Since I left the XML team at Microsoft they've gone on an impressive hiring spree. Two people who I'd have loved to work with who have joined up after I left are

David Remy: former Director of Product Engineering at Bea Systems, he was responsible for security, web services, and XML for Bea's Weblogic Workshop product line.

Mike Champion: formerly a research and development specialist at Software AG. He was on the W3C's Document Object Model (DOM) Working Group for over three years and was the co-chair of the Web Services Architecture Working Group.

I have to see how quickly I can nag both of them to start blogging. David used to be in charge of the folks who produced XML Beans so I suspect he has all sorts of interesting perspectives on XML programming models. Mike and I have been exchanging mail on XML-DEV for years and now that we can have some of these conversations in person, I work across campus. Irony indeed. :)