Simon Kelley
Self Employed Network Guru at Simon Kelley Consulting
Greater Cambridge Area United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolSimon Kelley is a seasoned network engineer and the principal developer of dnsmasq, with 26 years’ experience designing and hardening DNS, DHCP, PXE and IPv6 solutions for home routers and embedded systems. As a self-employed consultant he provides custom dnsmasq development and networking consultancy, drawing on a decade of systems leadership at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and a Cambridge PhD in computer systems networking. His open-source contributions include bug fixes and performance improvements across high-profile projects such as the upstream dnsmasq mirror, Asuswrt-Merlin firmware, and the Pi-hole FTL engine, reflecting deep expertise in DNS/DHCP internals and embedded networking constraints. Colleagues value his ability to translate subtle protocol edge cases into robust, maintainable fixes—examples include DHCPv6 memory-safety patches and DNSSEC-related crash fixes. He combines academic rigor with practical, production-hardened engineering for constrained devices and large-scale lab environments.
26 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Computer Systems Networking, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Computer Systems Networking at University of CambridgeNeston County School
Github Skills (19)
debugging10
caching10
debug10
routers10
firmware10
dnsmasq10
router10
c1110
c1710
dnssec10
dns10
performance-optimization10
network-protocol10
dhcp10
embedded8
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (5)
imp/dnsmasq
Nov 2021 - May 2022
Mirror of the upstream dnsmasq repository
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:52 commits in 5 months
Contributions summary:Simon primarily contributed to bug fixes and improvements within the dnsmasq codebase. Their work addressed issues related to domain matching, log ID confusion during DNS retries, and regressions in specific configurations. They also enhanced the DHCP-relay function and fixed a write-after-free error in the DHCPv6 code. Overall, their focus was on refining DNS and DHCP-related functionality.
dnsmasqupstreamdns
pi-hole/FTL
Oct 2018 - Jan 2023
The Pi-hole FTL engine
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:327 commits in 4 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Simon primarily contributed to the improvement of the caching behavior within the Pi-hole FTL engine, specifically concerning TCP connections and the handling of DNSSEC queries. Their work involved modifications to the cache.c file, including changes to the cache insertion logic and the handling of data transfer between child and master processes. Further contributions involved the removal of IPv6-free compilation support and code cleanups, suggesting a focus on optimizing the performance and maintainability of the DNS engine.
apidnsftlpi-hole-ftlpi-hole
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