Meet an ISC Engineer - Nicki Křı́žek!

Each quarter we like to profile one of our engineers, to acquaint our customers and users with some of the people they may interact with as they use our software. This time we’d like to introduce you to our newest staff member, Nicki Křı́žek!

Nicki joined our BIND 9 quality assurance team on May 1, so they’re still trying to get their head around everything at ISC. But they’ve been happy to see that some of the open source tools they’ve contributed to in the past are being utilized for BIND 9 testing.

Nicki comes to us from CZ.NIC, where they contributed to many DNS-related projects such as Knot Resolver, DNS Shotgun, and respdiff. Before that, they worked for Red Hat, which they say was “a great place to learn how the open source model can work commercially and to see how open source communities operate.” Nicki is a big proponent of free and open source software, and “by contributing to it professionally, I can really put my money where my mouth is.”

They have done a lot of DNS benchmarking that focused on the newer DNS-over-TLS and DNS-over-HTTPS protocols. They explain, “The switch from the stateless UDP to the stateful TCP has a lot of performance implications and I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to understand them. It eventually led to the development of DNS Shotgun, which can be used for some really advanced benchmarks that excel at simulating real-world DoT and DoH traffic.”

Nicki is pleased to join ISC and looks forward to further improving the tools they’ve worked on in the past to better suit ISC’s use cases. They hope to come up with new tools that could could improve the overall quality of BIND 9 and DNS software in general. They add, “I see contributing to free and open source software as a way to give something back to the community, since I rely on the work of many other FOSS contributors in the software I use every day.”

They recognize that the most challenging part of company-backed open source development is the business model, and they acknowledge that convincing people to pay for software that they can just run for free is difficult. As they say, “Providing the added value through support and documentation is critical to convince customers to actually pay for continued development. ISC seems to have this model just right.”

Nicki holds a master’s degree in Information Technology from the Technical University of Liberec (Czechia). And they use Arch btw.

Thank you for using ISC’s software and we hope you have enjoyed this peek behind the ISC curtain. We hope that sharing a little about us helps strengthen our connection to our customers. As always, we welcome your feedback at marketing@isc.org!