Tim Bray | |
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.jpg) Tim Bray in 2018 | |
| Born | (1955-06-21)June 21, 1955 (age 70) Alberta, Canada |
| Education | University of Guelph (BS) |
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| Spouse | Lauren Wood |
| Website | www |
Timothy William Bray (born June 21, 1955) is a Canadian software developer, environmentalist and political activist and one of the co-authors of the originalXMLspecification.[7] He worked forAmazon Web Services from December 2014 until May 2020 when he quit due to concerns over the terminating of whistleblowers.[8][9] Previously he has been employed byGoogle,Sun Microsystems andDigital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Bray has also founded or co-founded several start-ups, such as Antarctica Systems.[10][11][12]
Bray was born on June 21, 1955[13] inAlberta, Canada, where his father worked for the Dominion Experimental Farm Service inFort Vermilion. He grew up inBeirut, Lebanon, and returned to Canada to attend school at theUniversity of Guelph inGuelph,Ontario.[14] He graduated in 1981 with aBachelor of Science,double majoring in mathematics and computer Science. In 2009, he would return to Guelph to receive an honorary doctorate.[15] Tim described his switch of focus from math to computer science this way:
"In math I'd worked like a dog for my Cs, but in CS I worked much less for As—and learned that you got paid well for doing it."[16]
Bray joinedDigital Equipment Corporation (DEC) inToronto as a software specialist. In 1983, Bray left DEC for Microtel Pacific Research. He joined the NewOxford English Dictionary (OED) project at theUniversity of Waterloo in 1987 as its manager.[17] It was during this time Bray worked withSGML, a technology that would later become central to bothOpen Text Corporation and his XML andAtom standardization work.[4][6] Bray co-foundedAntarctica Systems - in 2002, during his tenure as CEO for Antarctica, Bray was included inUpside magazine'selite 100 list, alongside other IT leaders likeBill Gates,Steve Jobs,Michael Dell andLarry Ellison.[18] Bray was director of Web Technologies atSun Microsystems from early 2004 to early 2010.[2] He joinedGoogle as a developer advocate in 2010 focusing onAndroid, and then on technologies related toidentity, such asOAuth andOpenID.[4][5][6][19][20][21] He left Google in March 2014, unwilling to relocate toSilicon Valley fromVancouver.[22] He started working forAmazon Web Services (AWS) in December 2014. Bray left AWS in May 2020, after being dismayed by Amazon's treatment ofwhistleblowers who had raised concerns over the safety of warehouse workers in relation to theCOVID-19 pandemic. Bray had held thevice president rank, stating on his blog that "VPs shouldn't go publicly rogue", and had much praise for AWS, yet he wasn't pleased about his co-workers being fired.[23][24][8]
Bray's entrepreneurial activities include:
Bray served as the part-timechief executive officer ofWaterloo Maple during 1989–1990. Waterloo Maple is the developer of theMaple mathematical software.
Bray left the new OED project in 1989 to co-foundOpen Text Corporation with two colleagues. Open Text commercialised the search engine employed in the new OED project.
Bray recalled that "in 1994 I heard a conference speaker say that search engines would be big on the Internet, and in five seconds all the pieces just fell into place in my head. I realized that we could build such a thing with our technology."[16] Thus in 1995, Open Text released the Open Text Index, one of the first popular commercialwebsearch engines. Open Text Corporation is publicly traded on the Nasdaq under the symbol OTEX. From 1991 until 1996, Bray was senior vice president—technology'.
Bray, along with his wife Lauren Wood, ran Textuality,[25] a consulting practice in the field of web and publishing technology. He was contracted byNetscape in 1999, along withRamanathan V. Guha,[5] in part to create a new version of theMeta Content Framework calledResource Description Framework, which used the XML language.
In 1999, he founded Antarctica Systems, a Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada-based company that specialized in visualization-based business analytics.
Bray has contributed to standards in technology, particularlyWeb standards at theWorld Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
As an Invited Expert at theWorld Wide Web Consortium between 1996 and 1999, Bray co-edited theXML andXML namespace specifications. Halfway through the project Bray accepted a consulting engagement withNetscape, provoking vociferous protests from Netscape competitorMicrosoft (who had supported the initial moves to bringSGML to the web.)[citation needed] Bray was temporarily asked to resign the editorship. This led to intense dispute in the Working Group, eventually solved by the appointment of Microsoft'sJean Paoli as third co-editor.
In 2001, Bray wrote an article calledTaxi to the Future[26] for Xml.com which proposed a means to improve web client user experience and web server system performance via aTransform-Aggregate-send XML-Interact architecture—this proposed system is very similar to theAjax paradigm, popularized around 2005.[27]
Between 2001 and 2004[28] he served as aTim Berners-Lee appointee[29] to theW3CTechnical Architecture Group.[30]
Until October 2007, Bray was co-chair, with Paul Hoffman, of theAtom-focused Atompub Working Group of theInternet Engineering Task Force. Atom is a web syndication format developed to address perceived deficiencies with theRSS 2.0 format.
Bray worked with theIETFJSON Working Group in 2013 and 2014, serving as editor of RFC 7159, a specification of the JSON Data Interchange Format which revised RFC 4627 and highlighted interoperability best practices, released in March 2014.[31] He also edited RFC 8259, a further revision of JSON.[32]
Bray has written software applications, including Bonnie which was the inspiration forBonnie++, aUnixfile systembenchmarking tool; Lark, the firstXMLprocessor;[33] and APE, the Atom Protocol Exerciser.[34]
Starting in 2018, Bray became visible as an environmentalist in the context of theTrans Mountain Pipeline dispute. On April 18, 2018, he was arrested for contempt of court at a demonstration at the Trans Mountain site in Burnaby, Canada.[35][36] He also participated in an open letter from business leaders to theBritish Columbia government[37] and was subsequently a public voice against the project.[38][39] In 2019, Bray was the only VP-level Amazon employee to sign a letter to Amazon shareholders calling for a stop to Amazon Web Services' support for oil extraction.[40]
In 2024, Bray co-edited a book titledStanding On High Ground, a collection of personal stories of individuals who were arrested while protesting the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion.[41]
"a really good time to write about something is while you're still discovering it, before you're looking at it from the inside" —Tim Bray
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