I am currently revamping my portfolio and personal website, so most of my work is not available for viewing at the present moment. There will be projects presented here at another time.
The English word "portfolio" is borrowed not from French, Latin, or some Germanic tongue as so many of our words are, but rather from the Italian portafòglio which literally translates as portable papers, the carrying around of loose sheets.
Of course you may remember from high school that the kid who carried assignments and homework loose leaf in their backpack was likely to spend a long time shuffling through their stack to find what they need. You may, like me, have been that student yourself at one point. It is not quite an efficient process in the long run.
The Italians of the 18th century realized this too and so in time the portfolio no longer referred to a collection of loose papers but rather the leather case that carried them. As the Treccani Institute defines it, a portafòglio is a
Custodia di pelle, o di pelle e tessuto, o di materiale sintetico, di solito a due facce pieghevoli a libro, provvista nell’interno di più tasche o scomparti, in cui si ripongono banconote, documenti personali, carte di credito, tessere, biglietti da visita e sim.
In typical Italian fashion, it consisted of a notebook of the finest, smooth leather with several compartments to safely store and organize one's bank notes, tickets, identification papers, contracts, and other things of import. Not infrequently one's portfolio could contain a highly ornate stylized design to provide a customizable flair for each person of business.
The portafòglio was a crucial technology in the evolution of business. The Italians pioneered modern accounting and business methods, and the ability to literally carry one's work and information with them was highly revolutionary in a way that would not be surpassed until the arrival of the personal laptop centuries later.
And just like a laptop, it was highly inconvenient and frustrating (perhaps even life-threatning) to lose one's portafòglio. On a darker tone, it could sometimes be easier to replace the person than the portfolio they carried. And because of this the portafòglio developed a metonymous association with the role it was invented to help with.
As an Italian encyclopedia points out, the portafòglio can also mean "la carica e le funzioni di ministro" which translates as the role and the function of the minister. (Those familiar with IT security may be reminded of abstracted IAM roles and other forms of RBAC.)
So a joke emerges, the person without their portafòglio is the one unable to do their job. For the portafòglio does not only itself contain one's work projects, accomplishments, and all professional assets--it validates the skill and experience of its owner.
Just as the portafòglio is proof of the professionalism of the one who carries it, so today is the digital portofolio a form of proof of the professional capacity of the one who holds it.
It is for this reason that I open up my leather case to you, to invite you to see what is inside, so you can see the merits of my work and if these tokens are sufficient qualification for the state of my professional character. It is up to you to judge and evaluate these inner contents.
Portfolios are not static entities. They evolve and expand. They mellow and develop a shine. So too I hope will this one over the course of time.
This section provides a brief schedule of the sequence in which I plan on adding projects to my portfolio. I hope that the file directory structure is intuitive enough that visitors can find what they are interested in.
- AWS Well-Architected Labs
- AWS - CloudFormation - WordPress in 4 stages
- AWS - CloudFormation - HA VPN
- AWS - CloudFormation - Serverless Application
- AWS - Terraform - WordPress in 4 stages
- AWS - Terraform - HA VPN
- AWS - Terraform - Serverless Application
- Multi-cloud - Terraform - GKE Application backed by AWS Storage
- AWS - React - Code and deploy a MERN application
- GCP - Angular - Code and deploy a MEAN application
- GCP - Ruby - Code and deploy a Ruby on Rails Application