Tim Bray
Vancouver, BC, Canada
+1-604-615-7308, tbray@textuality.com
Employment, Voluntarism, and Professional Activities
2022- CoSocial Mastodon Co-operative
Co-founder, Treasurer

Canadian Non-profit Member-owned Co-operative aimed at providing high-quality, resilient, professionally managed and moderated social-media access for a low annual fee, at cosocial.ca.

2020- False Creek Friends Society
Co-founder, Director, Treasurer

BC Non-profit Society aimed at cleaning up False Creek and finding it a better future. Potential futures include Urban Marine Park and Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area. Initial focus is on doing the basic science necessary to build understanding of the biological and chemical profile of the water and the ocean floor.

1996- Textuality Services, Inc. Vancouver, BC
Principal

Successful consulting practice; customers included Microsoft, IBM, the European Parliament, A.T. Kearney, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Medtronic, Daimler Chrysler, Diebold, the U.S. Department of Energy, Lucent, Merrill Lynch, Software AG, and the US Federal Trade Commission.

Recent focus: Helping out startups and nonprofits. I’m currently co-chairing the jsonpath IETF working group.

Advisor to Zus and Yalo.

2014-2020 Amazon Web Services Vancouver, Canada
Senior Principal Technologist (2014-19), Vice-President/Distinguished Engineer (2019-20)
2010-2014 Google Mountain View, CA
Senior Developer Advocate, Identity Group (2012-2014)
Senior Developer Advocate, Android Group (2010-2012)
  • Participant in OAuth and OpenID Connect Working Groups at IETF and OpenID Foundation.

  • Speaker (often keynote) at many industry events, in the US, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Japan, and throughout South America.

  • Editor of the Android Developers’ blog and Tweet stream.

  • Internal work with partners and the Android engineering team.

2004-2009 Sun Microsystems Santa Clara, CA
Distinguished Engineer and Director of Web Technologies
  • Chairman’s award for co-launching the Sun blogging initiative and creating blogging policy.

  • Two appearances before the European Commission regarding open file formats.

  • Co-chair of the IETF Atompub working group, designing the Atom syndication data format and publishing protocol. Work completed successfully in summer 2007.

  • Implemented two Atom Publishing Protocol open-source software tools, the Atom Protocol Exerciser and mod_atom.

  • Led Sun’s movement toward embrace of dynamic languages, on and off the Java platform.

  • Worked with Sun’s general counsel and the SEC to explore the legality and appropriateness of all-Web financial reporting without use of the financial newswires.

  • Built strong relationships between Sun and the Ruby and Python communities.

  • Led the “Wide Finder” project (1, 2), influential research on parallelizing I/O-intensive data-processing style batch jobs.

  • Led the Concur.next project, widely-read research into performing traditional data-processing tasks efficiently in a many-core environment.

  • Co-designer of the Sun Cloud APIs.

1996-2004 World Wide Web Consortium Boston/Paris/Tokyo
Invited Expert

Served as Chair, Spec Editor, and member of several Working Groups and was a Tim Berners-Lee appointee to the Technical Architecture Group.

1999-2003 Antarctica Systems Vancouver, BC
Founder and CTO
  • Raised two rounds of VC financing.

  • Designed and implemented data visualization software based on large RAM-resident database implemented as an Apache module.

  • Managed development of an early single-page-app user interface.

1989-1996 Open Text Corporation Waterloo, Ont.
Co-Founder, CEO, Senior Vice President
  • Invented and built the Open Text Index of the World Wide Web, one of the first popular Web search engines.

  • Ported the Open Text search technology to operate in the Japanese language.

  • Designed and implemented an innovative graphical user interface that was central to the company’s later success.

  • Served as company’s leading evangelist, speaking and keynoting at many conferences.

  • Participated in three rounds of Venture Capital investment and the 1996 NASDAQ IPO.

1989-1990 Waterloo Maple Software Waterloo, Ont.
Interim CEO
  • Saved the company from bankruptcy by introducing basic financial sanity.

  • Diagnosed and fixed several memory leaks in Maple's memory manager.

1987-1990 University of Waterloo Waterloo, Ont.
Research Manager, New Oxford English Dictionary Project
  • Led a ten-programmer team in the research into and development of a new class of software tools for handling very large, highly structured text objects.

1983-1986 Microtel Pacific Research (a GTE company) Burnaby, BC
System Software Group Leader, Computer Support, then Technical Leader, Digital Products Group

Performed requirements analysis, system design, and led the implementation of a T1 network management system. This product became the basis for several large lines of business.

1984 Simon Fraser University Burnaby, BC
Part-time lecturer on Operating Systems
1981-1983 Digital Equipment Corporation (Canada) Toronto, Ont.
Software Specialist

Promoted twice within first 18 months. Won a variety of awards for technical excellence.

1976-1979 Guelph and Waterloo, Ont.
Freelance Stage Manager

Stage-managed hundreds of concerts, plays, and lectures — mostly rock & roll. Hired security and stagehands, dealt with promoters, artists, electricians, police, and fire department.

Social Media
2022- @timbray@cosocial.ca Mastodon account with 17K followers in 2023.

2007- @timbray Twitter stream with 45K followers in 2023.

2003-

ongoing by Tim Bray Weblog regularly rated in world’s top 1% by popularity, approximately 20,000 subscribers in 2023. I wrote roughly 2.15 million words for the blog between 2003 and 2020.

Education
2009 University of Guelph Guelph, Ont.

Honorary D.Sc.

1981 University of Guelph Guelph, Ont.

B.Sc. (Hon.) with double major in Mathematics and Computer Science.

Patents
6,950,791 (2000)

Method for describing objects in a virtual space

9,766,927 (2017)

Data flow management in processing workflows

9,904,585 (2018)

Error handling in executing workflow state machines

9,973,306 (2018)

Freshness-sensitive message delivery

10,346,217 (2019)

Best-effort key affinity workload sharding

10,505,881 (2019)

Generating message envelopes for heterogeneous events

10,614,239 (2020)

Immutable cryptographically secured ledger-backed databases

10,911,379 (2021)

Message schema management service for heterogeneous event-driven computing environments

10,990,887 (2021)

Anything-but matching using finite-state machines

11,068,487 (2021)

Event-stream searching using compiled rule patterns

Mainstream Media
2020

The winners and losers of the big tech congressional hearings Tim Bray, The Guardian, July 2020.

2020

We Have a Question for Jeff Bezos and Other Billionaires Tim Bray and Christy Hoffman, New York Times, July 2020.

2014

Why We Might Be Stuck With Passwords for a While Tim Bray, TIME.com, August 2014.

1999

XML and the Second-Generation Web Jon Bosak and Tim Bray, Scientific American, May 1999.

1997-1998

The Gilbane Report Tim Bray, ed., six issues.

1996

The VRML Riddle The Bulletin: Seybold News & Views on Electronic Publishing, Volume 1, No. 48

1996

Measuring the Web Computer Networks and ISDN Systems 28 (1996) pp. 993-1005 (Proc. 5th International World Wide Web Conference, Paris). This paper won a Gold Medal from the Mayor of Paris honouring it as the best of the conference.

1995

Why I Hate the Web Wired Magazine, #3.10

1993-1994

Live Music is Better - the Paradox of Live vs. Recorded Music The Abso!ute Sound - The High-End Journal, Issues #90 and #92.

1992

Shortening the OED: Experience with a Grammar Defined Database (with G. Elizabeth Blake and Frank Wm. Tompa). ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, vol. 10 #3.

1990

Steps to Success in Building Motif Applications Proc. Motif 1990, Washington DC

1989

Lessons of the New Oxford English Dictionary Project Proc. Winter 1989 Usenix Technical Conference, San Diego, CA.

1989

Words and Birds of Wonder - An Essay on Ornithology and Etymology Toronto Globe and Mail, Feb. 11, 1989.

Standards
2023

An Interoperable Regular Expression Format (RFC 9485) Carsten Bormann and Tim Bray, Editors.

2016

An HTTP Status Code to Report Legal Obstacles (RFC 7725) Tim Bray, Editor.

2015

The I-JSON Message Format (RFC 7493) Tim Bray, Editor.

2014

The JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) Data Interchange Format (RFC 8259) Tim Bray, Editor.

2007

The Atom Publishing Protocol (RFC 5023) Co-chair of the Working Group and spec-language contributor.

2005

The Atom Syndication Format (RFC 4287) Co-chair of the Working Group and spec-language contributor.

2004

The Architecture of the World Wide Web Contributor as member of W3C Technical Architecture Group, author of several early drafts.

1999

Namespaces in XML Tim Bray, Dave Hollander, and Andrew Layman, 14 January 1999.

1998

Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 Tim Bray, Jean Paoli, and C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, 10 February 1998.

Software

I have been developing software intermittently since 1981; these are the contributions which were made available to the world as opposed to shipping in an employer’s product suite.

2022

Quamina Fast pattern-matching library.

2021

TopFew Finds the fields (or combinations of fields) which appear most often in a stream of records.

2017

IsItOnAWS A Web site for discovering whether apps and domains are on AWS.

2016

Statelint A command-line validator for Amazon States Language.

2010

LifeSaver An Android app for transferring personal data between phones.

2007

mod-atom An AtomPub module for the Apache Web server.

2006

The Atom Protocol Exerciser A Web application in the Ruby language for exploring correctness of implementations of the Atom Publishing Protocol.

2004

Genx A library in the C language for generating correct, canonical XML efficiently. Still officially in Beta, but in production in a few live deployments.

1997

Lark The world’s first conforming XML processor; implemented in the Java language.

1995

The Open Text Index of the Web One of the first popular Web Search Engines, an industry-leader 1995-1996.

1990

Bonnie A Unix filesystem performance benchmark in the C language. Has been positively reviewed by Linus Torvalds, used to debug Linux filesystems, and is part of the Solaris Hardware Certification Test Suite.

Personal

Born June 21, 1955, Canada; raised in Beirut, Lebanon. Health excellent. Married, two children.