Spencer Kimball is an American

computer programmer A computer programmer, sometimes referred to as a software developer, a software engineer, a programmer or a coder, is a person who creates computer programs — often for larger computer software. A programmer is someone who writes/creates ...

, entrepreneur, and business executive. He is the CEO of Cockroach Labs, a company he co-founded in 2014. His work as a programmer includes creating GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) while still in college, and assisting the source code development of CockroachDB, the namesake software of Cockroach Labs. In addition to Cockroach Labs, Kimball was involved in the founding of other tech startups including WeGo and

Viewfinder In photography, a viewfinder is what the photographer looks through to compose, and, in many cases, to focus the picture. Most viewfinders are separate, and suffer parallax, while the single-lens reflex camera lets the viewfinder use the main ...

Early life and education

Kimball attended the

University of California at Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant uni ...

. While still a student in 1995, he developed the first version of GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) as a class project, along with his roommate

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 ...

. Kimball was also a member of a student club at Berkeley called the eXperimental Computing Facility (XCF). During his time with XCF, he co-wrote the code for GIMP. Kimball said in 1999 that, "From the first line of

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comment (computer programming), comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a Computer program, p ...

to the last, GIMP was always my 'dues' paid to the

free software movement The free software movement is a social movement with the goal of obtaining and guaranteeing certain freedoms for software users, namely the freedoms to run the software, to study the software, to modify the software, and to share copies of the s ...

. After using

emacs Emacs , originally named EMACS (an acronym for "Editor MACroS"), is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, ...

, gcc,

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...

, etc., I really felt that I owed a debt to the community which had, to a large degree, shaped my computing development." Kimball graduated with a B.A. in computer science from Berkeley in 1996.

Career

Kimball left college for work, and mostly ended his relationship with the GIMP development community. He co-founded WeGo, a company providing tools for building web communities, in 1998 and served as the company's co-CTO. While at XCF, he met

Gene Kan Gene Kan (September 6, 1976 — June 29, 2002) was a British-born Chinese American peer-to-peer file-sharing programmer who was among the first programmers to produce an open-source version of the file-sharing application that implemented the Gn ...

, who was also a member, and the two would later begin working together on a file-sharing program for the

Gnutella Gnutella is a peer-to-peer network protocol. Founded in 2000, it was the first decentralized peer-to-peer network of its kind, leading to other, later networks adopting the model. In June 2005, Gnutella's population was 1.81 million computer ...

network, the open source Unix/Linux client ''gnubile''. In 2000, he created a web-based version of GIMP, OnlinePhotoLab.com, that was short-lived. The technology was subsequently folded into Ofoto's online image manipulation tools. Kimball started work with

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

in Mountain View in 2002 and relocated to Google's New York offices in 2004. As one of Google's engineers, he helped spearhead

Colossus Colossus, Colossos, or the plural Colossi or Colossuses, may refer to: Statues * Any exceptionally large statue ** List of tallest statues ** :Colossal statues * '' Colossus of Barletta'', a bronze statue of an unidentified Roman emperor * '' C ...

, a new version of the Google File System. He also worked on the Google Servlet Engine. In January 2012, Kimball launched the company Viewfinder along with Mattis and Brian McGinnis, formerly of Lehman Brothers. The company developed an app that allowed social media users to share photos, chat privately, and search photo history without leaving the app. The company was acquired by

Square, Inc. Block, Inc. (formerly Square, Inc.) is an American multinational technology conglomerate founded in 2009 by Jack Dorsey and Jim McKelvey and launched its first platform in 2010. It has been traded as a public company on the New York Stock Exch ...

in December 2013. Kimball moved to Square's New York City office where he became a senior member of the company's East Coast team. While at Google, Kimball used a database known as Bigtable and followed the development of its next generation, known as

Spanner A wrench or spanner is a tool used to provide grip and mechanical advantage in applying torque to turn objects—usually rotary fasteners, such as nuts and bolts—or keep them from turning. In the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealan ...

. The database organizes data between thousands of servers to allow Google applications to stay online, even if an entire data center were to go offline. Kimball wanted to use this software but found there was nothing available outside of Google as either closed or open-source software with similar capabilities. He elicited the help of Mattis, along with ex- Google Reader team member Ben Darnell. They formed the company Cockroach Labs to provide commercial backing for CockroachDB, an open source project he started on

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, co ...

in February 2014. Kimball serves as the company's

chief executive officer A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especial ...

and also contributes to the source code development of CockroachDB.

Personal life

Spencer is named for his great-grandfather, LDS Church President Spencer W. Kimball.

References

External links

*
Cockroach Labs official website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kimball, Spencer Free software programmers Living people American computer programmers UC Berkeley College of Engineering alumni Year of birth missing (living people) GTK