Brad Fitzpatrick (born 1980) is an American programmer known for creating LiveJournal and Memcached. His work on web scaling infrastructure influenced how the modern web handles traffic.
LiveJournal
Fitzpatrick created LiveJournal in 1999 while a student at the University of Washington. It became one of the first major social blogging platforms, handling millions of users and pioneering social networking features.
Creating Memcached
To handle LiveJournal’s traffic, Fitzpatrick created Memcached in 2003. The distributed caching system reduced database load by storing frequently accessed data in memory. Its simplicity and effectiveness led to widespread adoption.
Other Projects
Fitzpatrick created several influential open-source projects:
- OpenID: Decentralized authentication
- PubSubHubbub: Real-time content distribution
- Various Go packages: HTTP/2, image processing
At Google from 2007, Fitzpatrick worked on infrastructure and became a major contributor to Go’s standard library. His practical experience scaling LiveJournal informed contributions to Google’s systems.
Philosophy
Fitzpatrick’s work emphasizes practical simplicity. Memcached succeeded because it solved a real problem with minimal complexity. His projects tend to do one thing well rather than trying to solve everything.