Introducing John Howell, Co-owner & Chief Technology Officer of Automatrix. Howell has worked in the IT field for over five years, focusing on Systems Administration. It’s widely known that nothing pairs as well with open-source software as professional wrestling, and Howell is a longtime fan of both.
Why is open-source important to you, and what impact does it have to the general public?
“Open-Source is important to me because I believe, as a power user, I am not catered to within most software. That is fine, so I choose tools in which I have a degree of control over that are reliable when I need them the most. More generally, I believe you should have the right to know what code is being executed on your computer. I can study how a screw driver works. Or my oven if I was dedicated enough. Why not software?”
What principles guide your business decisions?
“It took me a while to really nail down how best to describe this. If I had to sum it in two words it would be: Honesty & Integrity. I want our clients to know we are being entirely truthful with them and will back up our words with actions. We do not want to be known as the company that over promises and under delivers or the one that does a project and then leaves. We want a partnership with all of our clients and want them to know they can trust us just as much as we trust them.”
What technology or feature do you use as a power user that you thing would be the most useful for someone to learn?
“Emacs, 100%. As you can probably guess, running a business requires lots of information to be filed and retrieved. Without Emacs and specifically Org-Mode I couldn’t do it. If you need to juggle lots of information in your life I can guarantee taking a weekend to learn Emacs and Org-Mode would be heavily beneficial. It’s ability to script basically anything and export my files to any format to be shared or even thrown directly on a webserver saves me a ton of work I’d otherwise have to do manually.”
It’s clear that Howell is willing to put in the work for the things he believes in. Next time, we’ll meet the man who can decode the needs of you and your applications, Dexter Sicarius.