John Johansen began working with open source software in the late 80s and began playing with Linux in 93. He completed a masters in mathematics at the University of Waterloo and the began working for Immunix doing compiler hardening, and then AppArmor. After Immunix was acquired by Novell he began working on Suse Linux and in 2009 he joined Canonical as a kernel engineer. He is currently employed by Canonical as a security engineer with a primary focus on supporting the AppArmor project.