The basic template used for this website is the excellent Dev Portfolio by Ryan Fitzgerald (view on GitHub). I converted this into a Python template using Airium (view on PyPI), which allows me to quickly update site elements by reading in csv files with the desired data.
I made some small tweaks to the general layout of the site template. In particular, I changed the stock photo to one of my own home town, Houston Texas, and reduced the default blue hue being applied to that element. However, reducing the blue hue made the text more difficult to read. This necessitated some form of text outline to improve readability. I initially looked for some text stroke/outline feature but this didn't seem to be a feature of basic CSS, instead i landed on drop shadow with a distance of 0px,0px, which did the job quite well, in fact better than a text outline would have looked, in my opinion.
Another change was the removal of the background from the links at the top of the site. The original style had blue text over a large white rectangle. I think this looked too blunt, so I removed the white backing, which of course on top of this image of Houston was totally unreadable. I changed the text to white with another drop shadow applied, which I think came out looking quite nice. The last problem - the effect applied by hovering over a link looked super blurry, due to the shadow being added. The fix was a simple edit to css to remove the shadow from the hover effect.
My hosting stack is all via AWS. I used Route 53 to purchase my domain and Amplify to host my website. Amplify pulls directly from the “build” folder of my website’s GitHub repo and automatically updates the website each time a change is committed. Additionally, I set up email under my domain using AWS WorkMail.