Daniel Hawton
Senior Software Engineer at solo.io
Ljubljana, Slovenia
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDaniel Hawton is a Senior Software Engineer with 11 years of experience specializing in cloud-native infrastructure, Kubernetes (RKE/RKE2/K3s) administration, and release engineering. Based in Ljubljana, he has been a key maintainer and release manager for Istio—contributing to documentation, CI/CD automation, and multiple minor releases while also maintaining Prow environments and Pulumi/ArgoCD-driven infrastructure. He blends systems and software skills across Go, Rust, Lua, C#, TypeScript, SQL, and Bash to build developer tooling, automate complex release pipelines, and backport security fixes across numerous enterprise releases. His work on istio/istio and istio/istio.io highlights a focus on automating docs, CI, and build pipelines for a widely used service mesh. A former US Navy and FAA air traffic controller, he brings disciplined incident response and operational rigor to production systems. That operational background informs his pragmatic approach to security, observability, and reliable release processes.
11 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS, Software Engineering, Bachelor of Science - BS, Software Engineering at Western Governors University
Github Skills (22)
kubernetes10
docker10
dockers10
cicd10
automation10
automation-testing10
helm10
kubernetes-pods10
istio10
automations10
documentation10
github-ci9
release-management9
githubaction-workflow9
website-development7
Programming languages (21)
Github contributions (5)
istio/istio.io
Jun 2022 - Dec 2022
Source for the istio.io site
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:724 reviews, 11 commits, 90 PRs in 6 months
Contributions summary:Daniel primarily focused on automating and improving the Istio documentation website and related processes. Their contributions include updates to the CNI Helm install instructions and corresponding tests. The user also fixed CVSS vector calculator link generation and addressed issues related to the handling of @@ link notations within the documentation. Furthermore, they prepared the website for the v1.23 release and bumped Istio and API references.
istiomicroservices-architecture
istio/istio
Apr 2022 - Jan 2023
Connect, secure, control, and observe services.
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:513 reviews, 25 commits, 53 PRs in 8 months
Contributions summary:Daniel primarily contributed to the automation and release processes of the Istio project. They modified build scripts and configurations, particularly focusing on bumping dependencies like Kiali and release-builder. Their work also involved updating Istio versioning, and configuring the CI/CD pipeline related to ztunnel, demonstrating a focus on build and deployment infrastructure. Furthermore, the user made sure the ISTIO_OUTPUT chain clean up.
circuit-breakerenforce-policiesistioapi-managementmicroservice
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