Mini-bio

I came to the markup community by a circuitous route. In college I thought I was going to be a psychologist. My B.A. is in psychology and I basically double majored in it, taking almost every class available at my alma mater. Then I went to graduate school and learned what psychologists actually do all day; gradually guide people to overcoming their problems.

That's an over simplification of it and I do enjoy solving problems but not as a guide rather as an active participant. So I had an opportunity to work in Residence Life at my graduate school and jumped at the chance to stay on another year. Of course that career turned out to be less exciting than my graduate school days had suggested. The problem with grad school is they teach you how to be a Director of Residence Life and not how to deal with the day-to-day concerns of running a residence hall or dealing with University politics.

After a couple years of being an adult and living in the halls with college students, my patience wore thin. But psychology led me to The American Psychological Association and finally into their Electronic Publishing (now Full-Text Serials) Group. There I was first exposed to SGML, then quickly XML, XSLT 1.0 and the slippery slope that is markup lay out before me.

While at APA I earned my CompSci BS and learned more and more about markup and publishing. The time came for me to move, both professionally and physically, and my family and I relocated to the Philadelphia, PA suburbs. I started my own business and began working with various companies to forward their conversion and publishing goals. In the last year I've begun using XQuery more and more and had the opportunity to attend a MarkLogic developer training.

I don't consider myself an expert at any of these technologies. I know the experts. I've worked with the experts. I consider myself more of the journeyman apprentice. There are things that I know well and things that I know a little and, as I learn more, many things I know nothing about. Freelancing has taught me that there are more technologies in the world than anyone could possibly know, so focusing on XML and related techs seems like a good bet.

In many ways I've never left school. I've been using XSL-FO (or just XSL, depending on how dogmatic you want to be) for 4 years now and I still come upon properties that I've never had reason to use. XSLT still surprises me in how much of a "programming language" it really is. (Try calculating the Fibonacci numbers sometime and you'll see what I mean) And XQuery is challenging me left and right to think differently about things I thought I knew in XSLT.

If I weren't learning things anymore what reason is there to continue?

Greetings and Salutations

As this is the opening post to my company blog I imagine it is best to begin by introducing myself.

My name is Mark Shellenberger and I am a 'Markup Guy'. What does that mean to you? Well, as the reader of this blog it means that the majority of the posts here will be centered around the XML world. That means I will:

• Discuss an interesting thread on one of the major XML-technology listservs
• Post a technique that I used to solve a problem
• Link to interesting uses of XML
• Semi-live blog any XML conferences I attend
• Link to other blogged XML conferences
• Discuss the business of being a business

What you won't see here is World of Warcraft techniques, political rants, questionable humor, vacation photos, or sports rants. You can check out any of the previous links for my friends' blogs on those topics.

I'll do a mini-bio post soon but in the meantime see my company's website; Manorfield Consulting, LLC. And, if you happen to need XSLT, XQuery, XSL-FO, or any type of XML work, please get in touch with me through my contacts there.