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
For years I've been having a love-hate relationship with Instagram. I'm still there because I value the interaction with my friends, some of them remote, but I'm always annoyed by the quantity of ads that show up in my feed. Now that I'm...
I've seen three blog posts about this in my feeds today, and it's notable that so far everybody avoids openly sharing that they blog. I do share it when it's relevant, but thinking about this made me realize that I feel silly saying the...
I miss email as a personal communication tool. Surely I still use it, but it is 20% paper trail for transactions, and 80% cold-messaging from companies I don't know—or plain old spam, if there's even a difference. A few years ago, when I...
This is a note from my journal that works as a constant reminder of being kind, something that's very important on my current journey. I share it here because, as simple and silly as it may seem, sometimes finding something simple at the...
In its simplest form, journaling is keeping a record of our thoughts, emotions, and reactions to our circumstances. It gives us a history to revisit, reference material that would otherwise get lost in unreachable corners of our memory....
For years I’ve tried to have a digital-only note system, but it’s difficult. It’s easy to have an organized archive for quick-reference in digital form, but for daily on-the-go notes nothing beats the availability of pen and paper. Paper...
This blog is built on 11ty, and I use Decap CMS to update it (editing code directly gets old reeeeal quick). I don't love image management in Decap, though, and I always wanted a better and quicker solution for that. So I made my own. My...
I’m a huge nerd for notes. A long time ago, I learned not to trust my memory, so everything that comes to mind and needs to be remembered goes into a note. There’s this idea that the brain is an excellent processor and a very shitty...
I've been vibe coding again, but this time I took a different approach. I focused on stuff whose workings I already understand. It was a very different experience. The first time I tried to make an iOS app, with the hope that if it...
I never did drugs in my youth because I was too afraid, but I always had this curiosity of how it would feel to be high. I imagined pure awesomeness and bliss. Turns out I do need a lot of drugs, prescription ones, and the effect is not...
I love headphones. I love them because music has always been my safe place and headphones were my way to carry that with me in public, except I never allowed myself to use them. My ideal way of using headphones was a very simple and...
I removed Instagram from my phone two weeks ago. Well, all social apps, but Instagram is the main one for me. I didn’t stop using it, though. Now that they have an iPad app, I installed it there. The idea is to intentionally use it...
Desde muy pequeño he estado asustado con la idea de la muerte en general, la de mis seres queridos, y especialmente la idea de la mía propia. Aunque con los años he podido ir gradualmente y a cierto nivel reconciliándome con la idea,...
— Hi, I’m Mateo Pérez — Hello, I’m Axel Valdez. I just got here yesterday — So, what do you do exactly? — I’m a UI designer, and I also do front-end code. Mostly HTML and CSS, but also some JavaScript, usually for interaction stuff — For...
With time, our memories start jumbling up, tangling, getting fuzzy. I feel like I lived a lifetime from 15 to 20, then from 40 to 45 it was a blink. Some people say it’s the percentage of your life those years represent. I don’t think it...