Spencer Kimball (computer programmer)
| Spencer Kimball | |
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| Education | B.A., Computer Science |
| Alma mater | University of California, Berkeley |
| Occupation | CEO |
| Employer | Cockroach Labs |
| Known for | Computer Programming |
| Website | Spencer Kimball on LinkedIn |
Spencer Kimball is an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, and business executive. He is the CEO of Cockroach Labs, a company he co-founded in 2015. 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.
Kimball attended the University of California at Berkeley. 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. 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 to the last, GIMP was always my 'dues' paid to the free software movement. After using emacs, gcc, Linux, 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.
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, who was also a member, and the two would later begin working together on a file-sharing program for the Gnutella 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.
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