Persson started programming at the age of seven, using his dad's Commodore 128. He produced his first game (a text-adventure) at the age of eight, with the help of type-in programs. In 2005 he started working as a game developer for King.com, which he left in 2009 to work as a programmer at Jalbum. After Minecraft sales grew he moved from full time to part time at Jalbum and then eventually left to focus full time on Minecraft in June 2010, many of the Mojang employees (including CEO Carl Manneh) are also ex-Jalbum employees. Outside of work he frequently takes part in competitions, including Ludum Dare, LD12 and the Java 4K Game Programming Contest. He lived in Denmark before he moved to Sweden with his parents and went to school there.
Notch has his own part of the Mojang website that can be found here.