Design Engineer
I stopped writing for a while, since my road trip to Arizona last month, and my mind has been wandering too much. I feel like I can't anchor my thinking in a single thing at any given time. Normally, when I'm more focused, taking Ritalin improves my focus and puts me in a good mood. Today, the medication is affecting both my mood and my ideas. I'm two different people: on meds and not on meds. I…
I saw Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie two nights ago, and it blew my mind. It reminded me of the first time I saw The Science of Sleep by Michel Gondry. Back then, my mind was just, "You can do that in a movie?" This time, though, I already knew you can do whatever you want. The rules are arbitrary in every aspect of our lives. What really shook me was seeing someone actually doing those…
The worst possible thing I can do when I'm having a bad AuDHD day is start organizing my office, and that's the main thing I'm inclined to do, probably to somehow reclaim a bit of control. The process is the same every time. I wake up, maybe tired after having only a few hours of sleep, and the tiredness throws off my morning routine. Maybe I didn't feel like brewing coffee, or I wasn't hungry and…
When Andrés, my oldest son, was 9, we were watching a video about Logo , the programming language. He got especially excited with Turtle Graphics, where you have a "pen" on screen that you can draw with using commands to move it. That night I started a project using p5.js and my limited programming skills to do just that, drawing with commands, replacing my missing knowledge with unnecessary…
Smartphones have made traveling immeasurably easier. And I don’t think that was entirely free. Almost 25 years ago I was in a city that wasn’t my own. I’d never been there before. I was there along with my best friend, who lived in a different city, opposite ways from mine. We traveled there by bus to meet with a web design client. When we arrived we met at the bus station and took a cab to the…
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: our devices demanding work from us. We tend to think it’s only the big, evil, soul-shrinking companies demanding our attention, but on our side, a secondary-effect…
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. It's the timing of tasks. I tend to do things whenever the stars and my brain chemistry get aligned and I actually want to do them. When I was living alone, dishes…
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 a strong emotional response, not very different from losing someone you love, with the obvious differences in intensity. I don't like things becoming other…
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 me so much?" "Because I love you so much. I want to hug you as much as I can, because someday there'll be a moment when you won't want hugs from me anymore. And…
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 all that past shit as much as I love past sunshine and rainbows. Amor fati is a Latin phrase that means "love of fate", or "love of one's fate". The concept is…
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 phone. A couple of years ago I felt the urge to reinvent myself. It may have been caused by a midlife crisis, the extreme changes in my life (separation, new house,…
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. One of the things that I never liked about Memories was the fact that the website was on one place, and my photos in another. That was necessary in order to…
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 rest of us were tweeting away. I admire, envy, and wish I were one of them. Because I wasn't, I ended up carrying a lot of social media assumptions into blogging,…
Something that has proven beneficial for me, as an adult with ADHD, 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 point. The point is that they make me calmer. I'm relaxed when I get shit done. That's one of the best things about listening to music on vinyl records,…
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. I had two options: Stop fighting it and leave the embed as-is,…
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 kinda renounce the notion of privacy. I already settle for owning the platform where they're published, and really there's not much else we can do about it if 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 hacking together a whole new structure for the website. Well, the last sentence is a little unfair. I did plan the structure, and I had something semi-clear in…
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…
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 you're friends with, and that's either because they match what you value, or…
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 on blogs were almost as important as the blog content itself. We were blogging to…
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 some of the activities I use the corporate web for, and it occurred to me that…
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 thought so. I'm old enough to have called these things "web logs", which is waaay…
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 into social isolation. I asked my friends to use iMessage to reach out to me, and…
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 things on my own path that I'm extremely grateful for. Be kind to yourself by…
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 I'd already lived through situations similar to current events I considered new.…
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 and a pen everywhere you go, and we all know pens are always trying to get lost. The…
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 want to use it as an image gathering app (hoarding, really), not only as image…
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…
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 that the AI agent couldn't really solve, and I wasn’t much help because I was totally…
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 a regular person feels on their baseline. Ironic, I know. But you know what? it IS…
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 worrying someone would need my attention, and even in situations where that was…
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 have a moment during the day. It was difficult for the first couple of days, mostly…
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 podía dormir pensando en eso. Lo de las ideas persistentes y paralizantes ahora tiene…
— 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. Wow. — And what do you like the most? — CSS, definitely. I would be happy if I got to…
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 we live. When you drive from work to home, you barely register what happened. If…
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 therapy, medication, and a lot of introspective work. One of the main things I’ve…
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 to go watch ads with scattered updates from my friends. This quote from Leif…
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. Rationally I know it was difficult, especially with a three-year-old rightfully demanding…
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 to the bar, invited friends over, and visited, too. I got a feel for who is in my…
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 categories: tasks I had to do and tasks I wanted to do . Although both types of work…
I used to believe that social media kept me connected to the people I love, like, and enjoy, but I now realize that this couldn't be further from the truth. Although social media gives me the impression that I'm in touch with many individuals, broadcasting random thoughts and out-of-context ideas ultimately leads to a lack of genuine communication. The worst thing is that this false sense of…
After six and a half weeks in lockdown, I’m not anxious anymore. I don’t crave going out, and video calls have replaced face-to-face meetings very well: they no longer feel fake. I don’t perceive the screen anymore, but the person on the other side. Habits are changing. I can’t go out to the supermarket when I’m bored (yes, I do that, or used to, anyways) or call a friend to meet at the…
When we moved into the house where my family and I live, it occurred to me that it would be super cool and educational to have a solar system model in the ceiling of my kid’s room. And it would be a lot cooler —I thought— if the distances between the planets’ orbits and their size were proportional to their real-life counterparts, the light bulb in the center of the ceiling being the sun. I got…
I constantly find myself looking for free PSD mockups to present work, usually for small things like stickers, mugs, or posters. Today I couldn’t find a decent one for a set of stickers, and instead of buying a premium one, I decided to scratch my own itch, make my own and share it with you. How to use it Usage is fairly easy: Open the file in Photoshop Double click the smart object icon on the…
Before photography was invented, people could only see that in front of their eyes. To experience the rest of the world, people had to physically travel, or, if they couldn’t afford it, to use other’s interpretation of remote places via narrative or painting. That’s why the invention of photography was so huge for the human race. It removed a limit that most people didn’t even thought was there,…