Brad Fitzpatrick

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 a variety of free software projects such as memcached, notably used on LiveJournal [ [http://www.danga.com/memcached/ memcached homepage] ] , Facebook [ [http://lists.danga.com/pipermail/memcached/2007-May/004098.html Memcached on Facebook] ] [ [http://developers.facebook.com/opensource.php Facebook Code] ] , and YouTube [cite video
people = Cuong Do Cuong (Engineering manager at YouTube/Google)
title = [http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6304964351441328559 Seattle Conference on Scalability: YouTube Scalability]
medium = Online Video - 26th minute
publisher = Google Tech Talks
location = Seattle
June 23, 2007 ] .

Born in Iowa, Fitzpatrick grew up in Beaverton, Oregon and majored in computer science at the University of Washington in Seattle.

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, for an undisclosed sum of cash and stock. [ [http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1748489,00.asp Six Apart to Buy LiveJournal] (5 January 2005)] He was named chief architect of Six Apart. [ [http://news.livejournal.com/82926.html Big news... Six Apart and LiveJournal!] (5 January 2006)] 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, [ [http://brad.livejournal.com/2334177.html On leaving Six Apart] (31 May 2007)] but joined the LiveJournal Advisory Board in 2008. [ [http://mashable.com/2008/02/28/livejournal-advisory-board/] ] He now works for Google. [ [http://internetcommunications.tmcnet.com/topics/broadband-mobile/articles/19931-google-launches-application-programming-interface-api.htm Google Launches Application Programming Interface (API)] ] [ [http://valleywag.com/tech/brad-fitzpatrick/livejournal-creator-leaves-as-six-apart-fails-to-spin-286218.php LiveJournal creator leaves as Six Apart fails to spin] ] [ [http://www.linkedin.com/in/bradfitz LinkedIn Profile] ]

Brad is an avid scuba diver and motorcyclist.

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. [ [http://lifewiki.net/sixapart/memcachedUsers memcachedUsers] from Six Apart Developer Wiki]

Before LiveJournal, Fitzpatrick created FreeVote, a site hosting web-based voting booths. More recently, he created the OpenID single sign-on mechanism. [ [http://openid.net/what/ What is OpenID?] ]

References

External links

* [http://www.bradfitz.com/ BradFitz.com] - personal homepage
* [http://brad.livejournal.com/ Fitzpatrick's personal LiveJournal]
* [http://www.danga.com/ Danga Interactive]
* [http://www.livejournal.com/ LiveJournal]
* [http://www.sixapart.com/ Six Apart]