How this site was built.

The idea

A CV cannot show that I run networks, so I wanted something I built and deployed myself, on infrastructure I own end to end. I already had a free Oracle Cloud server and a domain.

First build: a port checker

My first version was a Flask port checker started with nohup. It worked, and it taught me that a public tool that connects to arbitrary hosts needs real safeguards: input validation, SSRF protection and rate limiting.

Pivot: the page is the product

I retired the checker. Nginx now serves static files directly, with no application server behind them. Less attack surface, faster load, nothing extra to patch.

Deploy day

I wrote a deploy script for packages, Nginx, the firewall and TLS. Then I broke it twice.

• Mistake 1. scp without -i returned Permission denied (publickey). The key has to follow the flag.
• Mistake 2. I pasted half the script into the terminal. The variables were empty, so the service stayed inactive and Nginx returned 404. Fix: clean up and run it as a file.

The certificate audit

I found three certificates, and one had been expired since January. I moved everything onto one valid certificate for umardeen.com, deleted the dead ones and tested renewal with a dry run.

Hardening

I added HSTS, a strict content-security policy with no inline code, anti-clickjacking and cross-origin headers, TLS 1.2 and 1.3 only, and HTTP/2, all from one script that backs up first.

• Mistake 3. The first run failed: an old Nginx file still pointed at the certificate I had deleted, so Nginx refused to reload. The script restored the old config, and now it checks for that before it changes anything.

Redesigns

I rebuilt the look several times before it felt like me. The one I kept is dark, red and cyan, like the screens I watch at work, with standard text sizes so it reads well on a laptop and a phone.

From one page to a documented site

I turned the single page into a structured site: experience, status-labelled projects, case studies in one standard template, a searchable knowledge base, interactive labs and a printable CV. Everything is static HTML generated from one content file, so adding a case study is a single edit.