Carlos CuéllarCarlos Cuéllar's personal site about design, technology and music.2024-03-15T22:11:19+00:00https://cuellar.fr/Carlos Cuéllarcarlos@cuellar.frYe Olde Blogroll2024-03-08T00:00:00+00:00https://cuellar.fr/blog/2024-03-08-ye-olde-blogroll/<p>Maybe you are tired of algorithms curating your news feed, or maybe you just wish it was 2004 again! Here you can find a humanly curated list of personal blogs, some of them popular, all of them regularly updated.</p>
Bye bye, TinyLetter (I still hate newsletters)2024-03-03T00:00:00+00:00https://cuellar.fr/blog/2024-03-03-bye-bye-tinyletter-i-still-hate-newsletters/<p><a href="https://www.theverge.com/24085737/tinyletter-mailchimp-shut-down-email-newsletters">The Verge on the recently discontinued TinyLetter newsletter service.</a> I remember playing with it years ago and, while I liked the minimalism, I never found a good use for it. The truth is that… I hate newsletters. My email inbox is already a hot mess, why would I want to add more clutter to it? If you want me to read your content, please give me an RSS feed, don’t force me to subscribe to another email list.</p>
Apple going to kneecap the web: PWAs2024-02-29T00:00:00+00:00https://cuellar.fr/blog/2024-02-29-apple-going-to-kneecap-the-web-pwas/Apple are going to kill PWAs. Sign the open letter, urgently, today.<p>Remember the days when Apple used to pitch itself as <em>David</em> in the David and Goliath stories? Well, the tables have turned. Apple, in a short number of days, are going to intentionally kill off PWA support.</p>
<p>This affects developers, businesses <em>and</em> users.</p>
<p>When any documentation eventually emerged, Apple not only intentionally confused readers as to the reasoning, but also lied, and not just a little lie, <a href="https://infrequently.org/2024/02/home-screen-advantage/#lies%2C-damned-lies%2C-and-%22still%2C-we-regret...%22">just outright lie</a>.</p>
<p>Alex Russell has an <a href="https://infrequently.org/2024/02/home-screen-advantage/">excellent long-form piece that explains the reality</a> of what’s going on. Take 20 minutes of your day and read it.</p>
<h2 id="do-two-things">Do two things</h2>
<p>There are two things you can do to help to <em>attempt</em> to fight back against Goliath Apple:</p>
<ol>
<li><a href="https://letter.open-web-advocacy.org/">Sign the open letter to Tim Cook</a></li>
<li>Blog (feel free to <a href="https://github.com/remy/remysharp.com/blob/main/public/blog/apple-trying-to-kneecap-the-web-pwas.md">copy this post</a> if you want), toot, bookface, linkitin, tweet (or ecks…?) - it doesn’t have to be long, but it has to be now.</li>
</ol>
<p>Safari has long held users back. If Apple succeed here, they’ll have delivered a heavy blow to the open web (and frankly, some decent choices for your phones).</p>
<p>Don’t just read this: <a href="https://letter.open-web-advocacy.org/"><strong>fight back</strong></a></p>
Default Apps 20242024-02-24T00:00:00+00:00https://cuellar.fr/blog/2024-02-24-default-apps-2024/Just a plain list of apps I currently use<p>I’m two or three months late to this <a href="https://defaults.rknight.me">blogging trend</a> I’ve seen in some of the blogs I follow, but here’s my list of current default apps! You’ll see that I use <a href="https://workflowy.com">Workflowy</a> for many different things, and I plan on writing soon a post about how I use this productivity app.</p>
<ul>
<li>📨 Mail Client: Gmail</li>
<li>📮 Mail Server: Google</li>
<li>📝 Notes: Workflowy</li>
<li>✅ To-Do: Workflowy</li>
<li>📷 Photo Shooting: iPhone 15</li>
<li>🎨 Photo Editing: Acorn</li>
<li>📆 Calendar: GCal</li>
<li>📁 Cloud File Storage: iCloud, Google Drive</li>
<li>📖 RSS: Miniflux + NetwNewsWire</li>
<li>🙍🏻♂️ Contacts: Google Contacts</li>
<li>🌐 Browser: Vivaldi</li>
<li>💬 Chat: WhatsApp, iMessage</li>
<li>🔖 Bookmarks: Workflowy</li>
<li>📑 Read It Later: Workflowy</li>
<li>📜 Word Processing: Google Docs</li>
<li>📈 Spreadsheets: Google Spreadsheets</li>
<li>📊 Presentations: Google Slides</li>
<li>🛒 Shopping Lists: Apple Reminders</li>
<li>🍴 Meal Planning: N/A</li>
<li>💰 Budgeting and Personal Finance: N/A</li>
<li>📰 News: Miniflux</li>
<li>🎵 Music: Plexamp</li>
<li>🎤 Podcasts: Pocket Casts</li>
<li>🔐 Password Management: Bitwarden</li>
<li>🧑💻 Code Editor: VSCode</li>
<li>✈️ VPN: PIA</li>
</ul>
Agile anti-patterns that can harm UX2024-01-03T00:00:00+00:00https://cuellar.fr/blog/2024-01-03-agile-anti-patterns-that-can-harm-ux/<blockquote>
<p>Agile was created by developers, for developers.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>Like an unwanted guest who never received a golden ticket to the magical Agile factory, design has never really got a look in.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This, 100%. I have experienced all these anti-patterns during my career but, as the author writes, there are several ways to mitigate them. This is a great short read.</p>
RSSHub: RSS-ify everything2023-12-15T00:00:00+00:00https://cuellar.fr/blog/2023-12-15-rsshub-rss-ify-everything/A feed aggregator capable of generating RSS from any website<p><a href="https://docs.rsshub.app">RSSHub</a> is a useful online tool that generates RSS feeds for websites that don’t have one. That allows me to follow pretty much anything from my news reader (<a href="https://netnewswire.com">NetNewsWire</a>) or my podcasts app (<a href="https://pocketcasts.com">Pocket Casts</a>).</p>
Marzipan2023-12-08T00:00:00+00:00https://cuellar.fr/blog/2023-12-08-marzipan/A music video created using AI stable diffusion.<p>This is the opening track of <a href="https://www.songsofjonathanwilson.com">Jonathan Wilson</a>’s album <a href="https://jonathanwilson.lnk.to/EatTheWormWE">Eat the Worm</a>, one of my favorites of 2023 and a recommendation of my good friend Eduard. The music video I’m sharing is amazing and it was created by Andrea Nakhla using AI stable diffusion.</p>
<div class="embed">
<iframe src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/jxzeOELVjkc" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</div>
Estate Sale2023-12-04T00:00:00+00:00https://cuellar.fr/blog/2023-12-04-estate-sale/New record hunting adventures in the Pacific Northwest!<p>Last week, in one of my multiple moments of procrastination, I found on Craigslist an ad about an estate sale (for non-Americans, a general sale of all the material belongings in a household). Not something I’d normally be interested in, but the highlight of this one was a vinyl record collection of a thousand albums, 60s and 70s classic rock, fair prices, all in mint condition. It sounded promising and it wasn’t too far from my home so… why not?</p>
<p>It’s Saturday morning, I got there a bit early and there were already 20 people in line, all prepared with those huge blue Ikea bags. They let us in, and they take us to the living room where there’s a dining table full of boxes, and a couple of bookcases with more records. There’s a guy wearing a baseball hat that looks like Larry David, he’s ruthless (at least as ruthless a hunting record collector can be) and he’s talking to another guy: I’ll look up here while you look there, and then we switch. There’s another younger guy with his girlfriend, he looks at every record and asks for her opinion (‘yes, no, maybe’). And then there’s me, behind all these people, looking depressed while they quickly get all the records I wanted (bye-bye, Badfinger’s original pressing).</p>
<p>After 10 minutes or so, Larry David was satisfied enough and I finally got to look at the boxes. I wasn’t expecting to find many treasures but somehow I did. And then it hit me. In one corner of the room, there was a vintage Pioneer turntable and a Sansui receiver, and in the other corner some old crutches and a walker. All the records were signed by the original owner, Bill. And there were also handwritten notes, tickets to concerts (Neil Young at Portland’s Civic Auditorium, January 1992)… I wasn’t just buying old records, I was taking memories of somebody else’s life.</p>
<p>I ended up taking home fifteen of Bill’s records. Wherever he is, I hope he knows I’ll take good care of them.</p>
The State of UX in 20242023-12-01T00:00:00+00:00https://cuellar.fr/blog/2023-12-01-the-state-of-ux-in-2024/<p>An accurate report of the state of User Experience Design in 2024, a convulse year with waves of layoffs, a job market saturated, and the strong irruption of AI in the tech industry.</p>
New site, who dis2023-10-02T00:00:00+00:00https://cuellar.fr/blog/2023-10-02-new-site-who-dis/Announcing the first significant update to this site since forever!<p><strong>November 2014.</strong> That was the last time I redesigned my personal website, and it was also when I migrated all the content <a href="https://cuellar.fr/blog/2014-11-05-migrating-to-jekyll/">from Textpattern to Jekyll</a>. At that time I was doing front-end professionally and I wanted to reflect that in my website. Oh, I was so proud of how clean and semantically correct the code was… And no JavaScript! And since I was using Sass variables, refreshing the look of the site was very easy, I just had to change a few lines of code to replace the fonts and colors.</p>
<p>But shortly after, 8 years ago, I stopped doing front-end at work. And I didn’t write here because, well, I didn’t have much time. I’m trying to change that now.</p>
<h3 id="a-personal-playground">A personal playground</h3>
<p>I don’t expect a lot of people to read this, and that’s totally ok. I’m building this new personal site because I want it to be my own digital playground, the place where I can experiment with things with no fear of breaking them, a corner where I can write short notes and share what I’m doing, or what music I’m liking lately. Some people call it a <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/03/1007716/digital-gardens-let-you-cultivate-your-own-little-bit-of-the-internet/">digital garden</a>, but you get the idea.</p>
<p>So I’m using this new domain, <a href="https://cuellar.fr">cuellar.fr</a>, because it’s shorter than the previous one and I’ve been wanting to use it for some time. And my full last name is <em>Cuéllar Francés</em>, so the .fr TLD is kind of perfect!</p>
<p>The content is similar, with a few new additions. I got rid of all the blog posts that didn’t seem relevant anymore, and I added a couple of new sections: <a href="https://cuellar.fr/music">Music</a>, where I share some mixes I’ve been uploading to Mixcloud, and <a href="https://cuellar.fr/now">Now</a>, which is just a short article where I share what I’m up to right now (I got the idea from <a href="https://nownownow.com/about">here</a>). I’d like to add a blogroll at some point, and the portfolio side is a work in progress that will probably take a few more months to complete.</p>
<h3 id="tools-i-used">Tools I used</h3>
<p>On the technology side, I’m still using <a href="https://jekyllrb.com/">Jekyll</a>. I considered other static site generators that are more modern and faster, like <a href="https://gohugo.io/">Hugo</a> or <a href="https://www.11ty.dev/">Eleventy</a>, but for the amount of content I share here Jekyll works just fine and I’m already familiar with how it works. There’s also the fact that it has native support for hosting in <a href="https://pages.github.com/">Github Pages</a> and I wanted to keep things simple, but that didn’t work exactly as I planned it.</p>
<p>So, my CSS skills were a bit rusty and I wanted to use this project as an opportunity to learn new things, but I also didn’t have a lot of time. That’s why I ended up using <a href="https://tailwindcss.com/">Tailwind</a>, a utility-first CSS framework that allowed me to build exactly what I wanted… without writing much CSS, honestly. If you are used to semantic CSS, you are going to be shocked (maybe horrified) the first time that you see a project built with Tailwind, and I’m aware that the approach is controversial, but for me it just worked. I was up to speed in a few hours, and the final CSS file is extremely light. What didn’t work is the hosting in Github Pages. Since Tailwind used <a href="https://postcss.org/">PostCSS</a>, the assets pipeline was broken and Github didn’t compile the styles out of the box and the workarounds I found online didn’t work for me. I ended up hosting in <a href="https://www.netlify.com/">Netlify</a>, which ended up being a better solution because it’s faster and more flexible than Github Pages.</p>
<p>So what’s next? I’m going to keep experimenting with some things. I’m not sure if comments are very useful in 2023 but I’m using a <a href="https://giscus.app/">system that connects them to Github Discussions</a>, which feels like the right place to store them. But of course, you need a Github account in order to leave a comment, so that’s not ideal. <a href="https://indieweb.org/Webmention">Webmentions</a> is the other technology I should try to implement, but it doesn’t seem very straightforward. I also found some people that used <a href="https://jan.wildeboer.net/2023/02/Jekyll-Mastodon-Comments/">Mastodon as their comment platform</a>… We’ll see. And I’ll keep fixing bugs and polishing things here and there. So if you find something, or if you just want to say hi, please feel free to <strong>leave a comment</strong> or <a href="mailto:carlos@cuellar.fr">send an email.</a></p>