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Axel Valdez

axel.mx · English

Personal website of Axel Valdez, Design Engineer living in Hermosillo, Mexico

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Sep 15, 2026
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  1. Invisible Tools: Window Management
    Sep 15, 2026 · original
    This post is part of a series about my invisible tools : the hardware and software I use so much that I don't have to think about using them. During 2024 and 2025, I traveled a lot, and I decided to work only on my laptop, with no peripherals, whether I was at home or on the go. I wanted my setup to stay the same so there wasn't any warm-up time when switching. It went well, until it didn't. Not because of the small screen, but because my neck and shoulders were constantly killing me. There's no practical way to prop up a laptop to the correct height (I'm tall) without it being an inconvenience by itself. I had to buy a new monitor because, in the process of using only the laptop, I gave my monitor to my oldest kid. I went for the same specs: curved 34" ultrawide, 3440x1440, 1800R curvature (I can't get used to more curved ones). My Window Arrangement When I work on the laptop, my rule i
  2. Invisible Tools: Keyboard Shortcuts
    Sep 14, 2026 · original
    This is the first post in a series about my invisible tools : the hardware and software I use so much that I don't have to think about using them. I'm starting with one of the simplest: keyboard shortcuts. Keyboard and shortcuts I use a Durgod Fusion keyboard, but I've found that the keyboard itself doesn't matter that much, the warm-up time when switching is minimal, as long as you have a similar layout. The Durgod is a 60% keyboard, and switching to the built-in keyboard on the MacBook isn't an issue, they're very similar. The most important thing about the keyboard is to extract as much value from it as possible. I've collected a bunch of toys during the last few years. Two of them that I recently ditched were a macropad with 12 configurable keys and a volume knob that used to sit behind the keyboard. They were both incredibly useful, but whenever I happened to be working with the lap
  3. Invisible Tools
    Sep 14, 2026 · original
    Having your tools become second-nature has more effect on your productivity than getting the right tools . Once they reach that status I like to call them "invisible tools". I've found the best way of having a tool become invisible is a combination of: Very few moving parts Building muscle memory to use it Stability: it doesn't fail, it doesn't change, or changes very slowly over time. In the following posts I talk about hardware and software tools, but this applies to everything that can be considered a tool: the pen and notebook pair I carry everywhere is an invisible tool. My phone camera also is invisible. I don't need to think about them, I just use them. The arrangement of the tools and their controls are also part of their invisibility. In my case, my phone is always in my left-hand pocket, my keys in the right-hand pocket, and my wallet in my right back one. The icons in my phone
  4. I agree with you, but can we stop yelling about it for five minutes?
    Sep 10, 2026 · original
    People posting AI slop to the internet is annoying, but not as much as people complaining non-stop about AI. I get it, AI companies are shitty, and their reach is menacing. Anyone that knows how technology influence legislation and society can easily understand that. I'm worried about it too. But lately, almost every content creator in the creative space launches into a diatribe against AI halfway through a video. No new arguments, the same thing every time. It's tiring. I'm mostly on your side. The part where I'm not is this: We can't ask regular people not to use something that allows them to "make" things that were previously out of their reach. It's unrealistic. Why would I ask my friends to invest months in learning a design tool to design their kid's birthday invites when an AI tool gets them a result that it's 80% the quality of a professional designer's work in literal seconds? A
  5. Disconnection in the Mountains and the Great Mennonite Debate
    Sep 8, 2026 · original
    This past weekend I took a hiking trip to the mountains in the neighboring state of Chihuahua. Beautiful forest scenery, streams, rivers with actual flowing water, and no internet signal. Not a single bar. It didn’t catch me off guard. I brought my iPod Classic in preparation for it, but I will admit it was weird at first. It felt like missing a limb. The feeling slowly went away as the hours passed, though. Things got slower, and the slight uneasiness I felt during the first couple of hours turned into a sensation of calmness, and I was suddenly focusing on the moment. During the walk down the canyon of Basaseachi Falls National Park, I decided to stay at one of the viewpoints and wait for the rest of the group to go down to the bottom and come back up (I was worried about the hike up to the surface). I ended up waiting for a little past an hour, with nothing to do. I really wished I ha
  6. Assignment
    Aug 10, 2026 · original
    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 would like to be off meds soon. I think I'm doing well without the antidepressants, at least for now, with some ups and downs. But I think I'm stable. I feel like I'm emotionally flatlining, but that's not the antidepressant's problem to solve. I think I've lived like this, undiagnosed, for most of my life. Persistent dysthymia. Anyway, writing helps. Writing anchors my focus and gives me structure. Sometimes it works as a step forward in something I'm already cooking. Other times, it's just an e
  7. Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie
    Jul 30, 2026 · original
    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 kinds of things: that kind of humor, and a story that moves forward as if they were making it up as they went, as if the whole movie was an improv session. My favorite part is the time-travel stuff, when they interact with their younger selves. I love it because it's a testament to obsession: two guys, two friends, two collaborators, doing something for so long that they have an absurd amount of material to pull off that kind of storytelling. To have conversations with themselves from seventeen year
  8. Boxes
    Jul 16, 2026 · original
    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 postponed breakfast. Or I overslept a little bit and I'm rushed to start working. Whatever it is, I feel like I'm not in control. Thoughts start bumping into each other, tasks overlap, and suddenly I'm jumping between apps, messages, thoughts, and tasks, with very little control over what gets my attention. At this point, my anxiety starts taking over. A couple of hours have passed and I've accomplished absolutely nothing. I skipped coffee, so the withdrawal starts creeping in, which intensifie
  9. Tortuga
    Jul 15, 2026 · original
    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 overcomplication and spaghetti code. But hey! It worked! We called it Tortuga, honoring the Logo concept of Turtle Graphics. Andrés loved it. He spent months coming back to it, and we added some features during that time: loops, an additional set of color "inks", and guide lines for the position and direction of the turtle. Cut to 7 years later, I'm watching a Daniel Shiffman video on fractals at night, when my youngest kid, Alan, sits by my side. He watches for a while and starts commenting and aski
  10. I Miss Getting Lost
    Jul 14, 2026 · original
    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 hotel restaurant where we were meeting with the client. The meeting went well. After lunch, we had plenty of daylight left and we were in a good mood, so we decided to walk back to the bus station and to use the time to catch up on each other’s life. Except we were in an unknown town, and we didn’t have smartphones (there were a good five or six years left for them to be invented) or internet access. So of course we got lost. We walked for two or three hours, and had to stop a couple of times for
  11. Quiet Tech
    Jul 13, 2026 · original
    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 of having a tech device always communicating with the world is that it demands our intervention tens, even hundreds of times a day. And we tend to exercise very little control on what we do and how we deal with that fact. This is the part that led me to think about what I do: You will pick up your phone eighty, ninety, a hundred times today. Dismissing a notification 22% Intentional use 20% Checking something that pinged 18% Replying to a person 15% Updating, configuring, or fixing 12% Unlocking
  12. Nothing Due Today
    Jul 8, 2026 · original
    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 tended to pile up, laundry got unmanageable, the fridge was empty and I had to push things over on the table to make space to sit down to eat. Then, on a random morning, my mind was right and I powered through it all and left the place spotless. Suddenly there were no 'tasks', it was all joy. Those weren't days where I finally became responsible. They were days where doing things actually felt good. It probably started as an ADHD thing, but after almost fifty years, it's just part of who I am:
  13. One Episode Left
    Jul 4, 2026 · original
    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 things, or going away suddenly. When I find something I'm content with, I want that thing to stay the same forever. I have my bar, and my beer at that bar. I have my favorite breakfast, lunch, and dinner restaurants, and I know the exact menu item I'm gonna pick the next time I visit any of them. If any of those items are suddenly discontinued, I'm not gonna be happy. If one of those places closes, much less. I just watched the second-to-last episode of The Bear. There's just one left. Forever. And I'
  14. Yet
    Jul 1, 2026 · original
    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 that's ok, but I want to do it all I can while you still like it" He didn't ask more. I could tell he was processing my answer. I got into the driver's seat and drove home. When we arrived, and I was helping him get out of the seat, he stopped, looked at me, and said: "Dad... I will always, always, hug you". And well, the moment I predicted arrived three or four years ago. He's still a loving kid, but he's quiet and distant around the family. I spend most of my time with the little one now. The one
  15. Amor Fati
    Jun 23, 2026 · original
    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 rooted in the Stoic philosophy, with people often linking it to Epictetus and/or Marcus Aurelius. The concept was later embraced by Nietzsche, who through his idea of eternal recurrence, wished to live the same life over and over again, exactly as it happened. The basic idea is: don't just accept what happens to you. Love it . And this is where it gets tricky. Accepting is easy. We've been trained religiously and socially, especially in Latin America, to accept and be grateful. And really, we have n
  16. Deleting Things
    Jun 15, 2026 · original
    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, new life dynamics), or my mental health diagnosis, or all of the above. But I slowly started getting rid of things. I still struggle sometimes, but when I catch myself, I force myself to do it. Very few things are essential, I tell myself. Most things are replaceable. It's always good to lighten our loads, both physical and cognitive. And after the struggle, after the fight to convince myself, after throwing away, or deleting, there's always a sense of lightness. I feel some kind of relief. One l
  17. Memories, Again
    Jun 12, 2026 · original
    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 upload them directly from a web interface. Turns out that there are things more valuable for me than uploading from a web interface: Having everything together (and local) A known publishing process So, after reading a comment from Plat I decided to integrate the whole thing into this website. Now everything's a single integrated thing. You can see above a menu item that reads Memories . That's the new one. The nerd stuff To be able to serve images resposively (and responsibly), I installed Elevent
  18. Unlearning Social Media
    Jun 9, 2026 · original
    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, and they're starting to surface. Having a blog isn't a replacement for social media Sometimes I have this feeling that I need my blog posts to be seen, and I need it now . And I use the verb "seen" here intentionally, because that feeling is not about wanting to be read. I need to be seen . Not read. Seen. It's the dopamine hit of the like and the retweet. It has very little to do with being understood. Blogs are social, but they aren't social media. People interact with us through our writing, c
  19. The Comfort of Constraints
    Jun 4, 2026 · original
    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, for example. It's an isolated activity. Of course I still stream music. Or listen to my iPod Classic, but the act of listening to records is a distinct activity. You need to be intentional about it: selecting the record, dusting it, loading it onto the turntable, playing it, sitting down to listen (or dancing to it), flipping it over when the first side is over, and repeating. It's a constrained activity even from the start: your options are limited to what you have in your collection¹. I also st
  20. The Comments Rabbit Hole
    Jun 1, 2026 · original
    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, sticking out like a sore thumb and ignoring the dark/light mode setting Remove it completely The email form After trying the first of my options, it was a no-no. Not only did it look bad and out of place, but it broke the overall experience and pacing of the website. I'm going for a calm ambience, and this was a lot of things, but calm wasn't one of them. I thought for a while. Maybe instead of a comments section I should have only an email form. Comments on static websites are complicated. They r

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