Axel Valdez Design Engineer
  • 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.

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  • 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 was maintaining just to make it feel somewhat integrated and realized it didn't make much sense.

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  • 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.

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  • 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 favorite [a] is [b]". There was no purpose other than having fun, it was totally anonymous, and I didn't know what I was doing at all, so as soon as it started breaking apart I had to put it away.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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 Notes, heavily based on Forever Notes by Matthias Hilse, but very distilled and simplified. However, I wanted an even more immediate quick-note system that was always up front and ready, so I made just that.

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  • 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.

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