About
I work with enterprise customers on cloud-native infrastructure, from proof of concept through production. Most recently that was at Solo.io, as a senior customer success engineer working on Istio, Envoy, and gateways. Before that I was a field engineer at Buoyant, the company behind Linkerd, where I built the pre-sales proof of concept process, contributed to a 4x increase in customers, and co-presented Multi-Zone Clusters Inside and Out at KubeCon North America 2024.
I've worked in UNIX, Linux, and infrastructure for over 30 years. I started in the data center and moved through virtualization, cloud, Kubernetes, and service mesh, and along the way I wrote Kubernetes and Linux courses, with hands-on labs, for thousands of learners, including the RHCSA 8 exam prep course I co-authored at Linux Academy and A Cloud Guru.
I'm open to new roles, and always happy to talk shop: tom@southsidedean.com
Projects
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. I also use it and ok3d, my home network monitor, to try out agentic features. These are the projects I'm working on:
- kodi-iptv-assistant Turn free internet TV into a tidy channel list with a working program guide in Kodi and other players.
- observability-k3d ok3d: a network operations center for your home on k3d.
- macos-ai-imagegen macos-ai-imagegen (mia): A stack for generating AI images on macOS
- cka-d-cluster-builder-lab Terraform that builds KVM/libvirt nodes for practicing kubeadm cluster builds for the CKA and CKAD exams.
- kubeadm-cluster-builder-aws-terraform Terraform that provisions Ubuntu nodes on AWS for practicing kubeadm cluster builds, upgrades, and break/fix.
Connect
Find me around the web, or scan a QR code with your phone camera.