Leif initially began using Avalon for a large commercial server that he was working. He became a committer after making several contributions.

Leif has contributed to the Excalibur Component Manager, Pooling, DataSource, and ThreadPooling projects. Leif was also responsible for the Instrumentation projects: Instrument, Instrument Manager, and Instrument Remote Client projects.

Outside of ASF, Leif also manages the Java Service Wrapper project.

Leif has lived and worked in Tokyo, Japan since 1996 and enjoys backpacking, swimming and water skiing.

His academic background includes an E.E. Degree specializing in Control Systems. Work background includes software testing, plant automation and data analysis, and more recently scalable recommendation server design and implementation.