Brendan Eich

Founder & CEO, Brave Software. Created JavaScript. Co-founded Mozilla and Firefox.

Brendan Eich's Profile Picture

Basic Info

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Here are milestones of Brendan Eich's career:

Early life

  • Brendan Eich grew up in Palo Alto.
  • He attended Ellwood P. Cubberley High School, graduating in the class of 1979.
  • Eich received his bachelor's degree in mathematics and computer science at Santa Clara University.
  • He received his master's degree in 1985 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Netscape and JavaScript

  • He started work at Netscape Communications Corporation in April 1995.
  • He completed the first version of a programming language in ten days in order to accommodate the Navigator 2.0 Beta release schedule.
  • The language was called Mocha, but renamed LiveScript in September 1995 and later JavaScript in the same month.

Mozilla

  • In early 1998, Eich co-founded the Mozilla project with Mitchell Baker, creating the website mozilla.org that was meant to manage open-source contributions to the Netscape source code. He served as Mozilla's chief architect.
  • AOL bought Netscape in 1999. After AOL shut down the Netscape browser unit in July 2003, Eich helped spin out the Mozilla Foundation.
  • In August 2005, Eich became CTO of the newly founded Mozilla Corporation, meant to be the Mozilla Foundation's for-profit arm.
  • Eich continued to "own" the Mozilla SpiderMonkey module, its JavaScript engine, until he passed on the ownership of it in 2011.
  • On March 24, 2014, Eich was promoted to CEO of Mozilla Corporation.
  • On April 3, 2014, Eich stepped down as CEO and resigned from working at Mozilla.

Brave Software

  • Eich is the CEO of Brave Software, an Internet security company which has raised $2.5 million in early funding from angel investors.
  • The company's co-founder is Brian Bondy, who worked on Firefox and Khan Academy. The company's employees include Marshall Rose, a network protocol engineer, and Yan Zhu, who worked on SecureDrop and Tor.
  • On January 20, 2016, the company released developer versions of its open-source Brave web browser, which blocked ads and trackers and included a micropayments system to offer users a choice between viewing selected ads or paying websites not to display them. A recent update added inbuilt integration of 1Password and LastPass password managers.

Basic Attention Token

  • Eich is also the founder of Basic Attention Token (BAT), a "utility token based on the Ethereum technology that can also be used as a unit of account between advertisers, publishers, and users in a new, blockchain-based digital advertising and services platform".
  • BAT launched its ICO on May 31, 2017 raising $35 million in just 30 seconds.

If you have time, you should read more about Brendan Eich at Wikipedia (and the image is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license).

Brendan Eich's qoutes

List of qoutes:

  1. Always bet on JavaScript.
  2. If the web can be evolved to include the missing APIs and have better performance, [developers] won't need to go beyond the web.
  3. JS had to "look like Java" only less so, be Java’s dumb kid brother or boy-hostage sidekick. Plus, I had to be done in ten days or something worse than JS would have happened.
  4. We're adding a lot of fun features.
  5. It's been over ten years, hard to believe. It was the Rodney Dangerfield of languages.
  6. It's time to get back to innovating in the browser space.
  7. Why the long freeze in JavaScript development? A lot of it had to do with the long freeze on browsers due to the IE [Internet Explorer] takeover.
  8. We're going to learn from Python. JavaScript is pretty close to Python.