He is best known as the creator of LiveJournal and is the author of a variety of free software projects such as memcached, PubSubHubbub, OpenID, and Perkeep.

Born in Iowa, Fitzpatrick grew up in Beaverton, Oregon, and majored in computer science at the University of Washington in Seattle.

[1] LiveJournal grew out of a journaling program Fitzpatrick wrote for himself as a college freshman.

At Google he was a Staff Software Engineer and was part of the Go programming language team.

[11][12] In June 2014, the University of Washington School of Computer Science and Engineering gave Fitzpatrick an award for Early Career Achievement.