Brad Fitzpatrick

Brad Fitzpatrick
Brad Fitzpatrick
Born
Bradley Joseph Fitzpatrick

(1980-02-05) February 5, 1980 (age 44)
Alma materUniversity of Washington
OccupationProgrammer
Websitebradfitz.com

Bradley Joseph Fitzpatrick (born February 5, 1980) is an American programmer. He is best known as the creator of LiveJournal and is the author of a variety of free software projects such as memcached, PubSubHubbub, OpenID, and Perkeep.

Early life and education

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Born in Iowa, Fitzpatrick grew up in Beaverton, Oregon, and majored in computer science at the University of Washington in Seattle. He started his first company, FreeVote.com, while in high school.[1]

Career

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LiveJournal grew out of a journaling program Fitzpatrick wrote for himself as a college freshman.[2][1] It eventually became a full-time job and then a company; in January 2005 he sold it and its parent company, Danga Interactive, to Six Apart, for an undisclosed sum of cash and stock.[2][1][3] He was named chief architect of Six Apart.[4] He left Six Apart in August 2007, moving to Google,[5] and in 2008, after the sale of LiveJournal to SUP Media, joined the LiveJournal Advisory Board.[6] In June 2010 the board was dissolved,[7] ending his involvement with LiveJournal. At Google he was a Staff Software Engineer and was part of the Go programming language team.[8]

In January 2020, Fitzpatrick announced[9] he was leaving Google. Three days later he joined Tailscale[10] as a late-stage co-founder.[11][12]

Honors

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In June 2014, the University of Washington School of Computer Science and Engineering gave Fitzpatrick an award for Early Career Achievement.[13]

References

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  1. ^ a b c Neva Chonin, LiveJournal grew out of one 18-year-old's frustration with Web journaling. Now Brad Fitzpatrick is on top of a blog revolution, San Francisco Chronicle (September 27, 2005)
  2. ^ a b LiveJournal: Brad Fitzpatrick, BusinessWeek (August 14, 2006)
  3. ^ Six Apart to Buy LiveJournal, eWeek (January 5, 2005)[dead link]
  4. ^ Big news... Six Apart and LiveJournal!, LiveJournal (5 January 2006) Archived 2010-05-30 at the Wayback Machine
  5. ^ Owen Thomas, LiveJournal creator leaves as Six Apart fails to spin, Valleywag (August 6, 2007) Archived 2007-10-13 at the Wayback Machine
  6. ^ Kristen Nicol, LiveJournal's New Advisory Board Includes Fitzpatrick, Mashable (February 28, 2008)
  7. ^ Our heartfelt thanks to the LiveJournal Advisory Board, LiveJournal (June 23, 2010)
  8. ^ Go Language contributors
  9. ^ Leaving Google, bradfitz.com (January 27, 2020)
  10. ^ Brad Fitzpatrick [@bradfitz] (30 Jan 2020). "Joining @Tailscale" (Tweet). Archived from the original on 15 Feb 2020 – via Twitter.
  11. ^ "Brad Fitzpatrick". Archived from the original on 20 August 2015. Retrieved 7 June 2021 – via LinkedIn.
  12. ^ Kyle, Wiggers (5 May 2022). "Tailscale lands $100 million to 'transform' enterprise VPNs with mesh technology". TechCrunch. Archived from the original on 23 February 2023. Avery Pennarun says that the solution lies in Tailscale, a security networking startup he co-founded with David Crashaw, David Carney and Brad Fitzpatrick.
  13. ^ UW CSE's Brad Fitzpatrick wins Diamond Award for Early Career Achievement, Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington (March 6, 2014)
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