Welcome to My Portfolio — What’s Running Under the Hood

If you’re reading this, you’ve landed on my little corner of the internet — and since I’m a systems guy at heart, it felt right to kick off the blog by talking about the infrastructure behind the site itself.

What’s Powering This Site

This portfolio is built on Azure Static Web Apps, deployed automatically via GitHub Actions whenever I push to the main branch. No manual FTP uploads, no clicking through portals — just a git push and the pipeline takes care of the rest. It’s a small setup, but it reflects how I think about systems: automated, repeatable, and auditable.

The frontend is built with Astro, a modern static site framework that lets me write clean, component-based pages while shipping minimal JavaScript to the browser. The blog you’re reading right now is powered by Astro’s content collections — each post is a Markdown file that gets compiled into a static page at build time.

For the visitor counter you’ll notice in the footer, I built a small Azure Function that gets triggered on each page load. It reads and increments a counter stored in Azure Cosmos DB, then returns the current count to the frontend. Simple, serverless, and a practical excuse to work with Azure’s PaaS ecosystem end to end.

The full stack looks like this:

• Hosting — Azure Static Web Apps
• CI/CD — GitHub Actions pipeline
• Framework — Astro
• Backend logic — Azure Functions (HTTP trigger)
• Database — Azure Cosmos DB
• Styling — Custom CSS with Font Awesome icons

Why I Built It This Way

I could have spun up a WordPress site in ten minutes. But where’s the fun in that?

Building this from scratch gave me a real-world project to tie together cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, serverless compute, and frontend development — all things I work with professionally. It also gives me something concrete to point to when I talk about my Azure experience.

Every part of this stack is something I’d recommend and defend in a real production environment. Azure Static Web Apps gives me global CDN delivery, free SSL, and tight GitHub integration out of the box. Astro keeps the frontend fast and the code clean. Azure Functions let me add dynamic features without running a full server. And Cosmos DB scales to whatever I throw at it, even if right now that’s just counting visitors.

What’s Coming

My goals for this space are straightforward:

Showcase projects. I’ll be writing about things I’ve actually built or worked on — automation scripts, Azure configurations, security tooling, home lab experiments. Real work, not theoretical walkthroughs.

Connect with IT people. If you’re a sysadmin, cloud engineer, security analyst, or anywhere in that orbit — I’d love to connect. The field moves fast and the best way to keep up is to stay in conversation with people who are in it every day.

Reach for new opportunities. I’m actively looking to bring my 11 years of systems and security experience into a role where I can go deeper on cloud and cybersecurity. If something I write resonates with you, my LinkedIn and email are on the front page.

Thanks for stopping by. More posts coming soon.

— Ondrej