Ask Hansen
Senior Engineering Manager at NTP Pool
Los Altos, California, United States
Summary
🤩
RockstarAsk Hansen is a Senior Engineering Manager with 28 years of experience building and operating mission-critical, high-traffic infrastructure for hundreds of millions of users. Based in Los Altos, he currently leads a global team of ~50 focused on DNS, CDN, and network systems reliability and scale. He combines hands-on engineering—maintaining long-running projects like the NTP Pool monitoring and a custom DNS server that handles over a billion queries per day—with people-first leadership that emphasizes trust, autonomy, and purposeful roadmaps. A prolific open-source contributor, Ask has improved DNS tooling and popular projects such as miekg/dns, stripe-node, Mojolicious and Hugo, often adding production-grade features like EDNS client-subnet and Prometheus metrics. He thrives on designing systems and teams that let engineers do their best work solving hard operational problems rather than micromanaging them. Quietly pragmatic, he prefers to build durable tools and community-run services rather than chase headlines.
28 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Danish, English
Stackoverflow
6,824reputation
902kreached
124answers
8questions
perl
top-5%
go
top-1%
struct
top-5%
webserver
top-5%
Github Skills (44)
javascript10
middleware10
stripe10
apidoc10
testing10
http10
perl10
network-programming10
go10
api10
dns10
event-loop10
web-framework10
nodejs10
static-site-generation10
Programming languages (26)
Github contributions (5)
abh/geodns
Aug 2012 - Nov 2022
DNS server with per-client targeted responses
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 releases, 3 reviews, 437 commits in 10 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Ask primarily worked on developing a DNS server with per-client targeted responses. Their contributions focused on implementing features like supporting multiple record types (AAAA, MX, NS, TXT, CNAME, and aliases) and adding EDNS-client-subnet support, along with improving handling of zone configurations. Further efforts included refactoring the codebase, adding health checks, and creating a Prometheus endpoint for monitoring, demonstrating skills in server-side development and potentially, operations. These changes were instrumental in enhancing the functionality and performance of the DNS server.
dns
stripe/stripe-node
Sep 2011 - Jul 2013
Node.js library for the Stripe API.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:45 commits in 1 year 9 months
Contributions summary:Ask focused on enhancing the Stripe Node.js library by introducing new features and improving existing functionality. They added new APIs, specifically for tokens and invoices, and implemented features such as customer listing. Further, the user addressed bugs, as evidenced by a fix related to duplicate callbacks and improved testing within the codebase. The user's work enhanced the library's capabilities, contributing to the overall functionality of the Stripe API integration.
nodejs-librarystripe-apistripestripe-sdk
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