Brad Fitzpatrick

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Brad Fitzpatrick, creator of LiveJournal.

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, PicPix, and FreeVote, as well as for being the former owner of Danga Interactive, which is now owned by Six Apart.

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. Fluent in German, he spent some time living in Germany after graduation.

Another recent project of note is memcached, a memory caching system designed to ease database load on large webserving applications, and used in many other situations as well. Fitzpatrick is the maintainer of the project, which was also released by 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 with his new wife (as of 15 July 2006), Dina Lolich, and their Boston Terrier pup Major.