Roedy, born Munroe Frederic Compton Green, has been cleaning up other people's code since 1962. He began his programming career in 1963 (he was just 15), writing Fortran timetable scheduling software for the West Vancouver Secondary School.

In August 1969, he came out as gay. His letter-writing campaign to connect gay people with various gay community groups led to the publication of A Guide for the Naïve Homosexual, in 1971, and became involved in the founding of the Gay Alliance Toward Equality (GATE), later serving as its second chairman (August 1971 to July 1972).

He developed some strong opinions on how code should be written to make it easy to maintain. He even went so far as to create a new computer language, "Abundance", (Byte Magazine October, 1986 ) to streamline maintenance. However, it was not until he posted a tongue in cheek essay called How To Write Unmaintainable Code, ostensibly on how to create employment for Java Programmers, that he hit the Dilbert button.

Roedy contracted HIV in 1985, and maintains a wide variety of resources on his website for people seeking more information about this disease.