Michael Kay
Director at Saxonica Limited
Reading, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolMichael Kay is a veteran software engineer and founder who has spent over two decades developing and commercializing the Saxon XSLT and XQuery processor through his company Saxonica. He served as editor for the XSLT 2.0 and 3.0 specifications, authored authoritative programmer references on XSLT and XPath, and remains active in standards and conference speaking. As Director of Saxonica he combines product development, consultancy and training, and recently transitioned the company to an Employee Ownership Trust while staying engaged. His background includes senior architecture roles at ICL, Fujitsu and Software AG and invited expert work at the W3C, reflecting deep expertise in XML technologies. Based in Reading, UK, he pairs academic grounding from Cambridge with practical open-source stewardship that has shaped XML tooling used across the industry. He prefers direct contact outside LinkedIn, reflecting a pragmatic, privacy-conscious approach to professional connections.
14 years of coding experience
27 years of employment as a software developer
Trinity College CambridgeBA, PhD, Computer Science, BA, PhD, Computer Science at University of CambridgeSalesian College, Farnborough
Stackoverflow
159,832reputation
13.2mreached
8,536answers
42questions
namespaces
top-5%
encoding
top-5%
java
top-1%
sorting
top-5%
dom
top-1%
selenium
top-5%
Github Skills (186)
parser10
abstract-syntax-tree10
testing10
ubl10
code-generation10
xpath10
schema10
jaxb10
code-generator10
validation10
errata10
xml-parsing10
html10
json10
xquery10
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
w3c/qt3tests
Jan 2018 - Dec 2022
Tests for XPath and XQuery
Contributions:4 reviews, 191 commits, 43 PRs in 4 years 11 months
testingxqueryxpath
qt4cg/xslt40-test
Jan 2021 - Feb 2025
XSLT 4.0 tests
Contributions:71 pushes, 4 branches in 4 years 2 months
xpathxqueryxslt
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