About
I help teams succeed with cloud-native infrastructure, and I've spent over 30 years doing the work myself. I started on UNIX and Linux in the data center and moved through virtualization, cloud, Kubernetes, and service mesh. Today I work with Solo.io customers on cloud connectivity and agentic AI.
Before Solo.io I was a field engineer at Buoyant, the company behind Linkerd, where I co-presented Multi-Zone Clusters Inside and Out at KubeCon North America 2024. Earlier I wrote Linux and container courses for Linux Academy and A Cloud Guru, co-authored the RHCSA 8 exam prep course, and helped build hands-on lab platforms for Kubernetes training.
Always happy to talk shop: tom@southsidedean.com
What I've Been Up To
Most of my GitHub time these days goes to kodi-iptv-assistant. It started as an itch to scratch, and it's the project that got me coding with Claude at home. These are my most recent projects:
- kodi-iptv-assistant Turn free internet TV into a tidy channel list with a working program guide in Kodi and other players.
- istio-envoy-sandboxes Scripted sandboxes for testing Istio, Gloo Mesh, kgateway, Gloo Gateway, kagent, and agentgateway on k3d, kind, and AWS EKS.
- observability-k3d Homelab observability on a local k3d cluster: Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and UniFi metrics through Unpoller, with kagent for AI-assisted operations. On hold for now.
Connect
Find me around the web, or scan a QR code with your phone camera.