The author grew up in Rockland, Maine and practiced internal medicine in Bangor, Maine at St. Joseph Hospital. His interest in programming dates back to the 1980s when he developed an electronic medical record for primary care, and was an early adopter of predictive analytics, a type of artificial intelligence. Dr. Wood attended the University of Maine, where he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Kappa Phi. His medical degree was from Dartmouth Medical School (now called Geisel School of Medicine) and he completed his residency at the Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School. He and his wife still live in Bangor, where they raised their two boys, who are now scattered.