Stafford Vaughan started computer programming at an early age. He grew up near Sydney, Australia, and found his first job at CustomWare, a software services company that specializes in the technology of fast growing software companies. In his time at CustomWare, Stafford has personally established the training departments of several companies, including Zendesk, Atlassian, and GoodData, and authored several of the official training programs for software products including Zendesk, JIRA, Confluence, GreenHopper, and GoodData. As an educator, Stafford has delivered training sessions to more than a thousand organizations in 15 countries, including NASA, the Pentagon, the United Nations in Geneva, Harvard University, Stanford Graduate School of Business, Groupon, the US Department of Commerce, Sun Microsystems, and Wells Fargo Bank. Stafford holds a Bachelor of Software Engineering degree from the University of Newcastle, he is a CompTIA Certified Technical Trainer (CTT+), a Sun Certified Programmer for the Java 2 Platform (Standard Edition 5.0), a Microsoft Certified Application Specialist (PowerPoint 2007), and an Adobe Certified Expert (Photoshop CS5). Stafford currently lives in San Francisco and works in Silicon Valley. In his spare time he is a keen hiker and serves as a volunteer mentor at the San Francisco SPCA.