# One of the best decisions I made during my AZ-400 prep: Building my own website When I started preparing for AZ-400, I didn't have a personal site. I quickly realized that just finishing projects in Azure wasn't enough, I wanted to demonstrate them properly. So I created one from scratch. I needed clean, secure, public URLs for my demos (especially for blue/green deployments, feature flags, and container apps). Deploying everything to a proper domain made the whole learning experience much more realistic, valuable and fun! Tech stack I ended up using: - Azure Container Apps for the backend/demo containers - Cloudflare for frontend hosting + DNS + SSL Why having your own website helps a lot for AZ-400 (and for other cloud/devops certs): - Practiced end-to-end scenarios (custom domains, TLS certificates, routing, managed identities) - Learned proper security and performance configuration (Cloudflare gave me a ton of new insights) - It forces you to think about real user experience and production-like setups - Great for building a portfolio you can actually show in interviews or to your network - Makes troubleshooting more realistic In my case, the site is still running the blue (stable) version of my Azure Container Apps demo. It gave me a live environment to test revisions, traffic shifting, and feature flags via Azure App Configuration. The projects that looked simple on paper became much richer once they were running on a real website. If you're preparing for AZ-400 (or AZ-204, AZ-400, DP-203, etc.), consider creating a small personal site early. It doesn't have to be fancy, just functional. Have you built a personal site or portfolio during your cert journey? Worth it or overkill? Curious to hear your experience! ![koorevaar.com homepage screenshot](https://images.koorevaar.com/linkedin-import/why-i-built-my-own-website-az400.jpg) --- *Co-authored with Claude.* If this was useful, [you can buy me a coffee](https://ko-fi.com/p47k0). New articles: [follow via RSS](https://blog.koorevaar.com/feed.xml).