Akbar Ali MarkLogic
Developer

I grew up in a farming family in Etah, Uttar Pradesh — a world away from computers, servers, and software. There was no tech ecosystem around me, no engineers in the family, no roadmap. Just a quiet determination that education could change everything.

I moved to Delhi, completed my BA from Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University, earned a GNIIT certification, and later a Master's in Computer Applications from Sikkim Manipal University — all while working full-time. Every degree, every certification was earned in parallel with real work, because that's the only way I knew how to do things.

My first IT role in December 2013 was as an XML Programmer at Netsoft, converting medical and scientific content for Elsevier. Within four months I moved to Innodata, led an XML team on the Wolters Kluwer Belgium project, and won the Silver Performance Award in my first full year. Then came MarkLogic — and everything changed.

Over the next 5 years at Innodata, I engineered the Smart Content Service for the British Standards Institution — the platform that powers standards like ISO, CEN, and IEC globally. I led a zero-downtime MarkLogic v8 to v10 upgrade, built production REST pipelines, and was recognized with the Star Performer Award in 2019.

In 2022, I joined Datavid as a MarkLogic Consultant on the American Chemical Society project — the largest and most complex data challenge of my career. A 62M+ document Operational Data Hub, multiple entity schemas, CTS query optimization that cut search latency by 60%. In 2025, I was named Datavid Consultant of the Month.

Alongside all of this, I built MLCopilot — a VS Code extension for MarkLogic developers — because I was tired of having no proper tooling for XQuery. It's now live on the VS Code Marketplace. That's the kind of developer I am: if the tool doesn't exist, I build it.