Notes on architecture, decisions, and learnings from the systems I build.
First entry of the thread. I walk through the choice of AWS over simpler alternatives and leave the site running in production, with the bucket private and static-page routing fixed at the edge.
The deploy goes from four manual commands to a single local command, and missing URLs now return a proper 404 instead of the raw bucket error. Two gotchas along the way: one from Windows and one from git.
The deploy gets automated with no stored credentials. I add a custom domain with TLS, basic observability, and cost guardrails, justified decisions through the Well-Architected Framework pillars.
A Full RAG pipeline that answers questions about me from a corner of the portfolio, designed prioritizing cost control and being honest about the limits of retrieval.
The linear pipeline turns into an agent: conversation memory, routing by question type, query reformulation when retrieval medition is weak, and an eval suite so nothing regresses on guesswork.
The known limitation is solved by a second reranking stage, and add a guard that reverts the reformulation when it degrades more than it improves.
