I'm Stefy Lanza — a freelance developer and systems hacker who has spent 25+ years turning "that's not possible" into shipped, running code. I'm the kind of engineer you call when the problem is genuinely hard: a closed protocol nobody has documented, a model that has to run on your hardware instead of someone's cloud, a daemon that simply has to stay up, or a product that needs one experienced person to own it end-to-end.

I work across the whole stack — from bare metal and firmware to the browser — and I'm equally comfortable reverse-engineering a wire format from packet captures as I am building the polished web app on top of it. I'm currently available for contract and freelance work, remote, worldwide.

What I do best

• AI & GPU infrastructure — local model orchestration (see CoderAI), OpenAI-compatible servers, multimodal pipelines, multi-provider brokers (AISBF), agent frameworks and MCP tooling. Self-hosted, so your data stays yours.
• Reverse engineering & interop — clean-room protocol implementations from black-box observation. My Bigscreen Remote Desktop (bsdrX) agent is a four-platform example built entirely from network captures.
• Systems & embedded — C and Python daemons, Linux internals, Microchip PIC and Atmel AVR microcontrollers, Arduino and ESP32/ESP8266 firmware, PCB design and hardware bring-up, home automation, industrial I/O.
• Full-stack & self-hosting — REST/real-time APIs, PWAs, streaming, WordPress & commerce, plus the ops to run it: TLS, TOR, containers, Debian/Devuan packaging.

The toolbox

Languages: C, Python, Elixir/Erlang, TypeScript/JavaScript, Go, Kotlin, C++, shell, Verilog.
Systems: Linux (Debian & Devuan, sysvinit and beyond), reverse engineering, networking & traffic shaping, CUDA/Vulkan GPU compute, Docker/Podman, TOR, MQTT.
Microcontrollers: Microchip PIC, Atmel AVR, Arduino, ESP32/ESP8266 — firmware in C, plus the boards to carry it.
Domains: AI/ML inference & orchestration, VR/360° video, embedded & PCB, astronomy instrumentation, streaming & media, home automation.

A bit of history

Nexlab has been my lab and handle for two decades. Along the way I've built and shipped things like:

• Rasky — an open-source Raspberry-Pi KVM-over-IP. GitLab
• Osso / mOsso — I/O expansion boards for Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone. GitLab
• Skylive — software infrastructure for a network of remotely operated telescopes, and plenty of astrophotography of my own.
• Devuan — contributions to the init-freedom Debian fork's build SDKs.
• …and a long tail of firmware, laser/CNC tooling, WordPress plugins and home-automation daemons — most of it on GitHub and GitLab.

Beyond the terminal

When I'm not shipping code I'm doing astrophotography, running 3D printers and lasers, designing PCBs, and advocating for LGBTQAI+ visibility and transgender rights in tech. I care about free software and building tools that put control back in people's hands — which is exactly why so much of my work is self-hostable.

Technology should be a tool for liberation, not lock-in. I build things that empower the people who run them.

Let's work together

Whether you've got a protocol to crack, a model to self-host, a stubborn daemon, or a whole product that needs building — I'd love to hear about it.

• Email: info@nexlab.net
• Upwork: Hire me on Upwork
• GitHub: github.com/nextime
• GitLab: git.nexlab.net
• CV: download my CV (PDF)