How to Lose Friends and Alienate People: The Joys of Engineering Leadership

Brian Fitzpatrick started his career at Google in 2005 as the first software engineer hired in the Chicago office. Brian leads Google’s Chicago engineering efforts and also serves as engineering manager for Google Code and internal advisor for Google’s open source efforts. Prior to joining Google, Brian was a senior software engineer on the version control team at CollabNet, working on Subversion, cvs2svn, and CVS. He has also worked at Apple Computer as a senior engineer in their professional services division, developing both client and web applications for Apple’s largest corporate customers.

Brian has been an active open source contributor for over ten years. After years of writing small open source programs and bugfixes, he became a core Subversion developer in 2000, and then the lead developer of the cvs2svn utility. He was nominated as a member of the Apache Software Foundation in 2002 and spent two years as the ASF’s VP of Public Relations. Brian has written numerous articles and given many presentations on a wide variety of subjects from version control to software development, including co-writing “Version Control with Subversion” as well as chapters for “Unix in a Nutshell” and “Linux in a Nutshell.”

Brian has an A.B. in Classics from Loyola University Chicago with a major in Latin, a minor in Greek, and a concentration in Fine Arts and Ceramics. Despite growing up in New Orleans and working for Silicon Valley companies for most of his career, he decided years ago that Chicago was his home and stubbornly refuses to move to California.

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Ben is a tech lead and manager for Google Code’s project hosting service. He was one of the founding developers of Subversion, and later helped port it to Google’s Bigtable infrastructure. He also has a degree in mathematics, plays banjo, writes musicals, and takes lots of photos.

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