I first encountered Michael at my first Balisage, ten years ago, where he was setting up the signage directing us to the appropriate conference suite. He was smart and cheerful and at the time I didn't realise the effect he would eventually have on my later in-retirement technical career. But at the end of that conference I was totally blown-away by his closing conference-summarising speech where he demonstrated just how sharp he was and how exceptional a communicator.

Over the following years I met him at several Balisage conferences, but it wasn't until relatively recently (post-Covid) that I got to work with him, on the QT4 community group (defining XSLT/XPath/XQuery 4) and the Invisible XML community group (refining the iXML specification and working on processor implementations.) And then it became very very apparent how valuable Michael could be to such technical projects.

Time and again, over most weeks for two years, I'd find myself in a Zoom call with Michael and several others, and Michael had this uncanny ability to take a half-formed verbal idea that someone had posited and, after a moment's though, crystallise what it was in its essentials and how it might or might not work. It was rare this didn't happen in a meeting.

But unlike some who have razor-sharp intellects, but lack other (social) skills, Michael would never belittle others and always emphasised the positive points, or showed how a simple variation might assist. He was certainly one of the very best 'contribution-enablers' in our community, and I can never recall him raising his voice or arguing destructively. He was the very best that any community-based technical project could be blessed with.

In the last year or so I and a few others have worked very closely with Michael on aspects of implementation of our iXML processors, where time and again we've found him able to understand very quickly some of the problems we were facing and collaboratively discuss and analyse the issues involved. For me, and I know for the others involved, these meetings with Michael weren't onerous - they were a distinct pleasure, that we looked forward to and always got far more out of than we'd imagined. We'll certainly miss them and him, desperately.

Michael Sperberg-McQueen was one of the best intellects and group-contributors I've every worked with, but even more than this, he had become a friend, and was, in all things, a real gentleman.

John Lumley MA PhD CEng FIEE
john@saxonica.com