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⛷ (at Bergstation Schmittenhöhe) https://www.instagram.com/p/BsoZxX5hpV_/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1ftm2bisiq3g8

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Snow sofá (at Bergstation Schmittenhöhe) https://www.instagram.com/p/BsoYwJfhX0r/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=gs7jwf64r44k

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❄️ (at Kaprun) https://www.instagram.com/p/BsoXujnh8VY/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1j8rxpihcebcx

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🏔 (at Zell am See) https://www.instagram.com/p/BsoXHJuh8La/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1qfkuohq48asn

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Classic Console Galore. Milking the nostalgia. 🕹 https://www.instagram.com/p/BsawffkBEdO/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1xk5ytp9numcx

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My Lists and Numbers from 2018

Same as the previous years, here's a bunch of lists and numbers from the things I did in 2018.

While writing this, I've realised that looking back at my own Twitter feed is a perfect way to recollect lots of the my year's highlights. And here I was thinking of using Twitter less, heh.

Places

I visited 5 cities in 4 countries. To get there and back, I traveled by train twice, and flew ten times.

London, England. First time visiting. It's uttely massive, so I felt like I didn't have the chance to see enough of it. What I did see was great.

Berlin, Germany.

Barcelona, Spain. Twice!

Cartagena and

Bogotá, Colombia. The food! <3.

Concerts

Steven Wilson @ AFAS, Amsterdam

Hamilton @ Victorian Palace Theater, London. This is one of this year's highlights. It was an incredible experience that I'd love to revisit.

Arcade Fire @ AHOY, Rotterdam

Motherwolf @ Melkweg, Amsterdam

CHVRCHES @ Tivoli, Utrecht

Nightwish @ Ziggo Dome, Amsterdam

Films

I love films. Going to the movies, watching films at home. Reading about them. Learning from them. This year, I decided to get a Cinevillepass, which basically allows me to watch films unlimitedly across 50+ movie theaters in The Netherlands for a monthly subscription. It's awesome, and it really made me go out to the movies more. I watched 25 films using the Cineville pass.

I also became a Pro member of Letterboxd, mostly to support the website and its service, as it has become my favourite place to geek out about films. And as it turns out, Pro members get a nice Stats page per year. Here's my 2018 Stats for Films:

In total, I watched 78 films — 63 of those were films I hadn't watched before, and the remaining 15 were rewatches. It amounted to 149 hours of movie-watching, or a bit more than 6 days.

I watched 5 of these films during a flight.

28 of these films I watched on Netflix.

My favourite film of the 2018 is Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse. I was anticipating it since I watched the first teaser halfway through the year and it absolutely blew my already-high expectations. It's perfect.

My runner up is Roma; as a fan of Alfonso Cuarón, this feels like his magnum opus. A technical masterpiece.

Games

This year I stumbled upon IGDB.com, which is trying to be a mix of IMDb + Letterboxd but for gaming. I decided to use it as a way to keep track of my games.

Here's the list of all the games I played and the games I finished in 2018.

From the moment I finished it, I had no doubt; my favourite game of 2018 is God Of War.

My favourite games of the 2018 are:

God Of War.

Marvel's Spider-Man

Celeste

Hollow Knight

Guacamelee 2

Music

I feel like I listened to so much music, so many different stuff that it's a bit tricky to recollect. These is what pops out as I write this, as my favourite music this year:

Celeste OST — Rena Laine

Happy However After — The Reign Of Kindo

Love Is Dead — CHVRCHES

The Now Now — Gorillaz

At this point, Love Is Dead is tied with The Now Now for my favourite album of 2018.

Work

This year I left my job of 4.4 years, and the first one I got in The Netherlands, to join a promising and exciting scale-up to continue working and growing as a Frontend Developer in Tiqets. I decided to work 36 hours (so a day off every 2 weeks) and it's being a bliss and I've learned a lot. Here's to more of that for 2019!

I also started development of and announced Reeddit 2. Hope to release it in early 2019.

Other

I walked on ice! When the canals in Amsterdam froze early in the year, we got to walk on them. It was incredible, and scary!

I bought a new Telecaster guitar which pushed me to get better at guitar playing and inspired me to learn more about music theory, specially. Hopefully I'll make it something out of it in 2019.

I visited Efteling, which is like a Dutch version of Disneyland, sort of. Was wonderful.

Here's to an even better 2019.

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Reeddit, six years old

6 years ago today, I gathered the courage to put Reeddit out there. To share it with other people. It was my first serious attempt at building a complete, frontend-only web-app.

Reeddit is basically an alternative way to browse reddit.com’s content. While I love to read and browse reddit.com, I never really liked their UI- specially on their mobile site, which was really cumbersome and ugly, at least back then.

Also, I wanted to become a proper web frontend developer! I had worked with Java for almost 4 years by then and sure, I had to work with HTML and CSS over the years, but it always felt like I was only scratching the surface, and JavaScript had always completely eluded me.

So this was, in my mind, the perfect way to address those things: I would design and build the reddit UI that I’d love to use, and by doing so, I would learn as much as I could about what frontend development really was, learn the proper foundation— JS included.

In the span of ~5 months, working a couple of hours every week after work and a bit more each weekend, I built a responsive, single-page web-app for just reading reddit. And by doing so, I had learnt so, so much about building things for the browser; how to tame the DOM (thanks to jQuery/Zepto!) and the Cascade, the Box Model, how to use Flexbox (so shiny and new back then!). And I had more or less built the alternative reddit client that I wanted.

But that was supposed to be it! I built it for me. So I could use it myself. I didn't consider publishing it on the web— not initially.

But after showing what I had done so far to a friend from work, he told me "you should put it out there! It's nice!", to which I said that wasn't in my plans because I didn't think it was good enough for people to use it and much less like it. And then he said "if you already find it useful or good for yourself, there will be others who will agree and use it as well".

And that made me realize: if there was a single person who finds Reeddit, uses it, likes it, and continues using it, that'd be a huge satisfaction for me. Enough of a reward.

So for a couple of days I worked on making Reeddit a bit more "presentable", and made sure it worked fine in all the browsers I had installed, which were desktop and mobile Safari, Chrome, Opera, and Firefox.

And finally, on November 20th, 2012, I shared it with the world; first with my Twitter and Facebook network (announcement tweet), and then on reddit itself (thread on r/webdev).

I considered also showing it to Hacker News, but decided not to because I thought it was definitely not HN-worthy and that it would be shat upon if I did share it there. So I didn't. Silly me.

The reception on twitter and reddit was pretty much what I expected and hoped; people gave me good feedback, suggestions, and compliments. It was great. It felt good to share what I had worked on and to see it being well-received. I figured the cycle was complete. That the project was over as it had served its original purpose.

But it was far from over.

Less than 2 months later, during the first week of January 2013, someone :) shared Reeddit on Hacker News, and I only found out about it because after waking up that morning, I saw I was getting a lot notifications from people making tweets about Reeddit! All because of the weird machine that is Hacker News top posts.

So, I learned that there's a bunch of twitter bots that automatically tweet when a HN post receives certain amount of votes; here's reeddit getting 50 votes and here's reeddit getting 100 votes. And I guess people that follows these bots started reacting to those tweets and checking and tweeting about Reeddit. Then HN's post reached the top 2 spot on the frontpage.

And then it quickly reached the top of HackerNews' frontpage. Gulp.

The buzz generated by HN and Twitter was picked up by some big websites:

Designmodo tweeted about Reeddit.

Venture Beat published an article and tweeted about Reeddit.

Mashable published a video article about Reddit — although the actual video doesn't seem to work anymore. Boo.

And best of all, Alexis Ohanian himself tweeted about Reeddit.

It was crazy.

Those were a very awesome couple of days. It made the whole thing so incredibly rewarding. Much more than it already was.

But it was not over.

Even after the online buzz faded out, I learned of another benefit from it; I started getting approached by a few companies that were interested on me joining them as a frontend developer. One of them was a big one, and I couldn't believe it. And even though none of those worked out –as I would have had to move to a city I didn't really want to– the fact there was interest in my profile as frontend developer gave me the confidence to persue that path completely, and apply for Frontend Dev jobs in Amsterdam, which is what I really wanted.

Very fittingly, while using Reeddit myself one day and browsing the Amsterdam subreddit, I stumbled upon a post from someone sharing a job opening in the city, to which I replied with interest. Long (sub)story short, it was the experience and knowledge that I got from building Reeddit, and the confidence that its reception got gave me, what ultimately resulted and me getting a great job and moving to Amsterdam.

Afterwards, I continuously used Reeddit as my code playground, trying new things while fixing its bugs or adding new features, experimenting with new frameworks or libraries, or just applying the new things I'd learned at work. I believe I learned Sass/SCSS by migrating Reeddit's styles to it.

Reeddit has also received some open-source contributions during these years, which has always made so happy, humble, and very thankful, and has inspired me to give back— even though I don't do it as much as I should.

But it's been a while since I've done any work on Reeddit. I still love the product, but I feel like I've moved on from the codebase.

For almost 2 years now, I haven't really improved Reeddit. It got an improvement some weeks ago via a Pull Request on GitHub (yay open source!) but that's been pretty much it since years.

And it's actually a great feeling to see something you haven't had to support for a long time is still working fine. Of course, that's partially also thanks to Reddit itself not breaking its public API and to a very stable GitHub Pages service. But it's ultimately a testament to how wonderful The Web as a platform really is. How things that haven't been touched for years are still perfectly usable and accessible. I love it and don't take it for granted.

And I will try to make sure that my now-6-year-old Reeddit web-app stays usable and accessible in the future; but it's time to officially feature-freeze Reeddit.

It's time to move on.

To Reeddit 2.

--

Footnotes:

The first improvement to Reeddit after releasing it was done just around 30 minutes after sharing it on reddit and getting the suggestion to show previews for image posts, in the comments view.

For some time at the beginning of the published codebase, all the JS code was wrapped in a single jQuery/Zepto $.ready() function.

Firefox had no support for Flexbox back then, so I had to do some sort of browser detection and use Floats instead. Yikes.

Reeddit's UI was inspired by HNMobile, now known as HackerWeb, by @cheeaun. When I used HNMobile for the first time on my iPhone 4S, I remember being blown away by the fact a web-app could look and feel so smooth and native.

Yes, I'm building a new version of Reeddit!

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Tower and Eye (at London, United Kingdom)

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My 2017: Lists and Numbers

At the end of the year, I like putting lists together and reviewing numbers for the things I managed to keep track of during the year. This is a fun way for me to look back at 2017 through the things I enjoy the most — music, films, concerts, traveling, and games!

Traveling

In 2017 I visited to 10 cities in 7 contries. To get to these cities and back, I traveled twice by train, 6 times by car, and 7 times by plane.

Brussels, Belgium

Liege, Belgium

Luxembourg, Luxembourg

Cologne, Germany

Dubrovnik, Croatia

New York City, USA

Chicago, USA

Iowa City, USA

Paris, France

Bogotá, Colombia

This year I finally visited New York City, which is, next to Tokyo, among the cities I've always wanted to visit the most. It was definitely the traveling highlight of the year for me.

Concerts

I attended 10 live shows, for 9 different artists, across 5 different cities in 3 countries.

Dream Theater — Tilburg

Between The Buried And Me — Amsterdam

Devin Townsend — Amsterdam

Haken — Amsterdam

Fatboy Slim — Amsterdam

Snarky Puppy — Eindhoven

The Shattered Fortress — Tilburg

La Yegros — Luxembourg

LCD Soundsystem — Amsterdam

Dream Theater — New York City

Dream Theater were the first and last live shows I attended during the year. Neat!

Music

I used Spotify almost exclusively to listen to music during 2017.

I listened for a total of 29699 minutes of music during the whole year, which is the same as 495 hours, or 20.6 days. I honestly feel surprised it was this little.

The artist I listened to the most was The Dear Hunter.

The song I listened to the most was People Who Eat Darkness by Steven Wilson.

Overall, my favourite album of the year was To The Bone by Steven Wilson, followed by Arcade Fire's Everything Now.

Films

According to my Film Diary in Letterboxd, which I tried to keep accurate through the whole year, I watched 57 films in 2017.

Out of those, 32 of them I watched at home, 15 on the cinema, and 9 while travelling (of which 4 were while on a plane).

Out of those, Blade Runner 2049 was my favourite film of the year, with Coco being a close second.

23 of these films I watched on Netflix.

I feel like I didn't watch as many films as I would have liked, so that's something I'll try to improve on next year. This year I also signed-up for Amazon Prime Video, so I hope it makes for more films to watch during next year.

Games

This year I played 31 games, and finished 13 of those.

22 of them were on PS4, 3 on Switch, 4 on Nintendo 2DS, 1 on SNES (Classic Mini), 1 on iOS, and 1 with emulation.

1 of them was a replay.

Finished:

Titan Souls — PS4

Final Fantasy XV — PS4

Journey — PS4

FF XV: A King's Tale — PS4

Inside — PS4

Kingdom Hearts 1.5 Final Mix — PS4

Kingdom Hearts 2.0 Final Mix — PS4

Monument Valley 2 — iOS

Unravel — PS4

Life Is Strange — PS4

Mario Kart 7 — Nintendo 2DS

Super Mario 3D Land — Nintendo 2DS

Super Mario Odyssey — Switch

Played

Doom — PS4

Yakuza 0 — PS4

Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age — PS4

Tearaway: Unfolded — PS4

Abzú — PS4

Super Mario Bros. 3 — NES Emulation

Yoshi's Island: Super Mario World 2 — SNES Classic Mini

Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep — PS4

Guacamelee — PS4, replay

Hyper Light Drifter — PS4

Sonic Mania — PS4

The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds — Nintendo 2DS

Mario And Luigi: Superstar Saga — Nintendo 2DS

Rocket League — PS4 + Switch

Downwell — PS4

Street Fighter V — PS4

Tricky Towers — PS4

Mario Kart 8 DX — Switch

Rocket League is easily the one game I played the most during the year.

And without a doubt Super Mario Odyssey is my favourite game of the year.

Highlights of 2017

Visiting the US was something I always wanted to do, and this year I finally got the chance to do it for the first time. It was a great experience altogether, specially NYC!

In preparation for visiting Japan (hopefully next year!) I started learning Japanese!

In Dubrovnik, I rode a water motor ski for the first time — it was pretty exciting. Also, stressful.

At work, I was promoted to Technical Lead for my Frontend development team.

The biggest one was getting engaged with my girlfriend Andrea. I proposed to her in the middle of the Brookly Bridge in New York - a culmination of personal goals coming together right there and then.

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The Bridge Town (at Charles Bridge)

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Something that I’ve learnt from my many years of struggling with depression is that it’s never really gone. Even at times when I feel good and healthy, I’m still always at risk of relapse. So far, I’ve experienced relapses every couple of years and one of the many reasons that happened is that I didn’t take my depression seriously enough. No one likes being mentally ill, so once depression doesn’t feel too present, I tend to ignore it. I quickly put myself under a lot of pressure, because everyone else does too, and since my depression isn’t acting up in that particular moment, I don’t feel like I have an excuse to take things easy. I feel like a liar and very disrespectful of other people’s hard work, so I push myself all the time to keep up with everyone. I don’t want to cause trouble because of something no one can see. While every single time seems still manageable to me, those situations keep stacking, until I can’t deal with the amount of stress anymore. Then I fall apart. This is a reminder to me and everyone else who’s in a similar situation: by accepting your depression and keeping it in mind, you’ll be able to live a healthier life in the long run. It’s difficult to miss out on certain things or to say “no” to friends because of something that isn’t an immediate problem. But every time you decide to take care of your needs, you will keep depression away a bit longer.

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:D

boss fight

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Image | This is from bluechair-webtoon.com!

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imagine you’re on a date with someone and it’s going really well and they drop a cheesy line like “if i could reach up and give you a star every time u made me smile, there would be none left” but neil degrasse tyson is sitting at the table next to you and explains to your date why they’re wrong in front of the whole damn restaurant

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The Pooch Selfie is a ball holder for your smart phone so that your dog stares at your phone while taking better selfies.

http://odditymall.com/pooch-selfie-phone-ball-holder

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Mi 2015

Como ya es costumbre, es momento de revisar y compartir el año que termina.

Siempre trato de llenar estos años de viajes y experiencias, y este año fue afortunadamente igual.

Además, fue un año de grandes decisiones y compromisos, y como siempre he tratado, un año de seguir aprendiendo.

En 2015 viajé a 7 ciudades en 5 países:

Roma, en Italia;

Ciudad del Vaticano;

Colonia, en Alemania;

Barcelona, en España; y

Bogotá,

Barranquilla, y

Cartagena, en Colombia.

Dentro de Holanda, viajé a 4 pueblos y/o ciudades:

Rotterdam,

Lisse,

Zaanse Schaans, y

IJmuiden.

Para llegar a todos estos sitios, usé:

10 aviones,

4 trenes,

4 buses, y

2 carros.

En esas ciudades, y en Amsterdam, vi a 8 artistas en vivo:

Cirque Du Soleil: Quidam,

Juanes,

Between The Buried And Me,

The Dear Hunter,

Steven Wilson,

CHVRCHES,

Foo Fighters, y

Nightwish.

Otras pequeñas pero notables cosas:

Vi y estuve bajo nieve por primera vez.

Escribí y publiqué mi primer post en Medium.

¡Conocí a Casey Crescenzo y el resto de The Dear Hunter!

Este año compré una DSLR (Nikon D3300), y he tratado de aprender más sobre fotografía. El progreso no ha sido ideal, pero igual estoy contento con lo que ya puedo lograr.

Basado en una de las metas que me propuse el año pasado, este año compré muchos libros… pero sólo leí unos pocos. Debo mejorar mi ritmo para el siguiente año.

Este año decidí aprender y usar ReactJS y se ha convertido en algo esencial en mi ‘front-end dev tool-belt’. Lancé The Likescape como la primera web-app que construí con React. Su ecosistema ha crecido increíblemente este año, y temo que no he logrado mantenerme al día, así que el año que viene trataré de invertir más tiempo en eso.

Reeddit cumplió 3 años desde que la lancé, así que dediqué un tiempo en actualizarla, y refrescar el codebase para que sea más fácil de mantener y mejorar en el futuro. Sigue siendo mi bebé.

Finalmente, lo más importante y notable de mi 2015 es sin duda ¡la compra de mi primer apartamento, con Andrea, en Amsterdam! Fue la gran meta que nos propusimos el año pasado, y después de meses de búsquedas, ofertas, contra-ofertas, y muchos papeleos, en Noviembre nos mudamos a nuestro nuevo hogar. El año que viene será para “ponerlo como lo queremos”. Aún me parece increíble estar en esta posición sólo a 2 años de haberme mudado a Amsterdam.

En general, anticipo a 2016 como el año para seguir visitando nuevas partes del mundo para mí, de aprender más y participar más en las comunidades de front-end web dev, de leer más libros y de seguir construyendo cosas en La Web.

Onward, forward and upward!