Gary Wicker
Principal SDE at Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolGary Wicker is a Principal SDE based in Seattle with over a decade of experience building reliable, low-level networking and IoT software at scale, currently contributing to EC2 VPC at AWS. He has deep expertise in MQTT, embedded C, and TCP/IP stacks—evidenced by notable contributions to MQTT.js and multiple AWS IoT and FreeRTOS projects improving reconnection logic, serializer flexibility, DNS caching, and TLS/resource cleanup. His background spans device drivers, real-time systems, and platform software from startups to large teams, including leading a smart-device software company acquired by a commercial vendor. Colleagues rely on him for pragmatic refactors that boost maintainability and runtime robustness, and he often surfaces subtle protocol and performance fixes that prevent hard-to-diagnose production issues. Gary pairs systems-level craftsmanship with product-minded delivery, bringing both historical depth (dating back to embedded and assembly work at TI) and current cloud-scale networking experience.
10 years of coding experience
31 years of employment as a software developer
Computer Science, Computer Science at Southern Methodist UniversityB.S., Computer Science, B.S., Computer Science at University of North Texas
Spanish, French
Github Skills (22)
javascript10
tls1210
testing10
freertos10
mqtt10
ip10
c1110
tls1310
mqttnet10
c1710
mtls10
dns10
sys10
tcp10
libtls10
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
aws/amazon-freertos
Dec 2019 - Sep 2020
DEPRECATED - See README.md
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:154 reviews, 18 commits, 133 PRs in 9 months
Contributions summary:Gary primarily worked on improving the Amazon FreeRTOS TCP/IP stack, addressing bugs and implementing enhancements. Their contributions include checking packet lengths, object lookup logic fixes, and TLS resource cleanup. They also addressed specific issues within the NXP Wi-Fi port, showcasing their involvement in platform-specific implementations and device driver interactions. Additionally, the user refactored the DNS resolution to improve performance and add support for caching multiple IP addresses per DNS cache entry.
markdown
aws/aws-iot-device-sdk-embedded-C
Sep 2019 - Nov 2019
SDK for connecting to AWS IoT from a device using embedded C.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:88 reviews, 11 commits, 72 PRs in 2 months
Contributions summary:Gary primarily focused on refactoring and improving the MQTT serializer override logic within the embedded C SDK. They added types for serializer functions and implemented internal macros to streamline the override process. The commits also include code modifications related to keep-alive operations and subscription handling within the MQTT API, suggesting a deep understanding of the MQTT protocol implementation. This work enhanced the flexibility and maintainability of the MQTT library.
aws-iotsdkembeddedawsembedded-c
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