A conversation with Spencer Kimball, creator of GIMP and CockroachDB

<p>Spencer was one of the original creators of open-source, cross-platform image editing software <a href="https://www.gimp.org/">GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program)</a>, authored while he was still in college. He went on to spend a decade at Google, plus two years as CTO of Viewfinder, later acquired by Square.</p><p>In 2014, he cofounded <a href="https://www.cockroachlabs.com/">Cockroach Labs</a> to back his creation <a href="https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach">CockroachDB</a>, a cloud-native distributed SQL database.</p><p>Database sharding is essential for CockroachDB: “a critical part of how Cockroach achieves virtually everything,” says Spencer. Read up on <a href="https://stackoverflow.blog/2022/03/14/how-sharding-a-database-can-make-it-faster/">how sharding a database can make it faster</a>.</p><p>Like many engineers who find themselves in the C-suite, Spencer went from full-time programmer to full-time CEO. He says it’s been a “relatively gentle” evolution, but he can always <a href="https://stackoverflow.blog/2022/02/04/moving-from-ceo-back-to-ic-a-chat-with-mitchell-hashimoto-on-his-love-for-code-ep-412/">go back</a>.</p><p>Like lots of you out there, Spencer started programming on a TI-99/4, <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-texas-instruments-994-worlds-first-16bit-computer">the world’s first 16-bit home computer</a>.</p><p>Connect with Spencer on <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/spencerwkimball/">LinkedIn</a> or <a href="https://moneyinc.com/spencer-kimball/">learn more</a> about him.</p><p>Today’s <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/help/badges/8842/lifeboat">Lifeboat badge</a> goes to user <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/users/6730571/hugues-m">Hughes M.</a> for their answer to the question <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44323454/multiple-keys-pointing-to-a-single-value-in-redis-cache-with-java">Multiple keys pointing to a single value in Redis (Cache) with Java</a>.</p>