John Merrells is a software engineer who has been a successful engineer, architect, and leader within technology companies both in the UK and US. His prior experience includes working on projects at Microsoft, Lucent, Netscape, AOL, and Sun. Most recently he founded the Berkeley DB XML project within Sleepycat software, and continues to lead that distributed engineering effort. His three years with Netscape, on the highly successful LDAP Directory server, led to his leading a standardization effort within the IETF, and the filing of numerous patent applications. He continues his work as the editor of a professional software engineering magazine for the ACCU, and is a technical reviewer for Addison-Wesley, Prentice-Hall, and APress.