Brad Fitzpatrick

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 This table may contain original research or unverified claims.
Please improve the article by adding references. See the talk page for details. (November 2007)
This article needs additional citations for verification.
Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (October 2007)

Bradley Joseph "Brad" Fitzpatrick (born February 5, 1980 in Iowa), often seen on the Internet under the nickname bradfitz, is an American programmer. He is best known as the creator of LiveJournal and is the author of many popular free software projects.[citation needed]

Born in Iowa, Fitzpatrick grew up in Beaverton, Oregon and majored in computer science and minored in German at the University of Washington in Seattle. While there, he developed LiveJournal as an extension of a database-driven method he had been using to update his personal journal.[citation needed]

LiveJournal eventually became a full-time job and then a company, which he called Danga Interactive. In January 2005, Fitzpatrick sold Danga to Six Apart, reportedly for an undisclosed sum of cash and stock.[1] He was named chief architect of Six Apart.[2] He left Six Apart in August 2007, citing a need to move on to different projects, and had not been active in LiveJournal's development for about two years.[3] He now works for Google.[4][5][6]

Brad is an avid scuba diver and motorcyclist.

[edit] Free Software

Some noteworthy free software projects by Fitzpatrick:

  • memcached, a memory caching system designed to ease database load on large webserving applications, and used in many other situations as well;
  • Perlbal, a load balancer and reverse proxy;
  • MogileFS, a distributed file system;
  • djabberd, a Jabber server;
  • PicPix, a photo-hosting service.

Since many of these applications were motivated by the real-world needs of LiveJournal, they are often useful for other database-driven websites, and have been used with several other websites and applications.[7]

Before LiveJournal, Fitzpatrick created FreeVote, a site hosting web-based voting booths. More recently, he created the OpenID single sign-on mechanism.[8]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Six Apart to Buy LiveJournal (5 January 2005)
  2. ^ Big news... Six Apart and LiveJournal! (5 January 2006)
  3. ^ On leaving Six Apart (31 May 2007)
  4. ^ Google Launches Application Programming Interface (API)
  5. ^ LiveJournal creator leaves as Six Apart fails to spin
  6. ^ LinkedIn Profile
  7. ^ memcachedUsers from Six Apart Developer Wiki
  8. ^ What is OpenID?

[edit] External links

Languages