On the move

[fanf]

I have sent my formal resignation letter: I am leaving the University. From March, I will be working full-time for isc.org on BIND.

I said in my letter that it has been a privilege and a pleasure working for the University. That isn't a polite fiction; I like the people I have worked with, and I have had interesting and rewarding things to do. But this is an exciting opportunity which came at the right time, so I allowed myself to be dragged away.

I have been a contributor to BIND for several years now. When I met Jeff Osborne (the president of ISC) in Amsterdam 3 years ago, he joked that I worked for them but he didn't pay me :-) And I have met many of the ISC folks at various conferences. So in some ways it's known territory.

But some things are going to be very different. The university has more than 1000 times the number of people as ISC, whereas ISC is almost entirely remote so spans over 1000 times the area. From my own point of view, I am looking forward to working in a bigger team than I have been.

This all happened fairly fast: Ondřej Surý (head of BIND development) suggested the new job to me only a few weeks ago, and I still find it hard to believe it's really happening! We have talked over email about what Ondřej would like me to work on, and I'm looking forward to getting stuck in.

Comments

[hatter]

Ooh, nice to switch things up a bit.

[emperor]

Congratulations :)

[aldabra]

Congrats!

[antiqueight]

Wow- big changes - good luck. I hope you LOVE it. Sounds like a great opportunity.

[sparrowsion]

Well done!

[brainwane]

Whoa!! What a neat opportunity! Wishing you the best and thanking you for your past and future contributions to BIND.

What will you concentrate on in your work?

[fanf]

There will probably be an effort to replace BIND's red-black tree with a qp-trie of some kind :-)

[mtbc]

Great! It's nice to be appreciated. (-:

[hilarita]

That sounds very exciting, and I hope you really enjoy it!

[nou]

Congratulations!

[kotturinn]

Wow. Congratulations.

[andrewducker]

I hope it goes really well!

Looking at the site, I'm amused that while source code is available there's no online repo. Which is entirely reasonable, it just feels old-fashioned. Funny how fast things change!

(I assume you'll be rewriting the whole thing in Rust)

[fanf]

hmm yes the links aren't very obvious! the "open source" and "report a bug" links (and maybe others) on the BIND product page go to the ISC GitLab at https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/bind9

I used to have "ISC Kremlinologist" in my Twitter bio. Back in the days before ISC moved to open development, I was carrying some local patches to BIND, which required rather more effort than it does now. So I was paying close attention to their release cadence, and able to discern more about their internal processes than you would normally expect! Which led to the amusing description from Evan Hunt, one of the BIND developers.

[andrewducker]

Aaah, that's actually on the BIND page - I just missed it when I noticed the "Download our source code" link instead!

[fanf]

Oh, and WRT Rust, I have not talked to ISC about it at all so I honestly don't know what they think about it.

In the wider community of open source DNS, NLnet Labs (who produce NSD and Unbound and lots of other stuff) have adopted Rust in their BGP routing security software, and have started writing DNS code in Rust (https://github.com/NLnetLabs/domain) tho I have not yet looked at it in any detail.

So, shrug, dunno, but I would like to do more work in Rust.

[andrewducker]

I figured you would - although mostly I was making a joke about the "Rewrite everthing in Rust!" stuff I people arguing back and forth about on HN.

[hairyears]

Congratulations!