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Ben Darnell is an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, and business executive. He is the chief technology officer for Cockroach Labs, a company he co-founded in 2015.[1] Prior to his work at Cockroach Labs, he worked for tech companies that include FriendFeed, Facebook, Brizzly, Dropbox, Viewfinder, and Square, Inc.
Ben Darnell | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Alma mater | North Carolina State University |
| Occupation | CTO |
| Employer | Cockroach Labs |
| Website | Ben Darnell on GitHub |
Early life and education
editDarnell entered North Carolina State University in 1998. He graduated in 2002 with a degree in computer science.[2]
Career
editDarnell was an early employee of Google and was part of its Google Reader team.[3] He worked with Thing Labs founders Jason Shellen and Chris Wetherell, two colleagues that he would later work with as part of Brizzly.[4] He worked a total of seven years for Google and attributes it as being the foundation for his career as an engineer.[2]
Darnell left Google to join FriendFeed.[5] He joined Kevin Fox whom he also worked with at Google.[5] Darnell began working at FriendFeed in July 2009. The company was purchased the following month by Facebook who incorporated Darnell into its team.[4] A few months later, he left to work for startup Brizzly, a third-party interface for Twitter and Facebook[6] that was later purchased by AOL.[7] During his time at Brizzly, Darnell took over Tornado, an open source real-time web framework based on FriendFeed.[8]
Darnell joined Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis at Viewfinder in 2012.[2] He met them in San Francisco when they showed him a sample of their work. He joined the team and worked primarily on the company's iPhone client app.[2] Darnell joined the team at Square, Inc. after its purchase of Viewfinder in 2013.[9]
Darnell helped launch CockroachDB in 2014 along with Kimball and Mattis.[10] They later formed the company Cockroach Labs after launching the software as an open source project on GitHub.[1] Darnell serves as the company's chief architect and also contributes to the source code development of CockroachDB.[11]
References
edit- ^ a b Finley, Klint (June 4, 2015). "Ex-Googlers Get Millions To Help You Build The Next Google". Wired. Retrieved July 25, 2015.
- ^ a b c d "Ben Darnell Makes Connections throughout the Tech Industry". ParkScholars. Retrieved July 28, 2015.
- ^ Ewbank, Kay (June 9, 2015). "CockroachDB Released". I Programmer. Retrieved July 25, 2015.
- ^ a b "Almost Famous Update: Now Out of Beta Brizzly Hires Facebooker and Translates Tweets". AllThingsD. November 20, 2009. Retrieved July 28, 2015.
- ^ a b Wauters, Robin (July 28, 2009). "Steal! Ben Darnell Leaves Google Reader Team, Joins FriendFeed". Tech Crunch. Retrieved July 28, 2015.
- ^ Siegler, MG (November 20, 2009). "Brizzly Opens To All. And Snatches Someone From Facebook". TechCrunch. Retrieved July 28, 2015.
- ^ Cutler, Kim-Mai (November 12, 2010). "Gmail Creator Paul Buchheit Leaves Facebook to Join Y Combinator". AdWeek. Retrieved July 28, 2015.
- ^ Siegler, MG (June 22, 2011). "FriendFeed Lives On (In Spirit): Tornado 2.0 Released". TechCrunch. Retrieved July 28, 2015.
- ^ Finley, Klint (July 21, 2014). "Out in the Open: Ex-Googlers Building Cloud Software That's Almost Impossible To Take Down". Wired. Retrieved July 28, 2015.
- ^ Novet, Jordan (June 4, 2015). "Peter Fenton's latest investment is a database startup called Cockroach". Venture Beat. Retrieved July 28, 2015.
- ^ Wheatley, Mike (June 8, 2015). "Cockroach Labs gets $6.25M to build a more resilient database". Silicon Angle. Retrieved July 28, 2015.