Tim Hockin

I am a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google, where I have worked for 11 years. I was working in the Borg/Omega team when the idea to make a Borg-like product arose. Brian and I (both on the internal “cloud” team) helped drive the effort to scope a product in this space, and joined on with a couple other folks from the Google Cloud team to get Kubernetes rolling.

OSS is where my love of programming was born. I cut my teeth on Linux in 1994 and started contributing to the kernel as soon as I could code my way out of an infinite loop. I have contributed to many OSS projects over the years, including Google’s own container stack “LMCTFY”, but Kubernetes is by far my most significant OSS effort. I’m very happy that Google lets me work on OSS nearly full time.

I actually went to college to become a painter (oil paint), but a fellow on my dorm floor gave me a Slackware CD-ROM my first semester, and I spent the better part of a year figuring out what to do with it. I took my first programming course (C, of course) the following school year, and gave up my art major 2 semesters later. I still doodle incessantly, though as the parent of 2 young boys I mostly end up drawing super-heroes. One of my first contributions to Kubernetes was the logo - my most successful work of art, by far.

My first major role at Google was writing x86 BIOS to bring up new motherboards for our server fleet. Since then I have moved steadily up the stack every few years. I still love fiddling with and reading about hardware and computer architecture.