What Stephen is doing now (summer 2026)

I definitely failed to update this quarterly haha but if you're forgiving it's almost annual.

Employment

I'm no longer working at Cisco. My current employer is a supplier for SpaceX though which is cooler IMO. It's with a bunch of people from the LU Robotics club so that's extra neat.

Where

I've moved back to Lynchburg. It's nice, I'd have to be paid a lot to move somewhere else so that seems unlikely.

Side projects

My primary side project has been an LLM harness named "Melder" which is a dependancy-free (other than the standard CPython distribution) LLM harness with some neat unique features. I personally far prefer it to Codex because of its good subagent suppport.

I've also been working on a handheld keyboard/videoterminal. The hardware is done I'm just emotionally bringing myself to let go of a couple of software features (I was implementing the generic USB display protocol but the Linux driver was so buggy/bitrotted there was no way around crashing your X server when it was unplugged. I started fixing some bugs in it but it looks like someone else scooped me, that's major scope creep for a keyboard anyway.

Robotics

I have two mobile robots currently. One is a tiny parametric rp2040 based thing that can be 3d printed or cut using a CNC machine. The other is a larger, more practical device based on a 3d printer controller board and a raspberry pi zero2 w which I think is the one I'll focus my effort on going forward.

Quantitative ML

I've given up on the LSTM currently. I'm focusing on having language models develop classical quantitative models. I wrote about my experience with a persistant agent in Melder doing this on the Melder page.

Boat power

She's floating but I've been incredibly busy. I haven't had the chance to sail recently which is super annoying.

Publishing

I've gotten a lot better about writing which is great! Hopefully I can keep that up.