might discourage use or adaptation of the material.

Importantly, using a copyleft-friendly platform such as Ubuntu Linux does not prevent the content hosted on it from being separately licensed. As clarified in the unit materials, one can build a commercial or individually licensed product on top of open-source software — just as companies like Google and Amazon do with Linux. The licence applies to my original written content and HTML/CSS code, not to the underlying operating system or server software.