Tim Maher has worked for U.C. Berkeley as a senior programmer/analyst, for the University of Utah as a professor of computer science, and for AT&T, DEC, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett Packard, and Consultix as a course developer and/or lecturer on operating systems and programming languages. He founded Seattle's SPUG, one of the oldest, largest, and most active Perl users groups and served as its leader for its first six years. He serves on the Advisory Board of the University of Washington that oversees its Perl Certificate Program, and has led discussions in the Perl community about the development of a certification process for Perl programmers. He lives in Seattle, Washington.