Hi, I'm Justin Hall.

About Me

Most weeks, the part of my calendar I care about most is the part that happens on a soccer field or at a hockey rink. I coach both, and on the nights I'm not coaching I'm usually in the stands watching one of my own kids play. Somewhere in there I try to get into a classroom at our local elementary school and talk with kids about how things actually get built.

I'm back in school myself. I'm partway through an MBA and a Master's in Business Analytics at the University of Iowa — both still in progress, both squeezed in around a full-time job and a family schedule that does not slow down for finals week. I'd rather be the person in the room who is still learning something than the one who has decided he's done.

What I Do

I started with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering Technology from the University of Northern Iowa, and I've spent about fifteen years since then in manufacturing — maintenance, operations, and the engineering work that sits in between.

A lot of that has been hands-on: PLC programming, factory automation, putting robot cells in, and a fair amount of coding, scripting, and database work — building out the MES and reporting side so the floor and the data actually agreed with each other. The rest has been people — running projects, supervising teams, and pushing on safety culture, which is the least glamorous and most worthwhile thing you can spend a year of a plant's attention on. I like both halves. The technical problems are the fun ones, but the ones that stick are the ones somebody else learned to solve without me.

These days most of my attention goes to AI, robotics, and automation. Some of that is plain curiosity, and some of it is that I've spent enough time on a plant floor to know the difference between a demo and something that still works on second shift in February. Closing that gap is the problem I find most interesting right now.

Things I'm Into

• Coaching youth soccer, which is nine parts logistics and one part actual soccer.
• Coaching youth hockey with WYHA — the early ice time turns out to be the easy part.
• Hockey, still, as a player and not just from the bench.
• Target shooting.
• Volunteering with the STEM programs at Waterloo Elementary School, mostly to show kids that the people who build things are just people.
• Keeping a foot in IEEE, AFS (the American Foundry Society), and ASEE, largely to see what everyone else in the trade is working out.

Ask AI About Me

If you'd rather ask a machine than read all that, these open a new tab with a question about me. Most will have it typed in already; one or two may just hand you an empty box.