Ben Darnell 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 chief technology officer for

Cockroach Labs CockroachDB is a commercial distributed SQL database management system, developed by Cockroach Labs. History Cockroach Labs was founded in 2015 by ex-Google employees Spencer Kimball, Peter Mattis, and Ben Darnell. Cockroach Labs founders Kim ...

, 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 feed. It was created in 2007 by B ...

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...

, Brizzly,

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

, Viewfinder, and

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 ...

Early life and education

Darnell entered

North Carolina State University North Carolina State University (NC State) is a public land-grant research university in Raleigh, North Carolina. Founded in 1887 and part of the University of North Carolina system, it is the largest university in the Carolinas. The universit ...

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 Google Reader was an RSS/Atom feed aggregator operated by Google. It was created in early 2005 by Google engineer Chris Wetherell and launched on October 7, 2005, through Google Labs. Google Reader grew in popularity to support a number of progra ...

team. He worked with Thing Labs founders

Jason Shellen Jason Harper Shellen (born August 30, 1973) is an American internet entrepreneur who was the founding product manager of Google Reader and helped create and launch Brizzly. His most recent software startup is the email app Boxer. He has since 20 ...

and

Chris Wetherell Chris Wetherell is a software developer and musician from the US best known as the founder of Google Reader and as an influential "ex-Googler" since his departure from the company. Software engineer While working at Google in 2005 as a Senior So ...

, 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 both the surface of the 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, altho ...

, 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 (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

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

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, 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, continuous ...

. 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)