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Spencer Kimball 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 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 CockroachDB is a source-available distributed SQL database management system developed by Cockroach Labs. The relational functionality is built on top of a distributed, transactional, consistent key-value store that can survive a variety of d ...
, 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 a device on a camera that a photographer uses to determine exactly where the camera is pointed, and approximately how much of that view will be photographed. A viewfinder can be mechanical (indicating only direct ...
.


Early life and education

Kimball was born in 1974 to a
Latter-day Saint The Latter Day Saint movement (also called the LDS movement, LDS restorationist movement, or Smith–Rigdon movement) is the collection of independent church groups that trace their origins to a Christian Restorationist movement founded b ...
family. He 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, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkele ...
. 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 Founded in 1986, the eXperimental Computing Facility (XCF) is an undergraduate computing-interest organization at University of California, Berkeley. The "Experimental" description was given in contrast to the Open Computing Facility and the C ...
(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 or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...
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 user (computing), software users, namely the freedoms to run, study, modify, and share copies of software. Software which meets thes ...
. 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, s ...
, gcc,
Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...
, 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

After graduation, Kimball 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 Gnute ...
, 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 and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
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; colossal statues, are generally taken to mean a statue at least twice life-size ** List of tallest statues ** :Colossal statues * ...
, a new version of the
Google File System Google File System (GFS or GoogleFS, not to be confused with the GFS Linux file system) is a proprietary distributed file system developed by Google to provide efficient, reliable access to data using large clusters of commodity hardware. Go ...
. 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. 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 Bigtable is a fully managed wide-column and key-value NoSQL database service for large analytical and operational workloads as part of the Google Cloud portfolio. History Bigtable development began in 2004.. It is now used by a number of Goo ...
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 Nut (hardware), nuts and screw, bolts—or keep them from turning. In the United Kingdom, UK, ...
. 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 () 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 ...
in February 2014. Kimball serves as the company's
chief executive officer A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a chief executive or managing director, is the top-ranking corporate officer charged with the management of an organization, usually a company or a nonprofit organization. CEOs find roles in variou ...
and also contributes to the source code development of CockroachDB.


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