Vernon L. Ceder has a PhD in Classics and for years taught Latin and Ancient History at independent schools in Texas, Greece and Indiana. At the same time he was beginning his career teaching ancient stuff he became interested in a new-fangled device called the microcomputer, and given the choice between buying a car and an Apple IIc, he chose the Apple. And the rest is (ancient) history.

Vern still teaches at an independent school (Canterbury School in Fort Wayne, IN) but has been teaching programming for some time, having moved from ancient computer languages like Pascal and C to Java and Python. He is also one of the founding organizers of the Fort Wayne Linux Users Group and frequently speaks at conferences on using Python in the high school curriculum and the role of open source software in education.

Vern lives in Fort Wayne, IN with his wife Becky and three Australian shepherds - Molly, Riker and Aeryn. Vern also trains, shows and judges dogs in obedience competitions and is a monthly columnist for Front and Finish, a national dog training magazine.