@justinsovine
Hi! I’m Justin Sovine
My story so far
I was the kind of kid who took things apart to see what was inside, and I didn’t always get them back together. Instead of hiding his tools when I was five, my dad, a skilled tradesman, built me a workbench and gave me a toolbox of my own.
I don’t have the bench or the tools anymore, but those things tend to become a part of you.
In 1993, my dad came home from some computer show with a stack of games. That’s how, a year or so before the bench, I started playing Super Solvers: Gizmos & Gadgets!, a DOS game where you solve science puzzles to collect parts, build vehicles out of them, and race a mad scientist.
I couldn’t read yet, so my dad would read the menus for me, until he got up from the keyboard and I was on my own. I pressed everything until I knew what it did, and by four I could read a bit, partly because of that game.
I never grew out of that. Hand me something I don’t understand and I’ll poke at it until I do.
We’re backpackers too. Out there, you only have what you thought to bring, so most of a trip is in the planning: miles per day, water sources and how to filter them, food and what it weighs, where to hang it away from bears. You pack for every eventuality you can think of, and the ones you didn’t think of, you deal with. I took to that part as much as the walking.
So that’s me: I make things, I poke at what I don’t understand, and I plan for what could go wrong. It took me twenty years to notice that’s my job description!
At Live Oaks, I earned a two-year certificate in information technology and networking, covering hardware, security, networking, and operating systems. I also competed in FIRST Robotics, won the Business Professionals of America C++ regional and went on to state, and earned my CompTIA A+ certification in 2005.
My first job was at Vantage Land Title in Dayton, as a junior systems administrator and web developer. I traveled to five cities in Florida to set up VPNs back to the home branch, supported our PCs, printers, and network, and built my first web apps with HTML, ASP 6.0, and MS-SQL.
Starting in 2008, I spent the next decade at Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion as Web Manager. I ran our Debian web servers, Drupal and WordPress sites, and internal PHP applications, and worked with faculty and staff across four campuses to serve our students, donors, and alumni. I supervised a web coordinator and helped guide the college toward WCAG 2.0 compliance.
I spent most of those ten years in that office in Cincinnati, and I still miss it sometimes.
Those were formative years. They’re where I came to understand stewardship: the long-term ownership of interconnected systems.
Before Hive13 there was Cinci2600. 2600 is the hacker quarterly, going since 1984, and since 1987 its readers have met on the first Friday of every month in whatever city has enough of them, usually in a mall food court, to talk shop. I was a regular at Cincinnati’s, which is where most of us who went on to start Hive13 first met.
So then, in 2009 we founded Hive13, Cincinnati’s hackerspace: an open space for hackers of all stripes, from computing and mechanics to art, chemistry, and brewing, to learn from each other and teach. It took over what Cinci2600 had been for. That happened everywhere around then: hackerspaces and makerspaces were opening, and the monthly meetings folded into them.
Those were the years I went to the cons, too: Notacon in Cleveland and PhreakNIC in Nashville. I talked MUDs and lockpicking with strangers, sat in the demoscene room watching graphics written in assembly, and won game after game of laser chess against people who had played before, on my first day playing it.
Watch a drone tour of Hive13 (April 2024, by Brad Walsh)
In 2016, I co-founded Intellect 37 and built an automation platform that extracts public PDF records and turns them into targeted leads for legal and healthcare clients. I still maintain its successor, OhioCrashLeads.
From 2018 to 2023, I worked at digital agencies. At Primax Studio, I refactored a plugin that connected an in-house ERP to an e-commerce platform doing over $4 million a month, and built a Laravel Zero microservice to sync Paycor payroll data. At Able Engine, I built a multi-tenant marketplace and worked on the API and dashboard for a physical access control system.
Somewhere in the agency years, the itch to get back out with a pack came on and didn’t leave. I kept hearing about the Sheltowee Trace Association and the trail it looks after, and I set my mind on doing the whole thing. In 2023, I did: more than 350 miles through Kentucky’s Daniel Boone National Forest, ending at the southern terminus by Burnt Mill Bridge in Tennessee.
My pack was a lot lighter than the one in that first photo: a Granite Gear Crown2 60 with a tarp and bug net instead of a tent, for a 12.8 lb base weight. Planning it was half the hike. That hike deserves its own post someday.
Halfway through 2023, the same year as the Trace, I started bodybuilding. Six months of walking had shown me what a body will do if you ask it every day, and I wanted to keep asking.
Watch a military press set, 95x12. Just having a little fun at the end.
It’s part of a larger pursuit that I’ve started on, one the Greeks called arete: excellence as a practice, the habit of living up to what you’re capable of, in body and in mind.
They had it figured out a long time ago.
“It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.”
– Socrates
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
– Aristotle
Speaking of the mind: I’ve catalogued my entire library, as one does.
After the agencies came two years at Eastern Kentucky University, where I led the consolidation of more than 200 Drupal 6 microsites into a single WordPress multisite, with a custom block library, single sign-on, Solr search, and a CI/CD pipeline. It improved enrollment metrics, performance, and accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA).
After EKU came a short stint building e-commerce features at Earthley Wellness, where I learned a lot about strict DevOps: deployment pipelines, CI/CD, and code hygiene.
Away from work, I run Grime Ethics Media, which started in Cincinnati’s experimental music scene. In October 2025, we hosted our first film screening: Interface at the Esquire Theatre in Clifton.
Interface began as a YouTube web series by Canadian animator Justin Tomchuk, known online as umami, who compiled it into a feature-length film in 2021. It has since screened at festivals from Toronto to Paris.
Watch the recap of the night, which I animated and edited to music
We sold 56 of the theater’s 74 seats, a near-full house for our first event. Before the film, I gave a short introduction on why I think it speaks more powerfully today than when it was made:
“As artificial intelligence rapidly evolves, we’re witnessing the commodification of human thoughtspace…”
Watch my introduction before the screening
We want to bring more experimental and indie film to Cincinnati. Follow Grime Ethics Media on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram to hear about the next one.
Watch “What’s next for Grime Ethics Media?”
I also built grimeethics.net, and it’s full of little things to find. The remote on the snack table changes the channel, there’s a pen for the napkin, and the TV doesn’t like being held down. Go poke at it.
In 2026, I joined Edoc Service as a software and platform engineer, where I help develop AI-assisted medical transcription and compliance reporting software.
Most of that work runs through a system I built for Claude Code, and the idea behind it got a post of its own: Keep the model out of the control loop.
That’s the story so far. The best parts aren’t online.
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