Cat Burston
Dunedin, New Zealand
- catburston@gmail.com
- catburston.com
- github.com/catburston
- linkedin.com/in/catburston
- Languages
- English: native
- German: conversation
- French: conversation
About me
With experience in front-end, technical product support and full-stack development, as well as professional consulting I have expertise in a wide range of technologies and situations.
I am currently working remotely as an experienced Support Engineer in New Zealand's South Island, assisting customers across the world and building tools to educate customers.
I am an Australian citizen with spousal working rights within the European Union.
Experience
Contentful, a headless Content Management System (CMS) is used by many organisations of all sizes to create and manage a range of digital projects. As a Support Engineer, I help those organisations with best-practice solutions and implementations. As the only agent working in the APAC timezone, I understand many parts of the product and business in order to meet the needs of our customers.
With tickets being raised through both Zendesk and Intercom, I look after a broad range of topics including API usage, connection troubleshooting and account management. While most of the platform users are experienced developers, not all have a technical background so it's often necessary to tailor the advice provided accordingly.
With an internal initiative to use our own product more, I have been developing a Knowledge Centre to cater to a specific set of Contentful users: Practitioners. Practitioners are generally content editors or authors and have little technical experience, so they find our existing documentation - aimed at developers - confusing. The Centre is built with Contentful, GatsbyJS and GraphQL.
Almost the complete antipodes point from my previous home in France, I moved to New Zealand with my husband at the end of 2016 and joined the customer care team for local startup PocketSmith, a personal finance and budgeting tool.
In the bank feeds group, I assisted customers around the world directly with any issues in setting up and monitoring their bank feeds. I also mediated with our third party provider to get questions answered and problems resolved as quickly as possible.
Reliance on a third-party can be difficult and meant that we didn't always have an immediate answer to user's questions and issues. In order to increase our efficacy, I built several tools that make it easier for the Support team to work more effectively. These tools include: an error-lookup browser extension and a Slack bot built in Ruby which aggregates difficult conversations for group discussion each day.
I developed a bot to automate as many of our interactions with our third party provider as possible: allowing us to work entirely from our help desk software, Help Scout, without having to log in to external systems several times through the day. Writing thorough specifications and a business case brought support from my colleagues and the founders as well as making it easier to get started! The project is created using a mixture of Puppeteer and NodeJS, as well as interacting with both Slack and Help Scout APIs.
I played a critical role in supporting the sales process by solving client support requests and identifying possible development issues before they were released to our customers. I made sure that our client integrations ran smoothly by managing expectations and ensuring that our desktop and mobile solutions matched their requirements.
Sitting at the the highest tier of our support team, I developed custom JavaScript solutions for client integrations of our product and debugged the most complex problems based on my technical understanding of the product and our client's systems. I used JIRA software to respond to client issues with software and integrations, as well as to keep track of future feature releases on the developer scrum boards.
I ensured that our Knowledge Base (hosted on Confluence) had the latest and most comprehensive information so that I could empower my colleagues and customers in their understanding of Teads products.
At Voxtok Technologies I developed and improved web applications for television and audio hardware. Due to the small processors in the hardware, the applications were required to be as lightweight and agile as possible. We use tools such as Closure Compiler and Compass to help achieve the most flexibility while using the smallest amount of processing power as possible.
The codebase was maintained with Jenkins Continuous Integration and bugs tracked using the Gerrit Code Review toolkit.
I was offered a secondment opportunity to the Deloitte Germany firm in Düsseldof where I helped clients including Siemens, Bayer and BASF achieve success in learning. I worked on projects focussing on implementing or improving learning solutions, as well as performing planning, strategy and communications analysis.
My projects focused on gathering and analysing requirements for stakeholders and managing change after implementation based on best practice resarch and advisory practices.
I was regularly responsible for organising junior analysts and interns, making sure they completed their tasks according to strict timelines and to a high standard.
The Deloitte Leadership and Innovation Academy provided portals to the best content on the topic of leadership and was available to Deloitte clients around the world. I created branded portals for clients including Rio Tinto and the Australian government, and managed the integration of the portals into the client's intranet system.
When our user-base doubled, I oversaw the development of an upgraded version of the portal with a cleaner user interface and better tools for users to track their own learning goals. After developing an implementation plan, I collaborated with our developers to plan and manage the project using Basecamp as our project management software. As our developers were located in Coffs Harbour, this helped us manage issues and maintain communication despite the distance.
I frequently hosted client workshops to demonstrate the capabilities of each Academy and provide assistance in managing use of the software at the client site.
Skills
Technical
- JavaScript, NodeJS and Puppeteer
- Ruby and Ruby on Rails
- HTML5 and markdown syntax
- CSS3 and CSS preprocessors; SASS, LESS
- Back-end development using Ruby on Rails and relational databases
- GitHub and version control
- Test-Driven Development techniques
Business
- Requirements analysis and product specifications
- Comprehensive product and user documentation
- End-to-end customer solutions and process management
- Global project collaboration
- Change management
- Communications management
- Advisory services
Education
I participated in the Ironhack Web Development Bootcamp in Barcelona, an immersive 8-week course in full-stack web development. I brushed up on my front-end languages like HTML5, CSS3 (plus CSS pre-processors) and JavaScript (both native and JQuery).
More importantly, it was a great introduction to the nuts-and-bolts of back-end languages, tools and techniques. We built apps based on Ruby on Rails using MVC and OOP techniques; tried out both Test-Driven Development and Behaviour-Driven Development; became comfortable with pair programming and played around with using and creating APIs.
Our final class project was to produce a working web application with real-world use, and my project - townbikes, the AirBnb for bikes - was selected to be presented at the final Hackshow event.
Bachelor of Business (Information Systems)
RMIT University, Melbourne
2006 — 2010
In this four-year program I learned to analyse, design and build sophisticated business information systems.
With a combination of common core studies in business and major studies in information systems, I built on classroom learning through a compulsory industry placement undertaken during the third year.