Axel talks to computers on behalf of people.
about
Me
My name is Axel. I'm Mexican American, raised in Mexico City, living in Ithaca, NY, with a penchant for command line interfaces. Besides computers I am passionate about music and cuisine; I play multiple instruments but mainly keyboard.
I'm also an NYS Certified First Responder and volunteer firefighter, philosophically absurdist, aspirationally stoic, and a strong proponent of FOSS and local AI.
Work
I talk to computers on behalf of people, get them talking to each other, and use them to make things that make things. Some of what I make is free and open source. Currently the Web and Systems Integrator at Cornell's College of Human Ecology. Open to contract work and new opportunities, especially anything with AI and the web.
Site
This is a Nunjucks and Fastify site built to work on any screen from almost anywhere: Chrome, Netscape, the terminal, your AI agent.
On a modern browser it is a multiplayer toroidal canvas, and a PWA. From IE6 it is a simple site, though not as simple as it is for curl or an LLM.
Site of Axel Stevens, programmer, first responder, instrumentalist, cook, bricoleur and autonym collector.
case studies
- A tenure packet builder Assembling a tenure packet took hours by hand, and any revision meant starting over.
- Automatic boot-removal dispatch Boot orders waited for whoever was dispatching to notice and retype them.
- Scraping three years of towing records A tax audit wanted three years of records that existed one screen at a time.
- Drag-and-drop access control Granting access took a ticket and a multi-day wait.
- NAO robot embodying AI The lab's NAO could only recite scripted replies.
- Recovering a fire department's call records The old system went away with twenty-five years of fire calls inside.
writing & web
- How much Fenomeno did we get? A notebook trying to answer "How much of R9 was there to (probably) get?"
- Just how good was R9? Brazilian Ronaldo's entire career in numbers.
- Rameau Music-theory evals ask multiple-choice questions. This one makes the model do the analysis, and checks it deterministically.
- Ronaldo R9 Career Starter EDA The starter notebook for R9 career dataset.
- Web Instruments Piano, bass, ukulele and drums, playable in the browser. The piano writes what you play onto a music sheet.
- E-ffigy A 3D figure in the browser you can hit, slap, scorch, hose, pelt with snowballs, eggs and tomatoes, and draw on.
- Which button? A notebook attempting to throw data at the red button, blue button dilemma.