George Hicken
Distinguished Engineer at Broadcom
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolGeorge Hicken is a Distinguished Engineer with 20+ years of systems and infrastructure experience and 11 years in senior engineering roles, currently at Broadcom in Palo Alto. He has a deep background in distributed systems, platform reliability, and devops from long tenures at VMware—where he led vSphere Integrated Containers and autonomous cluster architecture—and earlier systems work at IBM. A practical polyglot who moves between low-level platforms (JVM, C/C++) and cloud-native Go projects, he has contributed notable fixes and CI improvements to prominent open-source repos such as vmware/govmomi and vmware/vic. George blends hands-on engineering with architectural leadership, improving build and test reliability, session management, and operational tooling for large-scale infrastructure. He runs self-funded R&D through Akashic Laboratories, signaling ongoing curiosity and experimentation beyond his corporate roles. Based in the Bay Area with a BSc in Computer Science from Southampton, he’s comfortable solving knotty edge-case problems—from memory-constrained JVM diagnostics to resilient datacenter APIs.
11 years of coding experience
21 years of employment as a software developer
BSc Computer Science, BSc Computer Science at University of Southampton
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (14)
github-ci10
docker10
go10
githubaction-workflow10
makefile10
dockers10
cicd10
networking9
testing9
bash8
system-administration8
version-control7
git7
git-svn6
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
vmware/vic
Feb 2016 - Oct 2021
vSphere Integrated Containers Engine is a container runtime for vSphere.
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:2 releases, 265 commits, 423 PRs in 5 years 9 months
Contributions summary:George primarily focused on enhancing the build process, test infrastructure, and ensuring the reliability of the vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC) project. Their contributions involved improvements to the Makefile, the integration of dynamic Go dependencies, and implementing various fixes for the test environment, ensuring that tests run correctly by modifying testing parameters and build artifacts. Additionally, they addressed several log related issues with component management. These efforts resulted in improved build efficiency, and enhanced integration test results.
vicvsphere-networksruntimevic-enginevirtualization
vmware/govmomi
Oct 2015 - Jul 2017
Go library for the VMware vSphere API
Role in this project:Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:11 reviews, 2 commits, 3 PRs in 1 year 9 months
Contributions summary:George implemented features related to certificate-based login and keep-alive support, modifying the session management aspects of the Go library. They also addressed file-following issues within the datastore file system, ensuring robustness by tolerating repeated close operations. Furthermore, the user significantly contributed to the project's development and debugging workflow by integrating an interactive debug stage within the GitHub Actions pipeline, streamlining the troubleshooting process for build failures. Finally they have also done network configuration as well.
golangapivmware-vspherego-librarygo
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