Grace Durham

About This Site
The start of a new chapter...

For the past few months, I've been learning about computer science and IT basics...And I love it!

Site Design

This site originated as a way to practice my learning with HTML and web design, but it turned into a super fun project that allows me to easily share my accomplishments and hobbies with others. The steps I took are listed below...


  1. Creating a AWS S3 bucket to store my site information.
  2. Use Cloudfront for a secure connection and global accessibility.
  3. Aquiring a domain name (gracedurham.info).
  4. Collecting and adding all of the information I want to share with others.
  5. Finalizing the appearance by editing the CSS code so it looks how I want it to.


This site took months to make and I had a blast exploring. It will be under continuous construction as I gather more experience and pick up new hobbies!

AWS Certification

This journey started this summer, when I began to work on my AWS Cloud Practicioner Certification. I am nearly halfway done and I've used what I learned to create the infrastructure this website.



Crosse House

Another way that I've applied my learning is through community service. The Crosse House is a historical landmark in Sun Prairie, and they manage some Sun Prairie's historical records and images. My dad and I tag-teamed a project to help them digitize handwritten records so they will not only be able to edit the data, but easily retrieve it for community use.


AP

Our plan is as shown above:


  1. An image of the record is uploaded to an Amazon S3 bucket.
  2. The image triggers an event in SQS (simple queue service).
  3. If it succeeds, the image is passed to Lambda, which, using Textract, will extract the text from the image and place that into another S3 bucket.
  4. The extracted text will trigger an event in SQS, and will once again be sent to Lambda before being stored into DynamoDB (a non-relational database).
  5. After all ingestion is finished, the records will be fully digitized and available for local use, therefore the whole first part can be removed after ingestion is complete.



Credits

Inspiration for the design of this site goes to Zain Khoja, a product designer working at Ramp who also has work experience at Instagram and Github. He was kind enough to let me use his website as a guide to my studies, and it was a big help.


I also couldn't list the credits without thanking my Dad, who helped me through some of the tougher parts of this project. Thanks Dad!