Brad Fitzpatrick
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bradley "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.
Born in Iowa, Fitzpatrick grew up in Oregon and majored in computer science 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.
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 and will continue working on LiveJournal from San Francisco, California, [2], where he lives in Noe Valley. He is an avid scuba diver and cyclist.
[edit] Free Software
Some other 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 are often used in combination to power many popular websites (including Wikipedia itself).
Before LiveJournal, Fitzpatrick created FreeVote, a site hosting web-based voting booths. More recently, he created the OpenID single sign-on mechanism.
[edit] External links
- BradFitz.com - personal homepage
- Fitzpatrick's personal LiveJournal
- Danga Interactive
- LiveJournal
- Six Apart
