John has been using Perl since he first saw it distributed over Usenet in 1989. He was an active contributor to perl5-porters during the 90's and was co-author of O'Reilley's "Mastering Algorithms with Perl" - the wolf book. He currently works at OICR (the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research) helping researchers make their code: analyzing Genomic Databases for correlations to Cancer detection, prognosis, and treatment analysis. The BoutrosLab group at OICR is currently cleaning up a number of their modules to make them open source.