Meet an ISC Engineer – Michal Nowak!

It’s time once again to get to know one of our engineers!

Michal Nowak, one of our quality-assurance staff members, joined ISC not long before the Covid-19 pandemic began. Although he wasn’t able to prevent a worldwide health crisis, he works hard to prevent problems in our BIND 9 software before it’s released. Along with the other QA engineers, Michal ensures that BIND 9 releases are delivered on time and at high quality.

Michal regularly debugs unit tests, coordinates with Cloudsmith support for our BIND packages, improves our QA scripts, investigates and addresses system test failures, runs stress tests on different operating systems, fine-tunes our continuous integration (CI) processes, and more! So even though our customers and users may not interact with him on a daily basis, he is constantly working on your behalf.

After studying computer networking and the Unix operating system at the Faculty of Information Technology of the Brno University of Technology in Czechia, Michal later attended a liberal arts college at the Charles University in Prague, focusing on Western philosophy, literary theory of Milan Kundera, and Bohumil Hrabal’s works of fiction. He’s a true Renaissance man!

Prior to joining ISC, Michal worked as a QA engineer at Red Hat for five years and at SUSE for four years. In those organizations, he focused on general software maintenance updates and testing Docker and virtualization images of the Linux platform.

When asked why he chooses to work on open source rather than commercial software, Michal says, “I feel strongly about contributing to the community. So far in my career, I have worked only for open source companies because their products are freely accessible to the public, benefiting the broader community and positively impacting users worldwide.”

Michal is proud that ISC “brings together a team that keeps refactoring the old code to modern engineering standards.” He also admires how ISC’s engineers are “always ready to own their mistakes and correct them transparently.”

He adds, “The best part of working at ISC is the BIND 9 team’s decades-long experience with DNS protocols and the hardened real-world mission-critical implementation.”

We are fortunate to have Michal on our staff and know that our software is better thanks to his work.

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!