Professional Portfolio Website

A production-grade portfolio website engineered from scratch to demonstrate modern PHP architecture and DevOps practices.

Backend:
• PHP 8.5 — Core server-side language with strict typing, modern syntax, and property hooks.
• Laravel 12 — MVC framework providing routing, Eloquent ORM, queues, and service container.
• MySQL — Relational database storing projects, skills, experiences, and contact messages.
• Redis — In-memory store used for session management and application caching.

Frontend:
• Alpine.js — Lightweight reactive layer for UI interactions without a heavy SPA overhead.
• Tailwind CSS 4 — Utility-first CSS framework for a fully responsive, dark-mode design.
• Vite — Modern asset bundler providing hot module replacement during development.

Architecture & Quality:
• Repository Pattern + Service Layer + DTOs — Decoupled, testable business logic.
• Custom Session Guard — Bespoke authentication layer extending Laravel’s auth system.
• PHPUnit — Comprehensive unit and feature test suite covering controllers, services, and repositories.
• GitHub Actions — Automated CI/CD pipeline running tests, linting, and deployment on every push.

AI-Assisted Development:
• Claude (Anthropic) — Used as an autonomous coding agent to scaffold features, review logic, and accelerate delivery.

Infrastructure:
• AWS EC2 — Virtual machine hosting the Dockerised application stack in a production Linux environment.
• AWS Route 53 — DNS management and traffic routing with health-check failover pointing to the EC2 instance.
• AWS Budgets — Monthly cost threshold with email and SNS alerts to prevent unexpected spend.
• Docker Compose — Multi-container local and production environment (Nginx, PHP-FPM, MySQL, Redis).
• Nginx — Reverse proxy and static asset server inside the container network.
• Cloudflare — Global reverse proxy providing CDN, DDoS protection, SSL/TLS termination, and DNS management.
• Git — Full version control with feature-branch workflow.