Meet an ISC Engineer - Chuck Stearns!

Here’s another short profile of one of our engineers. We hope our customers enjoy learning a little more about our team!

Chuck Stearns, our newest Support Engineer, joined ISC on January 1, 2021. Chuck spent nearly 14 years working in frontline support and on DNS engineering at Rackspace Technology; prior to that he ran his own web design business and worked at several local ISPs near his home in Texas.

Chuck started working on Linux during his freshman year of college, when a dorm buddy opened his eyes to it. Linux got him interested in more than application space, and over the last 20+ years he’s learned about the internals of Linux “from userland down through kernel space and even out onto the network.” Although he hasn’t had a lot of formal computer science education, his hands-on practical experience definitely comes in handy as he works with ISC’s customers.

He says that so far, there are two things that he really enjoys about ISC:

1. The people. “They are tremendously smart, and I’ve been welcomed into the family. That feels really good.”
2. “The idea that I get to help contribute to something essential to the Internet as a whole is very rewarding.”

In his previous technical support and IT systems engineering work, Chuck’s experience with software delivery was limited to a team scale, so the support role at ISC has come as a bit of a shock. “It’s nothing like I thought it would be, going in. At ISC, relationships with our customers and each other are a priority - we try to be kind AND helpful at the same time. It’s a refreshing perspective.”

He has chosen to work on open source rather than commercial software because “open source is more than a computer program. It’s got a heartbeat. It drives technically inclined people - and anyone else who’s interested - to put forth their best work selflessly, for the benefit of all.” He also likes that “if I find a broken piece, or something I need to change to suit my individual need, I can patch it and make it work.” He adds, “the documentation and communities around many open source projects are absolutely top-notch, which is a great resource whether you’re contributing or implementing.”

Chuck also notes that there is much more activity in the open source community than he expected. “Within my first week, I was put in touch with some folks at DNS-OARC to discuss functional documentation aspects of catalog zones, something with which I’ve had a bit of practical experience in the past. I’ve also learned a lot about what is involved in the process of maintaining and releasing enterprise-level software. I’ve still got a lot of learning left to do, but the immersion into the larger community has been quite enlightening.”

Chuck says that one of his particular strengths is that “I’ve always had a knack for taking complex technical topics and translating them into human-readable formats, which I hope will prove useful during my tenure here.”

Chuck’s hobbies include writing novels and listening to music. He says, “Texas blues is great, but it’s really hard to beat that old Delta style, man.”

We’re delighted to welcome him to the ISC team and know that our support customers will enjoy working with him.

Thank you for using ISC’s software and we hope you have enjoyed this peek behind the ISC curtain. We welcome your feedback at marketing@isc.org!