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JAMES 'JAMIE' KOVACH III
Smith by name. Engineer by nature. Director by choice. Father by design.
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About the Engineer
Kovach is the South Slavic word for smith — blacksmith, to be precise. Someone whose purpose is to take raw material and forge it into something that works. It started with an Atari 400 in 1982 and the pattern has never changed. The languages and machines evolved — BASIC, Assembly, COBOL, Pascal, dBASE, and everything since — but the instinct to build something from nothing has been present from the beginning. That is not a career choice. That is a name.
Over more than four decades that instinct has compounded: from writing first programs to architecting enterprise systems, from tinkering in a garage to directing multi-million-dollar technical operations. Electronic medical records built from the ground up. Infotainment platforms deployed across automotive showrooms. Dealer portals processing real-world commerce. A music download store launched before the iTunes Music Store existed. The through-line in every one of these is the same: show up, understand the problem completely, and forge something that works.
Today that means full-stack engineering, network infrastructure, security operations, cloud architecture, and AI automation — all under one roof. This site itself runs on a personal Proxmox homelab stack, with AI inference served by a dedicated NVIDIA Jetson Nano Super running local LLMs via Ollama. The best way to demonstrate what you know is to put it to work.
Outside of screens and schematics, I'm a father — which, if you think about it, is just another long-term engineering project with a much higher tolerance for chaos and a considerably better return on investment.
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Technical Expertise
Full Stack Engineering
End-to-end application development from database architecture to pixel-perfect UI. LAMP stack roots with modern framework fluency. Commerce, healthcare, and broadcast systems in production.
Networking & Infrastructure
Multi-vendor enterprise routing and server infrastructure. Nexus/ASR deployments with BGP, OSPF, EIGRP, and EVPN topology work. Virtualized and bare-metal environments across Linux distros and cloud.
Automation & Workflow Engineering
Complex multi-system workflow automation connecting PSA, telephony, Microsoft 365, and infrastructure tooling. Ansible for multi-distro orchestration. N8N for everything in between.
AI & LLM Integration
Local and hybrid AI infrastructure — from edge inference to RAG pipelines. Deploying, tuning, and integrating LLMs into production automation workflows at the hardware level.
Security Operations
SIEM deployment, active threat monitoring, and hands-on incident response. From standing up Wazuh from scratch to forensic analysis of live web compromises involving webshell implants and attacker-driven platform abuse.
Maker / Hardware
Physical builds from napkin sketch to working machine. CAD design, additive fabrication, and microcontroller programming — bridging the digital and physical worlds.
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Career Timeline
Atari 400 → 800
It started with an Atari 400: membrane keyboard, cartridge slot, and a 12-year-old who had no idea his life just changed directions. BASIC came first, then Assembly. By the time the 800 arrived, casual curiosity had become something closer to compulsion.
COBOL, Pascal & dBASE
The jump to IBM-compatible opened a new world. COBOL and Pascal brought structure and discipline. dBASE introduced the power of data, and the satisfaction of a well-designed query. CP/M, DOS, and early OS/2 were the proving grounds. Then came Delphi, and with it, object-oriented programming. A genuine paradigm shift.
Bare Metal Programming
Fresh out of high school and already solving problems nobody had a clean solution for. At one of the largest real estate appraisal firms in the country, the challenge was getting highly specific appraisal forms to print precisely and professionally at scale. The answer was a custom-programmed font cartridge for the HP LaserJet II, built from scratch to produce output that looked like it belonged in a boardroom, not a dot-matrix fever dream.
President & Founder, 2 Much Fun Productions
Founded and ran 2 Much Fun Productions at 20 years old — a full production and promotions company operating alongside the DJ career that fed it. The company also operated 2 Much Music, a vinyl record store that put real inventory behind the entertainment business. Production, promotion, retail: three disciplines running under one roof before most people that age had figured out one. The instinct to build a business around a passion showed up early.
2 Much Fun Productions: Automotive Electronic Listings
In 1991, designed the marketing strategy and full workflow process for the electronic intake and listing of automobiles. The World Wide Web was not yet everyday technology — most people had never heard of it. The concept of buying or browsing vehicles through a computer screen was not a product category yet. It was just a problem that needed a better process, and the answer was electronic. Building it required rethinking how inventory moved from intake to visibility without assuming the buyer was in the room. Another case of arriving somewhere before the road existed.
Radio Broadcaster & Club DJ
A parallel career that ran alongside the tech work for over a decade. It started in 1989 at a well-known teen dance club hosted at Pebblewood Country Club in Bridgman, MI — where in 1990 the opportunity came to host Bad Boy Bill, the legendary Chicago house DJ from B96 WBBM-FM. That connection would resurface years later at the Winter Music Conference. From Pebblewood, the run expanded to Timbers, H.I.'s Hollywood Saloon, and Country Gal Saloon through the mid-nineties. From 1995 to 2001, co-hosted and performed on a weekly mix show on WSMK in Niles, where the credits included a sit-down interview with CeCe Peniston. In 1994, received an invitation to the Winter Music Conference in Miami, where the floor included Bad Boy Bill again, Arrested Development, and MTV's Downtown Julie Brown. Moved on to Heartland Dance Club in South Bend as lighting engineer, then to Excalibur in Chicago, where the roster included Mix Master Mike of the Beastie Boys, house music artist Xavier Gold and her producer Ralphi Rosario, Too Kool Chris, and the legendary Laura B. The ability to read a room, hold an audience, and make technical systems perform under pressure translates directly. It always has.
Michigan Real Estate Salesperson
Growing up with one of the largest real estate brokers in Berrien County as a father has a way of leaving a mark. At 21, that influence translated into action: passed the Michigan State Real Estate Salesperson exam with a 98% score and held an active license for 14 years. Real estate was never the career, but it was taken seriously while it lasted. In 2005, with other pursuits demanding full attention, the license was deliberately set aside.
Director of Medical Information Systems, Cedarwood Medical Center
Started at the helpdesk. Left as a Director. The ascent was fast because the work demanded it, overseeing an HBOC medical billing platform processing millions of dollars in claims daily, where downtime isn't an inconvenience, it's a crisis. Beyond keeping the lights on, played a pivotal role in bringing the region's very first Electronic Medical Records system online. The experience planted a seed that would later grow into building one from scratch. Featured in The Herald-Palladium (April 12, 1999) as the systems integrator responsible for Cedarwood's Y2K compliance readiness, and separately in the Sunday Business section as one of the pioneering users of MP3 technology — while most of the industry was still arguing about whether digital audio was a threat, the work was already done.
Director of Operations, Quantum Connections
Running operations for Quantum Connections, the dominant Internet Service Provider in Southwest Michigan, during the most chaotic and exciting stretch in the history of the web. The role demanded equal parts engineering, leadership, and improvisation. The highlight, a legitimate piece of internet history, was the first-ever live broadcast of a United States President over the internet. George H.W. Bush, speaking at Lake Michigan College, carried live on WSJM and streamed to the world. First. Ever.
DJ Music Download Store
Built under Kovach Technologies, this was a music purchase and download platform purpose-built for the Final Scratch DJ system, a pioneering timecode vinyl technology that let DJs control digital files with real records. This was 2001. The iTunes Music Store would not exist for another two years. The Herald-Palladium had already identified Kovach as one of the pioneering users of MP3 technology years before this platform launched — the download store was not a pivot, it was the next logical step. The platform was real, it worked, and it was gaining traction. It was also apparently enough of a threat that the hardware manufacturer applied pressure to halt development. The project was shut down. The instinct that built it was not wrong.
WebNTR.com
Co-founded WebNTR (Non-Traditional Revenue), a company built around a single thesis: that broadcast media was leaving money and reach on the table by ignoring the web. As part owner and Corporate Secretary, wore every hat that needed wearing. Two products came out of it. KnewsDirector was the flagship: the first CMS to unify text, images, audio, and video for radio stations, with video ad insertion built in before YouTube existed. The second was TastyTakeOut.com — a platform that let restaurants list their full menus online, searchable by location and food type, with radio stations selling the service directly to local restaurants as a non-traditional revenue stream. GrubHub would not launch for another two years. The Yahoo MRSS integration on KnewsDirector wasn't a feature request either. Both products were built by seeing where things were heading and getting there first.
Kovach Technologies
Kovach Technologies was never just one thing. Over more than a decade it operated as a full-service technology company: custom website and web application development, Cisco hardware support and network engineering, and managed service provider work for businesses that needed someone to own their infrastructure without hiring a full IT department. Running alongside that was a full audio and video production studio — producing artists, engineering live sound, and handling the technical side of events most people only see from the crowd. One of those artists opened for 50 Cent at the State Theater in Detroit. That night, the job was backstage, making sure every piece of the production ran exactly as planned. It did.
Medical Net Systems: EMR
The Cedarwood years had shown what a well-run medical information system could do for a facility. This was the next step: building one from scratch. A full Electronic Medical Record platform designed to handle the complete patient lifecycle, from intake through billing, with HIPAA compliance baked in from the ground up rather than bolted on afterward. The work went beyond the software: co-holds a patent for the Patient Centric Medical Home, a care coordination framework built around the platform.
Director of Information Technologies, Scope Services
Scope Services operates at the intersection of utility infrastructure and large-scale field operations, coordinating crews across electric, gas, and water deployments. The mandate was twofold: modernize the enterprise back office and put real-time intelligence in the hands of the field. Led the deployment of Clevest, a purpose-built mobile workforce management platform for utilities, automating dispatch, AVL vehicle tracking, and smart grid operations across the organization. Running parallel was a full Microsoft Dynamics rollout to unify operations, finance, and reporting. Two major enterprise systems. One Director.
Owner, WebsiteUpgrade.net
Hung out a shingle and built things for clients who needed them. Web application design, engineering, and implementation across a range of industries. Running your own shop means wearing every hat, account manager, architect, developer, and support desk, often in the same afternoon. Good training for everything that came after.
Johnson-Rauhoff / Johnson Controls: Infotainment Compatibility
Contracted through Johnson-Rauhoff, the St. Joseph-based marketing and technology agency, to build a platform for Johnson Controls' OEM automotive division. Every car buyer who ever asked "will my phone work with this?" got their answer through this system, a web-based platform ingesting raw Bluetooth compatibility data from Johnson Controls' device testing labs and serving it to major automotive manufacturers' showrooms and websites. Full ownership: hardware stack, database architecture, front-end interface.
Technical Master Zombie, Working Zombie Studios
Five and a half years running the full technical stack for Working Zombie Studios in Benton Harbor. The title was deliberate: this was not a role for specialists. Application and web programming, network administration, audio and video production, and computer 3D animation, all under one roof, all on the same resume. The kind of range that only comes from genuinely not being able to stop learning new things.
My Daughter Was Born
Everything before this date was prologue. 44 years of technology, building, leading, and creating — and none of it compares to the moment she arrived. She is, without question, the best thing I have ever made.
3D Printing Instructor, Krasl Art Museum
When the Krasl Art Museum wanted to bring 3D printing to their community, they needed someone who actually knew what they were doing. The intersection of emerging fabrication technology and a fine arts institution made for a genuinely interesting classroom, introducing students to a tool that sits right on the border between engineering and creative expression.
Full Stack Engineer, Interlink Group
Seven years in and the scope keeps expanding. The role covers the full technical spectrum: from writing application code to owning the infrastructure it runs on. Network engineering on Cisco and Meraki, security operations with Wazuh and Graylog, virtualization on Proxmox, cloud work in Azure, and server administration across Linux and cPanel environments. DevOps and SecOps aren't job titles here. They're daily practice. The current frontier: infrastructure automation with Ansible, workflow orchestration through N8N, and building with AI agents — putting emerging tools to practical use rather than watching from the sidelines.
Builder, Maker, Tinkerer
Kovach is the South Slavic word for smith — as in blacksmith. The original maker. Someone who takes raw material and forces it into something useful through heat, repetition, and refusal to quit. Robotics projects, 3D printing, CAD design, software, infrastructure, music, records, companies, systems, and whatever comes next. Forging things is not a hobby. Apparently, it was always the name.
Initializing..._
The forge is still hot. Forty-four years of building, founding, and forging — and the instinct has not cooled. The next achievement is already in motion. What shape it takes depends on the right problem, the right team, or the right conversation. If you're reading this, that conversation might already be happening.
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Notable Projects
Medical Net Systems
Electronic Medical Record
Ground-up design and development of a full Electronic Medical Record system. Built to handle the complete patient lifecycle: from intake and scheduling through clinical documentation, billing, and reporting, while meeting strict HIPAA compliance requirements. Co-holds a patent for the Patient Centric Medical Home, a care coordination framework built around the platform.
Key Features
- › Full patient lifecycle management
- › HIPAA-compliant data architecture
- › Clinical workflow automation
- › Billing & reporting modules
- › Multi-provider, multi-location support
- › Co-patent: Patient Centric Medical Home
Stack
American Cargo Group
Dealer Portal
Six years in, this is still the project that gets the most of me. What started as a dealer portal evolved into a comprehensive commercial trailer configuration platform — letting dealers walk a customer from blank canvas to signed quote without ever leaving the browser. Deep ERP integration keeps inventory, pricing, and order state synchronized in real time. At this scale and duration, the work spans full-stack engineering, ERP integration architecture, and database ownership — because on a long-running production system, someone has to own all of it.
Key Features
- › Interactive trailer build-up & configuration engine
- › Real-time pricing & quoting system
- › ERP integration layer
- › Full dealer network portal & management
- › Order lifecycle management
- › Database architecture & performance ownership
Stack
Johnson Controls
In-Dash Infotainment Compatibility Platform
Every car buyer who ever asked "will my phone work with this?" got their answer through this system. Built in 2012 for Johnson Controls' OEM division, this platform ingested raw Bluetooth compatibility data straight from their device testing labs and transformed it into a polished, consumer-facing experience deployed across major automotive manufacturers' showrooms and websites. End-to-end ownership: hardware stack, database architecture, and the front-end interface.
Key Features
- › Hardware stack design & specification
- › SQL schema for structured lab test ingestion
- › Consumer-facing compatibility lookup UI
- › iOS & Android device coverage
- › Multi-brand OEM deployment pipeline
- › Lab data → dealership floor in one system
Stack
Midwest Family Broadcasting
Town Crier Wire
Digital news wire system for a regional broadcasting group, automating the collection, editorial workflow, and multi-channel distribution of local news content to affiliated broadcast stations and digital properties.
Key Features
- › Automated content ingestion
- › Editorial workflow management
- › Multi-channel broadcast distribution
- › Affiliate station syndication
- › Real-time breaking news pipeline
Stack
KnewsDirector
Radio Broadcast CMS
Before "multimedia content management" was a product category, it was a problem — and this was the solution. KnewsDirector was purpose-built for radio stations across the United States, and it got there first: the first CMS to unify text, images, audio, and video streams in a single publishing platform. Digital media was stored directly in MySQL BLOB fields, a pragmatic architectural choice that kept the stack lean and portable. It was also among the earliest platforms to integrate with Yahoo MRSS feeds, putting stations' content into the emerging syndication ecosystem before most of the industry knew that ecosystem existed.
Key Features
- › First CMS to publish text, image, audio & video in one platform
- › MySQL BLOB architecture for digital media storage
- › Early Yahoo MRSS feed integration
- › Deployed across radio stations nationwide
- › Full content lifecycle: create, manage, publish, syndicate
Stack
TastyTakeOut.com
Restaurant Discovery & Menu Platform
Built under the WebNTR umbrella in 2002, TastyTakeOut.com let restaurants input their full menus online and gave the public a searchable directory by location and food type. Radio stations sold the service directly to local restaurants as a Non-Traditional Revenue stream — turning a community utility into a monetizable broadcast product. GrubHub would not launch for another two years. The concept was right. The timing was right. The market just needed a few more years to catch up.
Key Features
- › Restaurant menu management & publishing
- › Location and food-type search for consumers
- › NTR model: sold through radio station partnerships
- › Pre-dates GrubHub by two years
- › WebNTR Non-Traditional Revenue platform
Stack
Final Scratch Download Store
DJ Music Purchase & Download Platform
In 2001, before the iTunes Music Store existed, Kovach Technologies launched a purpose-built music purchase and download platform for the Final Scratch DJ system — the pioneering timecode vinyl technology that let DJs control digital audio with real records. The platform let DJs legally purchase and download tracks directly into their Final Scratch library. It worked, it was gaining traction, and it was ahead of the industry by years. Staton Music disagreed with that last part, and applied pressure to shut it down. The project ended. The instinct was not wrong.
Key Features
- › Music purchase & download for Final Scratch DJ system
- › Legal digital track delivery to DJ library
- › Built before the iTunes Music Store existed
- › Integrated with Final Scratch file management
- › Shut down under pressure from hardware manufacturer
Stack
WHT.tv
Roku Channel
Roku isn't exactly known for welcoming roll-your-own development, but that's exactly what this was. Designed and shipped a fully custom Roku channel for WHT.tv, bringing the network's content to living room screens across the platform's massive installed base. From content feed architecture to the on-device UI, a full-stack problem with a remote control as the interface.
Key Features
- › Custom Roku channel development
- › Content feed design & integration
- › On-device UI for 10-foot viewing experience
- › Video streaming pipeline
- › Roku platform certification & publishing
Stack
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Get In Touch
Whether you're looking to build something ambitious, need technical leadership, or just want to talk shop, I'm reachable.