I’m Jocelyn Knight. I live in Las Vegas, where I build the future.

When I was a child, I was told that there are two types of people in the world: those who flip the light switch on to turn on the light, and those who flip the light switch on and wonder how the light turns on. I was the latter.

I've always been a vivacious learner, falling asleep with a book in my bed was the norm. I was the kid who would take apart the fan just to see how it worked, and then put it back together again. Out of high school, I persued a Managament Information Systems degree. This was the first time I was introduced to programming and I was hooked. I spent countless hours in the computer lab working on projects.I wasn't a fan of the manditory english and history classes. All I wanted to do was code.

I ended up leaving to joing the United States Air Force as an F-15, A-10 and U-2 Avionics Technician. The systems troubleshoot skills that I learned in the Air Force have been invaluable in my software development career. I've been able to quickly identify and fix bugs in code, and I've been able to help my team members do the same.

Post military, I worked in both the mortgage and real estate sales industries, but quite soon started working as a freelance software developer for a few years before starting to work as a full time software engineer at several local companies. This continued as I started working remotely for companies in other states, before working remote was the cool thing to do.

I started off building full stack applications, with the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), but quickly moved to building applications with the MEAN (MongoDb, Express, Angular, Node) stack . I was early on the Angular train, working with it since the early days of AngularJS through it's current version. I've also worked on several projects using React as well as projects using Python, C#, MSSQL, Jenkins, Docker, AWS, you name it.

I've also worked as a technical lead, where I was responsible for leading a team of developers in the development of a large scale application. I was responsible for the architecture of the application, as well as the development of the front end and back end of the application. I was also responsible for the deployment of the application, as well as the maintenance of the application.

I find myself working on side projects in my free time, and I've built several applications that are currently out in the wild. I also run a pretty beefy homelab, where I have a full sized server rack housing a mixture of 9 Dell Poweredge r730, r730xd and r630 servers, Tripplite USPs, a 64 port Arista 10Gb/40Gb layer 3 switch, a custom firewall appliance runing pfSense routing software, and a Synology NAS. 6 of the servers are in a Proxmox cluster with Ceph shared storage running dozens of LXC containers (including the hosting on of the very page you're reading), 2 are running TrueNAS Scale and the last is a bare metal Ubuntu server.

I did this because I wanted to learn more about virtualization, containerization, networking, storage, and security. I also wanted to learn more about the software that I was using in my day job, and I wanted to be able to experiment with different configurations without breaking anything in production. I've learned a lot from this homelab, and I've been able to apply what I've learned to my day job. I've also been able to help my team members with their projects, and I've been able to help my friends and family with their technology issues.

Today, I’m the founder of B&M Development Services, where we’re building the future of software development. I’m passionate about building products that make a difference in people’s lives. I’m also a mentor, speaker, and being that I am quite often the only woman developer in the engineering room, I'm also an advocate for diversity and inclusion of women in tech.