Axl × Chicago
Chicago is
still part
of me.
A city I made a life in, a place I love, and a chapter I would love to return to.
Explore Chicago Rail AtlasMore than a place on my résumé
I lived and worked in Chicago. I love the city, and I would love to live there again. Waukesha is where I’m based now; Chicago is where I would prefer to build the next chapter of my life.
That belongs alongside the professional information here. A job title can tell you what I do. It cannot tell you every place that has mattered to me, what I want my life to feel like, or where I would be excited to begin again. Chicago is part of that answer.
I want the city to have room in the story. My connection to it includes real work, people who knew me through that work, and a data project that returns to the city through a different lens. It also includes a straightforward personal preference: I would be happy for a future opportunity to bring me back.
A chapter with real roots
Stephanie Izard’s original recommendation records that I moved to Chicago in June 2019 to join her team at Duck Duck Goat and Little Goat. The letter is an especially meaningful piece of this history because it comes from someone who knew me there. It describes my work, but it also describes my curiosity, judgment, communication, and character. Read the original letter and its transcription.
My professional record places the Duck Duck Goat line-cook role in July–September 2019, followed by bread baking with BOKA Restaurant Group in September 2019–September 2020. The June move and July role start describe different events; they are both retained in the sources.
| Chapter | Dates in my professional record | The work |
|---|---|---|
| Duck Duck Goat · Line Cook | July–September 2019 | Grill and protein preparation, coordinated with the kitchen through busy service. |
| BOKA Restaurant Group · Bread Baker | September 2019–September 2020 | Bread production serving Little Goat Diner, Girl & the Goat, Cabra, and Duck Duck Goat. |
These were substantial responsibilities in their own right. My bread work included morning preparation, mixing doughs and breakfast batters, and baking artisan loaves. The record also preserves the disruption of COVID-19: I was furloughed and later left amid changes in operations. The end date describes the role’s recorded span, not an assertion that ordinary service continued uninterrupted throughout it. See the complete career history.
The person people worked with
One sentence from Stephanie’s letter stays with the story:
“Andrex is a smart and kind human being.”
— Stephanie Izard, Winner + Fan Favorite of Bravo’s Top Chef Season 4 and Food Network judge. The letter uses my name at the time, Andrex Ibiza. See the original context.
Her recommendation also notes that I was pursuing my MBA while working with the team. That is a useful way to understand this period: several parts of my life were developing at once. Professional craft, business learning, responsibility to colleagues, and the desire to keep learning belonged to the same person.
My subsequent work in data and AI did not erase that person. I still want collaborators to encounter someone with a substantial life behind the technical work. A recommendation about judgment and kindness can explain something that a skills inventory or a contribution count cannot.
Another way into the city: the Red Line
Chicago also appears in my data work. CTA Red Line Ridership: 2018–2023 is a project I published on Kaggle under andrexibiza. It brings a different part of my background into the same city story: working with data and making patterns available for a reader to examine.
The project’s period matters. These are historical ridership data, and the questions they can answer belong to that recorded period. They are not a live description of today’s service or a record of my own travel. Looking at the project alongside my Chicago history gives it a human setting while preserving what the dataset actually measures.
Explore the Red Line project onsite to follow the analysis and its original sources. The Kaggle publication remains available as the supporting artifact. This is one city approached through several parts of my life: lived experience, professional relationships, and analytical work.
Returning with a broader life of work
If I return to Chicago, I will bring the history I already have there and everything I have worked on since. My background now includes an MBA, data analysis, authored research and writing, business operations, and AI software development. Those experiences belong together without needing to be reduced to one role.
My current Hermes work makes that breadth visible in another way. It includes architecture, implementation, review, and the relationships that make a large body of work understandable. The Hermes journey lets you explore that work in depth. The About page puts it back beside the rest of my life.
I would welcome an opportunity to return. That possibility is open, and I am making my preference clear so the right conversation has somewhere to begin.
A reason to connect
If you’re in Chicago and see a connection between my work and something you’re building, I would like to hear from you. A role, a collaboration, or an introduction can start with a conversation about the person and the work together.
I have a history in this city. I would love to give that history a future.