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.
August 2026
September 2026
October 2026
Top Words
- social
- media
- invisible
- tools
- comments
- miss
- memories
- check
All posts (53)
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 hacking together a whole new structure for the website. Well, the last sentence...
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 people's favorite things. It was centered around a single sentence saying "My...
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 other people. How you present yourself to the world. Beyond that, taste dictates who...
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 me thinking about how at a certain point in ancient history, circa 2003, comments...
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 fully coming back to the small/indie/personal web, I'm trying to take with me...
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 word "blog" out loud. And it is a silly word after all, or at least I've always...
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 left Facebook, I tried to leave WhatsApp, but at least in Mexico that's opting...
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 right time can give someone a shift in perspective, and I've found innumerable...
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. I've gone back to pages from 4 or 5 years ago and been surprised to realize that...
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 is inconvenient. For the system to be reliable, you need to carry a notebook...
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 requirements were the following: I want a standalone solution for image hosting...
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 storage solution. I fully subscribe to that notion. I already use a system in Apple...
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