Axel Valdez
Axel Valdez
Axel Valdez
Hello, I'm Axel. I'm a Design Engineer living in Hermosillo, Mexico. I've been working in the software development industry for pretty much my entire adult life, in roles related to both front-end development and design. I lived through the browser wars, the web standards movement, social media becoming mainstream, and the decay of privacy online. Today I'm very much into the indie web and the small web movements. This website is my hub on the web, from work to hobbies and everything in-between.
Latest Posts
I stopped writing for a while, since my road trip to Arizona last month, and my mind has been wandering too much. I feel like I can't anchor my thinking in a single thing at any given time. Normally, when I'm more focused, taking Ritalin...
I saw Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie two nights ago, and it blew my mind. It reminded me of the first time I saw The Science of Sleep by Michel Gondry. Back then, my mind was just, "You can do that in a movie?" This time, though, I...
The worst possible thing I can do when I'm having a bad AuDHD day is start organizing my office, and that's the main thing I'm inclined to do, probably to somehow reclaim a bit of control. The process is the same every time. I wake up,...
When Andrés, my oldest son, was 9, we were watching a video about Logo, the programming language. He got especially excited with Turtle Graphics, where you have a "pen" on screen that you can draw with using commands to move it. That...
Smartphones have made traveling immeasurably easier. And I don’t think that was entirely free. Almost 25 years ago I was in a city that wasn’t my own. I’d never been there before. I was there along with my best friend, who lived in a...
A couple of weeks ago I read The Last Quiet Thing by Terry Godier, and it made me very conscious of what my devices were asking from me. I keep talking about seeking calm to everyone who’ll listen, and still I hadn’t seen it like that:...
A life organized around a to-do list takes the joy out of living. There's always stuff to do, obviously: somebody has to wash the dishes, sweep, go grocery shopping, get that cabinet door fixed. The problem is not the to-do list itself....
I experience a sense of grief every time a great TV series ends. The sadness that there isn't going to be any more of it, the irrational feeling that there's never going to be anything as good, and the sensation of emptiness inside. It's...
It was ten, maybe eleven years ago. I was picking my oldest kid from school, he was 4 or 5. When he came out, I gave him a hug. We walked to the car, I buckled him into his car seat, and hugged him again. "Hey, dad, why are you hugging...
In the last week I've found myself in two situations where I had to explain that despite all the crap I've been through, I wouldn't change a thing. That I love who I am, and I'm the product of everything I've lived, hence, I shall love...
I've always been a hoarder. I refuse to get rid of things, and that goes both for the box of cables and old electronics down in that cabinet in my office and for the files in my Google Drive, external hard drives, on my computers and...
We'll, I've been thinking a lot about photos, as you might have noticed. A few months ago I published Memories, my photo-blog-kinda-thing, and I loved it, but as it was a separate project from this website, I ignored it most of the time....
When I came back to blogging after years of being in and out of it, I did so mostly because I wanted to leave social media behind. Sure, some people never stopped. There are people who have been blogging for twenty-plus years while the...
Something that has proven beneficial for me, as an ADHDer, is to isolate activities. My brain works better in single-task mode, and I stay calm and more focused. I'm also more productive when I do these things, but that's not really the...
This past Saturday I was fighting the comments embed on this site, trying to adjust it for some changes and make it look like it belonged with the rest of what I have going on here. At some point I looked at the giant list of overrides I...