Ben Darnell is an American

computer programmer A programmer, computer programmer or coder is an author of computer source code someone with skill in computer programming. The professional titles ''software developer'' and ''software engineer'' are used for jobs that require a progr ...

, entrepreneur, and business executive. He is the chief technology officer for Cockroach Labs, a company he co-founded in 2015. Prior to his work at Cockroach Labs, he worked for tech companies that include

FriendFeed FriendFeed was a real-time feed aggregator that consolidated updates from social media and social networking websites, social bookmarking websites, blogs and microblogging updates, as well as any type of RSS/Atom (Web standard), Atom feed. It was ...

Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...

, Brizzly,

Dropbox Dropbox is a file hosting service operated by the American company Dropbox, Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, California, that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and Client (computing), client software. Dropbox w ...

, Viewfinder, and Square, Inc.

Early life and education

Darnell entered

North Carolina State University North Carolina State University (NC State, North Carolina State, NC State University, or NCSU) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Raleigh, North Carolina, United States. Founded in 1887 and p ...

in 1998. He graduated in 2002 with a degree in computer science.

Career

Darnell was an early employee of Google and was part of its Google Reader team. He worked with Thing Labs founders Jason Shellen and Chris Wetherell, two colleagues that he would later work with as part of Brizzly. He worked a total of seven years for Google and attributes it as being the foundation for his career as an engineer. Darnell left Google to join

. He joined Kevin Fox whom he also worked with at Google. Darnell began working at FriendFeed in July 2009. The company was purchased the following month by Facebook who incorporated Darnell into its team. A few months later, he left to work for startup Brizzly, a third-party interface for Twitter and Facebook that was later purchased by AOL. During his time at Brizzly, Darnell took over

Tornado A tornado is a violently rotating column of air that is in contact with the surface of Earth and a cumulonimbus cloud or, in rare cases, the base of a cumulus cloud. It is often referred to as a twister, whirlwind or cyclone, although the ...

, an open source real-time web framework based on FriendFeed. Darnell joined Spencer Kimball and

Peter Mattis Peter Mattis is an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, and business executive. He is the CTO and co-founder for Cockroach Labs, a company he co-founded in 2014. His work as a programmer includes launching GNU Image Manipulation Program ( ...

at Viewfinder in 2012. He met them in

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

when they showed him a sample of their work. He joined the team and worked primarily on the company's iPhone client app. Darnell joined the team at Square, Inc. after its purchase of Viewfinder in 2013. Darnell helped launch CockroachDB in 2014 along with Kimball and Mattis. They later formed the company Cockroach Labs after launching the software as an open source project on

GitHub GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...

. Darnell serves as the company's chief architect and also contributes to the source code development of CockroachDB.

References

External links

Cockroach Labs official website

Ben Darnell GitHub profile
{{DEFAULTSORT:Darnell, Ben American chief technology officers Living people North Carolina State University alumni Google employees Year of birth missing (living people)