Paul Vixie
lorenetworkingsecurity
The engineer behind BIND and much of the operational practice around DNS, founder of the Internet Systems Consortium, author of Vixie cron, and creator of the first successful commercial anti-spam service.
Born in 1963, he has spent a career on the parts of the internet that only get attention when they break. BIND is the name server most of the internet ran on; Vixie cron is on nearly every Unix system alive; and the anti-spam reputation lists he built established the pattern - a list distributed as DNS, so it needed no new software anywhere - that later produced response policy zones, which he specified with Vernon Schryver in 2010. The through-line is the same each time: put the new capability inside machinery operators already run, because the adoption problem is harder than the design problem.
Also known as: vixie, vixie cron