Brad Fitzpatrick
Photo: Brad Fitzpatrick, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons18

Brad Fitzpatrick

American programmer and creator of LiveJournal

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, WebSub, OpenID, and Perkeep.2

From Wikipedia’s article on Brad Fitzpatrick (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Born Feb 5, 1980.1

Companies

Early life and education

  • 1998 to 2002University of Washington Bachelor of Science3
  • Date not recordedLesley University3
  • Date not recordedAloha High School3

Career

Occupation: programmer.8

LiveJournal grew out of a journaling program Fitzpatrick wrote for himself as a college freshman. 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. He was named chief architect of Six Apart. He left Six Apart in August 2007, moving to Google, and in 2008, after the sale of LiveJournal to SUP Media, joined the LiveJournal Advisory Board. In June 2010, the board was dissolved, ending his involvement with LiveJournal. At Google he was a Staff Software Engineer and was part of the Go programming language team.

In January 2020, Fitzpatrick announced he was leaving Google. Three days later he joined Tailscale as a late-stage co-founder.

From Wikipedia’s article on Brad Fitzpatrick (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Personal life

  • BornFeb 5, 1980, Iowa9
  • CitizenshipUnited States10
  • ResidenceUnited States11

Born in Iowa, Fitzpatrick grew up in Beaverton, Oregon where he attended Aloha High School, and majored in computer science at the University of Washington in Seattle. He started his first company, FreeVote.com, while in high school.

Fitzpatrick is married to Kate Fitzpatrick. They have three children.

From Wikipedia’s article on Brad Fitzpatrick (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Awards

  • 2010O'Reilly Open Source Award12