It must have been around 1997, while I was still studying for my Master's Degree in Computational Chemistry, that I got first acquainted with XML. I started following the XSLT 1.0 standard in that period as well. It was still a Working Draft at that time. My first steps into the internet and XML community followed thereafter quickly.
I joined the Dutch IT-company Daidalos (http://www.daidalos.nl/) in the year 2000, bringing in XML and XSLT skills as well as general programming skills I had developed in the years before. At that time, Daidalos had a general focus on employing XML technologies, originally applied mostly in the publishing market. These days it is more focused on a few specific strategies and solutions, although it still covers most of the XML technologies, market-independently.
My contributions to Daidalos have always been in or close to the area of Content Engineering. In the early days I learned the proprietary programming languages Omnimark and MetaMorphosis. Both very powerful content processing languages, though very unalike. Not well-known though. I also broadened my XML knowledge, learning about most of the XML standards, and a lot about all kinds of XML tools and applications. I also followed the rise of XSLT 2.0 and XQuery 1.0 closely.
More recently, around mid-2008, I got acquainted with MarkLogic Server (http://www.marklogic.com/). It's a bit hard to describe in one sentence, but let’s call it a highly scalable XML and search platform. I have had the opportunity to gain in-depth knowledge of this product, and have used it plenty to sharpen my MarkLogic and XQuery skills.
Only recently have I joined XML Holland (http://www.xmlholland.nl/) to help organise its yearly XML conference. Our ambition is to organise a conference similar to the annual XML Prague conferences, with plenty renowned invited speakers from outside of the Netherlands.
Apart from technical stuff am I also interested in reading books, white chocolate, playing board games, and solving puzzles. My lovely wife and I are the proud parents of a beautiful little baby-daughter.
