Neil Cook
Head Of Product at PowerDNS.COM BV
Taunton, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNeil Cook is a seasoned technology leader and software engineer with over 10 years of experience (backed by a PhD in Computer Science) who blends deep technical craftsmanship with product and security leadership. He has driven product and security strategy as Head of Product at PowerDNS and as CTO/Chief Security Architect at Cloudmark and Open-Xchange, building teams, launching security programs and even co-inventing a patent on DNS-based data exfiltration detection. A hands-on backend developer and open-source contributor, he has improved core DNS projects like getdns and PowerDNS—adding thread-safety, performance wins, and domain-tracking telemetry to hard-to-reach parts of the stack. He excels at turning low-level protocol and systems work into product features and operational telemetry that expose suspicious behavior. Based in Taunton, England, he combines public-facing roles (RFC author, speaker, product evangelism) with pragmatic engineering and consulting through his own firm. Colleagues know him for shipping robust, secure infrastructure changes that prevent subtle resource leaks and scale to real-world deployments.
10 years of coding experience
24 years of employment as a software developer
PhD, Computer Science, PhD, Computer Science at University of Nottingham
English, French
Github Skills (19)
c-language10
thread-safety10
pthread10
powerdns10
c1110
networking10
c1710
event-loop10
cprogramming-language10
protobuffer10
protobuf10
pthreads10
dns9
lua9
auth8
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
PowerDNS/pdns
Aug 2017 - May 2019
PowerDNS Authoritative, PowerDNS Recursor, dnsdist
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:12 reviews, 23 commits, 7 PRs in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Neil implemented and documented features for the PowerDNS recursor related to tracking and logging newly observed domains and unique DNS responses. They added functionality to log information to protobuf messages and include policy tags, allowing for better identification of potentially suspicious behavior. The changes involved modifications to core files like `pdns_recursor.cc`, `lua-recursor4.cc`, and protobuf definitions to accommodate the new domain tracking features, and also included updates to the Protobuf logger. Furthermore, the user refactored the NOD code and added UDR tracking.
dnsdistpowerdns-recursordnssystems-programmingrecursor
getdnsapi/getdns
Dec 2015 - Jul 2017
A modern asynchronous DNS API https://getdnsapi.net/
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:20 commits, 11 PRs, 27 comments in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Neil primarily focused on improving the `getdns` project by addressing thread safety and performance. Their contributions involved implementing pthread-based locking mechanisms for `arc4random` and the SSL initialization process to enhance thread safety. Furthermore, the user refactored the default event loop by migrating from `select` to `poll` and optimizing the event loop structure for improved resource management. They also fixed a bug related to array bounds in the upstream selection logic and ensured proper socket closure to prevent resource leaks.
apiasynchronousdnsdns-apigetdnsapi
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