Kate Brock

I'm a professional Software Engineer based on Kaurna land in South Australia. In my professional life, I primarily develop .NET applications, but I have also been spending quite a lot of time in DevOps; creating and deploying internal tooling and processes. I'm deeply fascinated by technology, and often find myself spending time learning and improving on my skill set.

Currently, I'm focused on my home server setup, which runs multiple LXC and VMs on clustered Proxmox hosts. Each of the containers runs the NixOS Linux distibution, which allows me to declaratively define their configurations in code. It's really cool!

Work History

Viterra Australia September 2021 - Current

Viterra is an agricultural company that connects Australian growers with domestic and international consumers. The applications team provides technical solutions for both external and internal clients.

Applications Developer

January 2023 - Current

From project conception, I led the design, development, and deployment of a large internal application, which featured advanced auditing and compliance requirements. This project led to me be being involved in all aspects of the development, from UI and database design, to the development of the deployment pipelines, as well as consistent communication with the project owner and testing team.

I also became heavily invested in DevOps, proposing and designing the deployment pipelines and processes for multiple projects.

Skills:

C#
.NET Core
Project Management
Application Design
DevOps
Windows Server
SQL Design

Graduate Engineer

September 2021 - December 2022

In small teams in a self directed, agile environment, I was involved in the successful development and deployment of several internal .NET Core applications to specification.

I also proposed, designed, and developed internal tooling and processes to handle the automated deployment and teardown of testing environments. This is where I really developed a passion for DevOps.

Pushed for the adoption of best practice processes such as using Git and proper branch management.

Skills:

C#
.NET Core
Azure DevOps
Git
TFVC

Avinet February 2021 - September 2021

Small Australian SaaS company that produces the AirMaestro aviation software, that provides the tooling for cloud-based management of their client's aviation companies.

Graduate Engineer

Fresh out of university, I joined a team of 10 developers, who worked on their cloud-based SaaS project which was central to the functioning of the company. In this team, I performed day to day development and maintenance duties on a large .NET 4 project; utilising Telerik UI for ASP.NET.

This was my first professional experience, and I learnt the value of both undergoing, and performing code reviews - I learnt so much.

Skills:

C#
VB.NET
.NET Framework
Javascript
jQuery
Git
Kendo UI
SQL

Projects

Home Server

https://github.com/CertifiKate/nix-dotfiles

I run and maintain a home server setup comprised of a highly-available two node cluster running Proxmox as a hypervisor. On this cluster, I run many LXCs and VMs, most of which run NixOS. This allows me to declaratively configure each of these nodes from one single repository (see the link). Previously, I was managing these nodes with Ansible, but I found the configuration drift frustrating, which prompted the move. This project has taught me a lot - from networking with VLANs, to management of clusters.

Soon, I'll be looking into adding terraform into the mix, to assist with the provisioning of these nodes.

Skills:

NixOS
Server Maintenance
Ansible
Terraform
Linux
Networking