Tim Bray


Timothy William Bray is a Canadian software developer, environmentalist, political activist and one of the co-authors of the original XML specification. He worked for Amazon Web Services from December 2014 until May 2020 when he quit due to concerns over the sacking of whistleblowers. Previously he has been employed by Google, Sun Microsystems and the Digital Equipment Corporation. Bray has also founded or co-founded several start-ups such as Antarctica Systems.

Education and early life

Bray was born on June 21, 1955 in Alberta, Canada where his father worked for the Dominion Experimental Farm Service in Fort Vermilion. He grew up in Beirut, Lebanon and returned to Canada to attend school at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario. He graduated in 1981 with a Bachelor of Science, double majoring in Mathematics and Computer Science. In 2009, he would return to Guelph to receive an honorary Doctor of Science degree. 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."

Career

Fresh out of university, Bray joined Digital Equipment Corporation in Toronto as a software specialist. In 1983, Bray left DEC for Microtel Pacific Research. He joined the New Oxford English Dictionary project at the University of Waterloo in 1987 as its manager. It was during this time Bray worked with SGML, a technology that would later become central to both Open Text Corporation and his XML and Atom standardization work. Bray co-founded Antarctica Systems - in 2002, during his tenure as CEO for Antarctica, Bray was included in Upside magazine's elite 100 list, along side other IT leaders like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell and Larry Ellison. Bray was director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems from early 2004 to early 2010. He joined Google as a developer advocate in 2010 focusing on Android, and then on technologies related to identity, such as OAuth and OpenID. He left Google in March 2014, unwilling to relocate to Silicon Valley from Vancouver. He started working for Amazon Web Services in December 2014. Bray left AWS in May 2020, after being dismayed by their treatment of whistleblowers who had raised concerns over the safety of warehouse workers in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. Bray had held the vice 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.
Bray has been involved in several entrepreneurial activities including:

Waterloo Maple

Tim Bray served as the part-time CEO of Waterloo Maple during 1989–1990. Waterloo Maple is the developer of the popular Maple mathematical software.

Open Text Corporation

Bray left the new OED project in 1989 to co-found Open 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.” Thus in 1995, Open Text released the Open Text Index, one of the first popular commercial web search engines. Open Text Corporation is now publicly traded on the Nasdaq under the symbol OTEX. From 1991 until 1996, Bray held the position of Senior Vice President—Technology.

Textuality

Bray, along with his wife Dr. Lauren Wood, ran Textuality, a successful consulting practice in the field of web and publishing technology. He was contracted by Netscape in 1999, along with Ramanathan V. Guha, in part to create a new version of Meta Content Framework called Resource Description Framework, which used the XML language.

Antarctica Systems

In 1999 he founded Antarctica Systems, a Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada-based company that specializes in visualization-based business analytics.

Web standards

Bray has contributed to several important standards in technology, particularly Web standards at the World Wide Web Consortium.

XML

As an Invited Expert at the World Wide Web Consortium between 1996 and 1999, Bray co-edited the XML and XML namespace specifications. Halfway through the project Bray accepted a consulting engagement with Netscape, provoking vociferous protests from Netscape competitor Microsoft Bray was temporarily asked to resign the editorship. This led to intense dispute in the Working Group, eventually solved by the appointment of Microsoft's Jean Paoli as third co-editor.
In 2001, Bray wrote an article called Taxi to the Future for Xml.com which proposed a means to improve web client user experience and web server system performance via a Transform-Aggregate-send XML-Interact architecture—this proposed system is very similar to the Ajax paradigm, popularized around 2005.

W3C TAG

Between 2001 and 2004 he served as a Tim Berners-Lee appointee to the W3C Technical Architecture Group.

Atom

Until October 2007, Bray was co-chairing, with Paul Hoffman, the Atom-focused Atompub Working Group of the Internet Engineering Task Force. Atom is a web syndication format developed to address perceived deficiencies with the RSS 2.0 format.

JSON

Bray worked with the IETF JSON 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. He also edited RFC 8259, a further revision of JSON.

Software

Bray has written many software applications, including Bonnie which was the inspiration for Bonnie++, a Unix file system benchmarking tool; Lark, the first XML processor; and APE, the Atom Protocol Exerciser.

Environmentalism

Starting in 2018, Bray became visible as an environmentalist in the context of the Trans Mountain Pipeline dispute. On April 18th, 2018, he was arrested for Contempt of Court at a demonstration at the Trans Mountain site in Burnaby, Canada. He also participated in an open letter from business leaders to the British Columbia government and was subsequently a public voice against the project.
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.
protest in 2019