Getting to Know John
John has a varied background in the high tech field. He was the president of BlackCert, a cloud consulting firm, which he also co-founded.
In addition to starting BlackCert, John started the podcast Build Liberty Radio. He has also worked in various capacities in business development and cybersecurity.
Finally, he has worked as a freelance writer at WhoIsHostingThis.com as well as many other publications like SiliconANGLE, where he is their CyberSecurity Editor.
One of John’s most interesting endeavors was working as Digital Operations Director for John McAfee’s 2016 presidential bid.
He lives in Colorado.
Our Interview with John
Here we interview John about things serious and silly.
How did you get into technology and web development?
I have been a technology consultant since 1999, in tech since 1995. I feel fortunate to have found a career that I’m passionate about. Today, I help companies with cloud, security, and crypto strategies.
Windows, Mac, or GNU/Linux?
All of the above!
Do you own any websites?
More than I can keep up with. BlackCert.com is where most of my efforts are at as of this moment.
What hosting companies have you used?
Hostway, Codero, Azure, AWS, HostGator, BlueHost, and I even have a Wix site somewhere.
How’d you get into technical writing?
A technology media company found a now-defunct blog of mine, it was all about my adventures in technology consulting. I soon found a voice, followed by fans at one point. I knew I made it when trolls took notice. The rest is history.
Are you working on any cool projects?
Absolutely! In addition to the digital certificate business, BlackCert has been working on a number of cloud security projects. We have built a support and services offering for companies of all sizes, with a specialty in compliance and security needs. This service will launch soon, so keep watching the site.
We are also developing a blockchain-based privacy API for the Internet of Things (IoT) and digital authentication. What’s really cool about it is that it will run on any cloud service, hosted server, or any device down to a Raspberry PI. It’s called Medusa, it will be open source, and we plan on building a variety of enterprise and consumer services off of that.
Favorite code/text/HTML editor?
I grew up using DreamWeaver, and it’s still my go-to.
Star Trek or Star Wars?
Star Trek, as long as it’s the original.
What are your favorite books?
The Phoenix Project, The E-Myth Revisited.
Where are you in the world?
Most of the time, I’m in Denver, CO
When did you first use the internet?
I was on an 8-bit Atari X800 with a 1200 baud modem.
Name one weird fact most people don’t know about you.
I love opera music and jazz.
When you aren’t sitting in front of a computer, what are you doing?
Family time.
What was your first computer?
I used a Tandy TRS-80 at school.
What do you like to watch on TV?
Boxing
What was the first website you ever built?
Wow. I’m going to guess it was NRGServices.com It was horrible, but I did sell that domain for 5 figures.
Who do you use for hosting?
I’m an avid Azure enthusiast.
Code from scratch or use a CMS?
I’ve done both, but I prefer CMS nowadays
How did you learn web development?
I learned from doing. Plenty of mistakes that way, which taught me a lot.
What do you love about freelance writing?
I love doing things that not everyone can do. I’ve done a lot of marketing content for major companies, as well as a lot of thought leadership ghostwriting for CEOs and such.
I specialize in leading concepts in the fields of security and cloud. In a way, it is a part of my advisory skills that I use in leadership roles and consultative engagements.
What do you hate about freelance writing?
I’ve written for a couple of major tech news sites that for one reason or another brought in so-called ‘experts’ to hopefully improve quality, etc. In almost every case, these experts were on this mission of imitating what they learned in college journalism onto these websites.
Paper news is a dying, boring format. With all respect to the science of journalism professionals, that makes for a boring internet. If everyone has the same style, AP cues, etc then why would anyone want to read your stuff over anyone else’s?
This is the web, it takes all kinds, and many people want to read things from the real-world, not a canned, systematic thesis-style story.
Selected WhoIsHostingThis Writing
Although John’s focus is cybersecurity, he writes about all aspects of high tech. Here is a short list of some of the articles he’s written for WhoIsHostingThis.com.
Open-Realty Hosting: learn all about this web-based real estate listing management application and find the right host for it.
OpenBiblio Hosting: check out this open-source library management application. It’s used by many small libraries around the world.
ADO.NET Hosting: an introduction to this database interface for the .NET framework. It also provides information on getting the right host if you are a .NET programmer.
PHPESP Hosting: find out about this survey software and what host is best for it.
XRMS CRM: find out if you should try out this free and open-source customer relationship management application.
Mercurial: an introduction to this distributed source control management tool.
Elsewhere on the Web
John can be found elsewhere on the web:
Learn more about the WhoIsHostingThis authors and editors here.
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