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)
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 worked, I would also do a macOS app from that. But it didn't work: too many errors...
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 an incredible high, but just plain normality. I need to drug myself to feel like...
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 normal one: to go about my day with music as a companion. The problem was I kept...
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 whenever I want to check or post something, instead of defaulting to it every time I...
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, este miedo empezó siendo paralizante. Al nivel de ser un niño de 6 años que no...
— 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 how long have you been doing these things? — It’s been like... 15 years now....
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 works like that. I think i’ts a problem of us not being mindful of the things...
I’ve been thinking a lot about emotional management, particularly after a challenging year of depression and anxiety. I’ve lived with both for most of my life, but it wasn’t until recently that I was formally diagnosed. About a year ago, I hit rock bottom. Since then, it’s been a slow but steady climb, thanks to...
Musk has made it really easy not to go back to Twitter. Props for that. Threads is slowly creeping into being a true replacement for Twitter, toxicity and all. It may come as a surprise to no one that the problem isn’t the platform, but the people pouring their shit into it. Instagram is still the one app I’m using...
With each day that passes, I increasingly remember the pandemic with a positive twist. It was far from good. It wreaked havoc on my mental health at first, but perhaps it is a blessing that my mind chooses to retain the positive aspects and bury the rest I miss being all day at home with my wife and my kids....
Today is the last day of my 30 days without social media. These are some bullet points of my experience: The first two weeks were hell. I constantly reached for my phone and got frustrated. The fear of missing out (FOMO) was strong, but after two weeks, it was mostly gone. I socialized a lot more in person: I went...
There is this quote from drummer Keith Moon I heard from Ira Glass and deeply resonated with me: I am the best Keith Moon-style drummer in the world. It reminded me of my approach to work for my first few years of employment at Nearsoft, a company that heavily promoted self-management. I divided my work into two...
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