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
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...
I've been thinking a lot about publishing photos for myself and my close circle, and in a second iteration of memories. The principal lines of thought are these: Privacy This is obviously the main thing, but to put up photos online we...
A couple of nights ago, I was about to post a song on The Headphonist, my music journal, when I decided the design I'd put up a couple of months ago wasn't doing it for me anymore. And because who needs sleep?, I went ahead and started...
Back in 2019, before the world ended, I was trying to learn JavaScript. Serious JavaScript, not just hiding and showing things like I'd always done for microinteractions in websites. As one of my exercises, I published an app to collect...
Taste dictates what music you listen to, your favorite food, your drink of choice, your clothing style, the books you read, the TV series you follow, the movies you watch — and rewatch. How you speak, how you flirt, how you react to...
A few days ago I stumbled upon this blog post by Matizeta where he talks about "the alive internet" and shares several ways to bring humanity back to the web. His focus on human interaction, and especially the part about comments, left...