Philipp K. Janert was born and raised in Germany. He obtained a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from the University of Washington in 1997 and has been working in the tech industry since, including four years at Amazon.com, where he initiated and led several projects to improve Amazon's order fulfillment process.
He is the author of a book on graphical data analysis using open-source tools ("Gnuplot in Action" - Manning Publications, 2008), and his writings have appeared on Perl.com, IBM developerWorks, IEEE Software, and the Linux Magazine. He also has contributed to CPAN and other open-source projects.
He knows small start-ups and large corporate environments. He has seen good projects fail and bad ones succeed, and more than once he managed to pull a failing project back from the brink.
Currently, he makes his home in the Pacific Northwest.