LiveJournal grew out of a journaling program Fitzpatrick wrote for himself as a college freshman.[2][1] 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.[2][1][3] He was named chief architect of Six Apart.[4] He left Six Apart in August 2007, moving to Google,[5] and in 2008, after the sale of LiveJournal to SUP Media, joined the LiveJournal Advisory Board.[6] In June 2010 the board was dissolved,[7] ending his involvement with LiveJournal. At Google he was a Staff Software Engineer and was part of the Go programming language team.[8]
In January 2020, Fitzpatrick announced[9] he was leaving Google. Three days later he joined Tailscale[10] as a late-stage co-founder.[11][12]
Honors
In June 2014, the University of Washington School of Computer Science and Engineering gave Fitzpatrick an award for Early Career Achievement.[13]