aldhairmartinez.com Engineering Lab

This portfolio used to be the same codebase as this lab — they've since split into two separate projects with two separate goals. This one stayed the technical playground: a real FastAPI backend, PostgreSQL, and Grafana Alloy, all running locally in Docker, instrumented end to end with OpenTelemetry and exporting real traces to Grafana Cloud (Tempo / Application Observability).

What it actually does

• Persists contact-form submissions, resume-download and project-view analytics, and deployment history in PostgreSQL — plain psycopg with a connection pool, no ORM.
• Instruments FastAPI, its outbound HTTP calls, and every database query with OpenTelemetry, all under one distributed trace per request — verified by comparing trace IDs directly, not assumed.
• Relays those traces through Grafana Alloy to Grafana Cloud, entirely self-hosted in Docker Desktop — no cloud infrastructure required to run it.

Why it's separate from the portfolio

The portfolio needs to be simple, reliable, and low-maintenance — the actual production site people see. This lab needs to be free to add databases, message queues, and infrastructure experiments without any of that risk touching the site that's actually live. Splitting them was the point, not a compromise.

See the GitHub repository for the full architecture and build history.