Site: James Rhoat — Giving back to the community
Source: https://james.rhoat.com/about/
Title: About
Word count: 337
Reading time: 2 min

Contents:
- [About Me](#about-me)
  - [Background](#background)
  - [What I Work With](#what-i-work-with)
  - [Certifications](#certifications)
  - [What I Write About Here](#what-i-write-about-here)
  - [Connect](#connect)

***

# About


## About Me

Cloud Engineer and DevOps practitioner focused on infrastructure automation, Kubernetes, and platform engineering. I build and maintain production infrastructure, write tooling to automate the boring parts, and share what I learn here.

### Background

I started in the SQL Server world — deep database internals, storage engines, recovery models, corruption forensics. That foundation in understanding how systems actually work underneath carried over as I moved into cloud infrastructure and DevOps.

Previously as a Cloud Engineer, responsible for managing the QlikSense BI Platform and infrastructure across AWS and VMWare. Now I work as a platform engineer where I focus on kubernetes operators and automation. 

### What I Work With

- **Orchestration**: Kubernetes (CKA + CKAD certified), Helm, ArgoCD
- **Infrastructure as Code**: Terraform, Ansible, Packer
- **Cloud**: AWS, Cloudflare, Oracle Cloud
- **Build Systems**: Bazel
- **Languages**: Go, Python, PowerShell
- **Homelab**: Proxmox cluster, k8s, Vault, Grafana, and more

### Certifications

- [Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)](https://www.credly.com/badges/eb8594af-448a-4c71-bcf2-7277750c22d0)
- [Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD)](https://www.credly.com/badges/eca3ac41-b8aa-49a6-9c69-1e4df3a83d0f)

### What I Write About Here

Most posts here are field notes from real production work — runbook
material, post-mortems on infrastructure outages I helped resolve,
deep dives into how a specific tool actually behaves under pressure
versus what its docs promise, and short pieces on the engineering
practices I've found genuinely useful (and the ones I've found
overrated).

Common subjects:

- **Kubernetes** in the homelab and at work — operators, networking,
  storage, GitOps with ArgoCD, and the long tail of debugging
- **Database internals**, especially SQL Server backup, recovery,
  and integrity work that paid the bills for my early career
- **Infrastructure as Code** — Terraform module design, Ansible
  patterns that scale, Packer for VM image builds, and where each
  tool stops being the right answer
- **Build systems** — Bazel monorepos for polyglot codebases, why
  I switched to it for personal projects, and what it costs to
  adopt
- **Career and learning** — certifications worth pursuing, learning
  paths that worked for me, and the lateral moves between adjacent
  technical disciplines

### Connect

If something here was useful, broken, or wrong, the best places to
reach me are:

- [GitHub](https://github.com/rhoat)
- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jrhoat/)
- [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@JamesRhoat)