Resume

Owen Brodal-Robertson (owen@owenseducation.com)
Software engineering, systems integration and mental health peer support

I’m an IT professional returning to technology after several years in mental health peer support. My earlier career covered software development, systems integration, Unix administration and IT consulting. I’m now building with modern .NET and putting my systems experience to work across several websites.

After being diagnosed with schizophrenia, I learned to live with this condition and found what worked for me. That lived experience shaped my work as a Consumer Peer Support Worker at Harvester Clinic and shapes how I approach IT. I’ve learned to reflect on my own assumptions, listen patiently before proposing a solution, and communicate clearly when people are under pressure. I make room for different perspectives and take feedback seriously. I wrote about this in From Being Right to Being Reflective: What Mental Health Has Taught Me About IT. My mental health has been stable for several years. During that time, I worked as a peer support worker at Harvester Clinic, and I’m ready to bring that experience into an IT role.

I run several virtual private servers (VPSs) to host websites with different purposes, from this WordPress learning journal to My Bottle Collection, a web application for managing personal collections. Across those servers I work with different setups, including Nginx, Caddy, Docker and WordPress. Running them gives me hands-on practice with deployments, DNS, HTTPS and troubleshooting live services.

Skills

Skill area	Skills
Application development and data	C#, .NET 10, ASP.NET Core, REST APIs, JSON, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Entity Framework Core, PostgreSQL, SQLite, MariaDB and SQL Server
Authentication and integrations	OAuth with PKCE, OpenIddict, ASP.NET Core Identity, Google and Facebook sign-in, Model Context Protocol (MCP), and data migration
Web hosting and delivery	Debian Linux, VPS administration, Docker Compose, Caddy, Nginx, WordPress, PHP-FPM, WP-CLI, Jetpack, SSH, DNS, HTTPS, Certbot and Let’s Encrypt, nftables, Fail2Ban, systemd, GoAccess, logrotate, Git and GitHub, release coordination and troubleshooting
Email infrastructure	Postfix, Dovecot, Rspamd, Redis, SMTP, IMAP, SPF, DKIM and DMARC
Communication and leadership	Interpersonal communication, stakeholder engagement, team leadership and technical documentation
Peer support and facilitation	Therapeutic listening, peer advocacy, group facilitation and reflective practice
Earlier enterprise experience	BizTalk, IBM MQ, WCF, XML/XSLT, HiPortfolio, Unix, Windows and networking

Recent projects

• My Bottle Collection — I built a web application for cataloguing and managing personal whisky, wine and spirits collections. It’s where I put modern .NET development and API design into practice.
• Owen’s Education — I set up a Debian server to run this WordPress site and its email service, working through DNS, HTTPS, firewall configuration and secure SSH access. I document the setup and my ongoing study in the journal.
• Owen’s MUD and AI-MUD-Agents — I ported a legacy text-based multiplayer game to 64-bit and brought it back online. I’m also working on a C# and .NET project that tests how automated players interpret game messages and act together.

Professional experience

Western Health, Harvester Clinic

Consumer Peer Support Worker · Jan 2023 – Jan 2026

Role overview. I used my lived experience to build rapport with consumers, listen to what mattered to them and advocate for their needs. As part of the treating team, I joined clinical and medical reviews, shared a consumer perspective and helped identify people who might benefit from individual peer support or group activities.

Highlights from the role

• Hearing Voices group. I co-established a peer support group that ran for two years, giving people who hear voices a space to share experiences and support one another.
• Dungeons & Dragons group. I started a tabletop role-playing group that ran for 12 months, giving consumers a regular opportunity to socialise, play together and enjoy a shared activity.
• Other group activities. I helped facilitate cooking, board games, arts and crafts, and community outings.

Career Break (2015–2022)

I took time away from IT to focus on my mental health and recovery, then retrained for work in mental health peer support.

WEX Australia

Application Developer (contract) · Jul 2015 – Oct 2015

Role overview. I joined the prepaid development team to resolve customer issues and extend its ASP.NET Web Forms and MVC platform. I worked with business analysts on customer requirements, provided escalation support and prepared release packages for the operations team.

Highlights from the role

• Bulk order processing. I cut the time for uploads of more than 1,500 orders to be ready for review from over three minutes to 37 seconds by parallelising the database operations that enriched orders with metadata and saved them.
• Weekly customer reports. I enabled scheduled delivery of weekly customer reports by connecting the batch scheduler to the SQL Server Reporting Services web service and updating the reports.
• Excel exports. I gave customers a single Excel export for order data from multiple databases by extending the existing report.

Johns Lyng Group

.NET Developer (contract) · Mar 2015 – Apr 2015

Role overview. I joined a senior .NET team to maintain its CRM, ERP and accounting applications and add reporting to Call Scripter, a tool used by staff handling insurance calls.

Highlights from the role

• Call Scripter reporting. I began building the reporting module by integrating ASP.NET Web Forms with MVC 4 using VB.NET, C# and JavaScript. Development was still in progress when my contract ended.
• Legacy job reporting. I made pivoted job reports available on SQL Server 2000 by writing dynamic SQL for a database that lacked the built-in PIVOT operator.
• Database integrity. I worked on referential integrity and cleaned up orphaned records, adapting changes developed on SQL Server 2012 for the older production database.

PwC Australia

Senior Developer (contract) · Sep 2014 – Dec 2014

Role overview. I joined a project to give staff one front end for tax, legal and time billing, reducing duplicate data entry and switching between applications. I built parts of the integration layer using BizTalk for web services and data transformation, and SQL Server 2012 for database logic.

Highlights from the role

• Batch XML requests. I enabled callers to submit a batch of XML requests and receive one consolidated response. My BizTalk orchestration split the batch into individual calls for the downstream service and reassembled its replies.
• Data feeds. I enabled data feeds between databases by configuring BizTalk maps and ports.
• Failure diagnosis. I built a T-SQL logging framework that let developers investigate database failures without needing access to Windows event logs.

DST Bluedoor

Application Developer · Nov 2013 – Feb 2014

Role overview. I worked on adding call recording and playback to a wealth management registry application.

Highlights from the role

• Contact-centre module. I connected the registry’s contact-centre module to the external call recording system through SOAP and REST, building and fixing features in ASP.NET Web Forms with VB.NET and SQL Server.
• Telephony simulator. I built an MVC 4 simulator using WCF and ASMX, reproduced the client’s service contracts from its WSDLs, and added text-to-speech and WAV-to-MP3 conversion. This let the team test recording and playback before the client’s system was available.

Bupa Australia

Application Developer · Mar 2013 – Aug 2013

Role overview. I joined Bupa’s tax statement project to help update how customers received statements following legislative changes. I contributed to the design, built two ASP.NET MVC 4 services and provided escalation support for the applications in test and production.

Highlights from the role

• DocumentStream. Customers could access their PDF tax statements through the website. I built the ASP.NET MVC 4 service to generate and validate unique access tokens and used WCF to work with Oracle and Unix-based network storage.
• EmailApiService. The CRM could send templated customer emails through this web API. I designed much of the interaction between the two systems.

BNP Paribas Securities Services

HiPort & BizTalk Developer · Apr 2010 – Jan 2013
HiPortfolio Technical Consultant (contract) · May 2009 – Apr 2010

Role overview. I started as a technical consultant helping move data between HiPortfolio and other investment systems, then became a permanent developer. I worked with service delivery to schedule releases, secure sign-off and write support guides, and used feedback from users to prioritise defects.

Highlights from the role

• Data on Demand. I led a three-person R&D team, allocated work, managed the budget and reported progress to stakeholders. We used BizTalk maps and orchestrations, .NET components and WCF to move data downstream. The rule-based HiPortTriggers component responded to job completions and file deliveries.
• Data staging. I built a multi-user WinForms and SQL Server tool that let operations staff load, transform and extract data for a migration involving A$60 billion in assets.
• Asset reconciliation. I moved a single-user Access tool to SQL Server. The upgraded tool was used to reconcile approximately A$10 billion in assets.
• 64-bit migration. Moving HiPortfolio from 32-bit to 64-bit Windows cut some processing times by up to 50%.

AustCyber (own business)

Co-owner & IT Architect/Consultant · Apr 2006 – May 2009

Role overview. I co-owned a café that combined hospitality with public computing and business services. I managed suppliers, rosters and accounts alongside my IT consulting work.

Highlights from the role

• Café acquisition and network. I carried out due diligence, negotiated the acquisition and built the public network, including the servers and customer workstations.
• Staff training and procedures. I hired and trained staff in café operations and food safety, and documented procedures so staff could take over day-to-day operations and the model could be replicated.
• Consulting revenue. I brought in a second revenue stream for the café business through an outsourced IT support contract and advised small manufacturers on IT strategy and governance.

United Networks

Technical Architect · Feb 2005 – Mar 2006

Role overview. I translated customer needs into technical designs, evaluated products, estimated costs and supported tenders.

Highlights from the role

• National network. I brought a national medical indemnity insurer’s regional offices onto shared Active Directory infrastructure by implementing a WAN and VPN.
• Messaging reliability. I diagnosed messaging instability for an asset management and consulting firm and coordinated the remediation.
• Disaster recovery. I designed offerings ranging from storage replication to scheduled tape backups with data verification.

NAB National Custodian Services

Application Support Specialist · Oct 2004 – Feb 2005

Role overview. I supported the custody operation’s data warehouse, extranet and ERP systems. I monitored availability, reported service levels and coordinated production changes through the ITIL change process. The role included supporting Solaris applications and deploying WebSphere applications to test and production.

Highlights from the role

• HiPortfolio platform design. As NAB worked with the vendor on the next release, I evaluated hardware and software options and recommended a clustered Sun platform for its thin-client components.

ABN AMRO Asset Management

Unix & Middleware Technical Specialist · Dec 2003 – May 2004
Unix System Administrator · Mar 2002 – Nov 2003

Role overview. I began in production AIX operations and moved into the Global Project Office as a Unix and middleware specialist.

Highlights from the role

• AIX consolidation. I helped consolidate the AIX estate onto three partitioned IBM systems and upgrade the operating system and applications.
• European messaging infrastructure. I replaced NFS-based file transfers in the core data interchange with messaging by implementing MQSeries across the European network and redesigning the interchange.
• Trading integration and recovery. I connected HiPortfolio to the Hermes trading systems and built a replay tool that made it possible to recover from order middleware failures.

Phoneware Online

Professional Services Manager · Nov 2000 – Dec 2001

Role overview. I managed the Professional Services division to help Phoneware offer corporate customers a single provider for internet access, networking and technical support. I handled pre- and post-sales work, consulted on client networks and oversaw customer satisfaction.

Highlights from the role

• Network consolidation. I integrated the networks of two acquired internet providers.
• Linux servers. I introduced Linux servers to reduce costs.
• International connectivity. I gave the parent company international network connectivity through a VPN.

Education and professional development

• Graduate Certificate in Bioinformatics (with Distinction) — RMIT University.
• Information technology coursework — RMIT University, including management, business processes and decision-making.
• Certificate IV in Mental Health — part-time study at Swinburne University of Technology, in progress.
• Intentional Peer Support Core Training — completed Apr 2024.
• Trauma Informed Care — NorthWestern Mental Health, Mar 2023 (7 hours of professional development).
• Earlier credentials — Citrix Certified Administrator, Cisco Certified Network Associate, and food handling and food safety supervisor training.

My current technical study covers modern .NET and REST APIs, Linux administration, and Microsoft cloud and endpoint administration. I’m working towards Linux and Microsoft certifications alongside hands-on projects.