Brad Fitzpatrick
Late Stage Co-Founder
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBrad Fitzpatrick is a seasoned software engineer and founder with 25+ years of professional experience and 35 years of programming across many languages. He founded LiveJournal, authored memcached and OpenID, spent a decade on the Go team at Google, and today helps make WireGuard and networking magical as a late-stage co-founder at Tailscale. His work blends low-level networking, protocol design, and pragmatic backend engineering—evident in contributions to WireGuard, gRPC, net/http, and Go crypto libraries. He’s practiced at shipping production-grade systems and tooling (goimports, gomemcache, Go playground improvements) and at operating services at scale, including deployment and restore features for internal shortlink services. Based in Seattle with a CS degree from the University of Washington, he pairs entrepreneurial leadership with deep open-source craftsmanship. A less obvious strength: he repeatedly solves subtle concurrency, performance, and platform edge cases that make networking and distributed systems reliably usable.
25 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Computer Science, BS, Computer Science at University of Washington
Stackoverflow
3,571reputation
103kreached
13answers
0questions
android
top-5%
Github Skills (108)
mobile-development10
wp-api10
abstract-syntax-tree10
testing10
http10
blob-storage10
metadata10
winapi10
c1110
tailscale10
gcp10
c1710
javas10
code-generation10
google-cloud10
Programming languages (28)
Github contributions (5)
bradfitz/gomemcache
Jun 2011 - Jan 2023
Go Memcached client library #golang
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:12 reviews, 60 commits, 42 PRs in 11 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Brad primarily worked on implementing and improving the core functionality of the Go Memcached client library. Their contributions included adding the `GetMulti` function, supporting deletion, and incorporating atomic increment/decrement operations. They also refactored and renamed helper functions and added connection reuse and timeout functionalities, indicating a focus on improving performance and reliability.
gogolangmemcachedmemcached-clientsmemcache
inetaf/tcpproxy
Jun 2017 - Oct 2022
Proxy TCP connections based on static rules, HTTP Host headers, and SNI server names (Go package or binary)
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:4 reviews, 11 commits, 3 PRs in 5 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Brad primarily contributed to the `tcpproxy` project by implementing new features and making improvements to the core proxy functionality. Their work included adding a `TargetListener` for accepting connections, incorporating dynamic SNI routing, and optimizing performance. They also refactored code, corrected documentation, and addressed a deadlock issue.
go-packagesproxyserver-nametcp
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