Building chingyung.dev: a static-first knowledge platform on AWS

My previous site was a single resume landing page. This rebuild turns it into a long-term knowledge platform — and the platform itself is the first case study published on it.

The architecture in one paragraph

Next.js builds the entire site to static assets at build time. Content lives as MDX files in Git, validated against Zod schemas, and every page consumes it through a typed Content Access Layer. GitHub Actions assumes an AWS role via OIDC — no static credentials anywhere — syncs the build to a private S3 bucket, and invalidates CloudFront.

Infrastructure as Code

The whole stack is Terraform. The deploy role is scoped to exactly two capabilities — syncing one bucket and invalidating one distribution:

data "aws_iam_policy_document" "deploy_permissions" {
  statement {
    sid       = "SyncSiteBucket"
    actions   = ["s3:PutObject", "s3:DeleteObject", "s3:GetObject"]
    resources = ["${var.site_bucket_arn}/*"]
  }

  statement {
    sid       = "InvalidateCache"
    actions   = ["cloudfront:CreateInvalidation"]
    resources = [var.distribution_arn]
  }
}

What I'd tell past me

Start with the walking skeleton. Having a one-command publish path from day one changed how every later decision felt — features land on a moving conveyor belt instead of piling up before a big-bang launch.