This site is where I (Gavin Nicol) maintain my corner of the web.
What do I do you ask? Well, I do/did a lot of work on XML and related technologies, having been lucky enough to work with luminaries in the field of markup technologies, and participating in the birth of XML. I also did a fair amount of work in the I18N field, especially as it relates to the WWW and building a true Word Wide Web.
I have spent a fair portion of the past 30 years of my life working with SGML and XML, most of that time at EBT. When I joined EBT, it was arguably the leading company in the world for SGML technology, with people such as Steve DeRose, Sharon Adler, Anders Berglund, and Pierre Richard walking the halls. Very heady stuff indeed, and I have these people to thank for all the things I learned from them.
Sadly, EBT is no longer. It was bought by Inso Corporation, and after a long and very trying period of misdirection and false starts, the company closed it’s doors. The company stopped caring about people, and it’s customers , and that was it’s end.
I’ve done multiple startups over the years, and might be considered a ‘startup guy’. That’s mostly because more than anything else, having an impact is the best thing an engineer can do. It’s easy to have an impact when you’re one of the very early employees, and innovation matters most in the early days.