Meet an ISC Engineer – Tomek Mrugalski!

It’s been a while since we’ve profiled one of our engineers, so we’re overdue. But this isn’t one of our new hires: it’s time to get to know a little more about Tomek Mrugalski, our Director of DHCP Engineering!

When Tomek Mrugalski started working at ISC in 2011, he was asked a seemingly simple question: “You wrote one DHCP server already. Can you write another one, but better?” He answered “Yes!” and has spent the last 13+ years following through on that answer.

Tomek, who joined ISC after working at Intel for seven years, holds a Master’s degree in computer science, a Master’s in space and satellite technologies, and a Ph.D in telecommunications, and calls himself a “networking geek.” His family has been living in his home town of Gdańsk, Poland for generations; all three of his graduate degrees are from Gdańsk University of Technology.

His MSc topic, “DHCPv6 client and server implementation for Linux,” led Tomek to create the Dibbler open source project. (From the very beginning, the code was available in a CVS that he self-hosted, long before GitHub was even founded.) He kept improving his work, and eventually received an invitation to a DHCPv6 “bakeoff” in Amsterdam where he met many other DHCPv6 enthusiasts, including some ISC staff members. Later, he was invited to join the IETF’s work on the DS-lite draft, which eventually became RFC 6334, the first of 14 RFCs that Tomek has authored or co-authored.

Tomek joined ISC as a software engineer, tasked with writing a replacement for the aging ISC DHCP software. The project was initially intended to create modules in a new BIND 10 framework, but when that project was cancelled the DHCP modules quickly became independent.

Tomek is an avid traveler: he has visited over 50 countries on six continents. He also loves nature and enjoys giving shoutouts to some of his favorite animals in his software projects. His first DHCP software was called Dibbler, named after a small marsupial that lives in Australia, and his Ph.D simulator software was called Numbat (another Australian creature). So of course when it came time to name the new DHCP server, he called it Kea after the New Zealand parrot.

After a few years, Tomek was asked to manage the whole DHCP team, which now includes 10 other engineers. Along the way, Tomek came up with a proposal to address what he felt was the biggest shortcoming of our BIND 9 and Kea DHCP software: the lack of an easy-to-use graphical interface. This led to our newest software project, Stork.

Kea is very popular already and Stork is quickly growing in popularity as a management dashboard for Kea; Tomek’s goal to make both of those projects even better in the future. The major challenge that he and his team have just started tackling is to expand Stork to be able to interact with and manage BIND, and DNS in general. He says: “It’s both exciting and scary. DNS is a very different world compared to DHCP. I’m optimistic, though.”

Although Tomek started working in the closed source world of Intel, he learned a lot of good testing and software development practices there that he has been able to bring to ISC. He likes the philosophy of open source: “Whatever you’re trying to do, you don’t need to start from scratch; you can take existing code, extend it to do whatever you want, and hopefully give it back to the community, so others can take it even further.”

Tomek enjoys the freedom he gets from working at ISC. “When there’s something important that needs to be done, nobody tries to stop us. Here’s an example: back at Intel, our team developed an extension for Wireshark that added support for a new protocol. It was very useful for all the engineers involved, so we wanted to share it. But the red tape was impossible to manage - endless approvals, meetings with managers, lawyers asking questions about leaking intellectual property, and so on. After a couple of months we gave up. In contrast, at ISC we implemented a new DHCPv6 option in Kea that was not yet supported by Wireshark. I wrote the code that extended Wireshark, sent a patch that was accepted, and the whole thing was complete in a day or two.”

He adds: “Another great thing about working at ISC is that we get involved in some long-term activities that are good for the whole Internet; my personal favorite is the standardization work done in the IETF. In my opinion, this is the highest honor an engineer can achieve. When I work on a specific implementation, I can fix or improve just one piece of software. But when I work on a standard, I can fix or make things better for all of the implementations.”

Tomek says that one of the best professional compliments he’s ever received was from a Cisco engineer who was using Dibbler, his earlier DHCPv6 software. Tomek was surprised and asked why he was using Dibbler instead of Cisco’s own code. The engineer said, “It’s easier to use and it just works.” Tomek doesn’t write as much code as he used to, but in the daily discussions he has with his team he likes to push for solutions that are transparent and easy to use. We know our users and customers appreciate that!

Tomek is now the father of a three-year-old daughter, so his spare time is limited, but in those rare moments when time permits he loves to watch the skies and practice astronomy, a bit of satellite communications, and basically anything else related to space. He has been building a home observatory for the last few years, where he enjoys working on his astrophotography. He says: “The progress on the observatory is slow, but it’s very rewarding. I did the designs and most of the construction work myself, except the roof. When I’m really tired after a week of doing all the DHCP stuff, this is my place to unwind, relax, look up, and chase some asteroids.”

He’s even written some automation software for his observatory, which is (of course) open source; that and all of his other code is available on GitHub. “I like to release all the code I write as open source, even for my own personal projects. I don’t think anyone will ever use it, but the mere fact that it’s public makes me try harder to write better code.”

ISC is fortunate to have Tomek leading our DHCP development team.

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 and users. As always, we welcome your feedback at marketing@isc.org!