Category Archives: Side Projects

Road to Cadejo – Part 3 – Tech Stack

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This entry is part of 3 in the series Road to Cadejo

Initially, I was planning on creating a pure React Application, and I don’t exactly remember how (one of my friends/co-workers might have made a comment about it most likely) I ended considering two tools: Gatsby JS and Next JS.

I built a small prototype with both of them (oh the time I’ve spent on this project…) and decided to continue with Gatsby JS.

Gatsby Js powers Cadejo.dev!

I don’t want to go super technical in these posts, but I particularly liked how lightweight and flexible Gatsby is.

One of the other reasons behind my decision was a blog post written by Ali Spittel. I was able to take a look at her blog and at the source code that powered it.

I asked Ali for permission to use her blog repository as a base to create my own, and she gleefully gave me her seal of approval.

Seal of Approval - Home | Facebook
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Road to Cadejo – Part 2 – Taking Action

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This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Road to Cadejo

Once I was ready to start working (around June 2019), I made a couple of moves in parallel:

Hiring a Professional

I hired a graphic designer: Sarah Fischer. I knew for a fact that I wanted to put my money where my mouth was, and I…also knew for a fact that my design skills are not very good. Sarah is currently working on her own company, but I initially met her as my co-worker at Code Fellows.

One of the main ideas I wanted to convey with Cadejo was the fact that computer science is a beautiful subject. I remember looking at one of her designs and thinking “WOW that’s beautiful”. I decided to hire her to work on Cadejo as soon as she opened her own business.

This was the ad that made me fell in love with Sarah’s work.

If you pay attention to my website, I’m trying to open my articles with a beautiful picture that sets the tone for the journey.

Look at those beautiful ants

Ok…I know I know! I know it goes against practical advice to spend a considerable amount of money when you are just first starting your website. Even Ramit advices against it, however; I really wanted to convey the beautiful side of computer science with Cadejo, and having such a powerful brand from the start really ignited my spirits.

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Introducing – Cadejo.dev

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This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series Road to Cadejo
Cadejo.dev!!! =D

I’ve been introducing SEVERAL projects over the last few years, but I’m hoping this one will be a constant in my life for the foreseeable future: www.cadejo.dev

With Cadejo, I’m planning to create a platform where I can teach one of the things I love the most in life: Computer Science =D. If you are interested in my personal projects, I would really appreciate it if you subscribe to Cadejo’s Youtube channel.

You can read more “official” info about Cadejo on its about page. The rest of this blog post is going to be “behind the scenes” stories about Cadejo and its launch.

Road to Cadejo – Part 1 – First Step

You have no idea how happy it makes me to finally be able to talk about Cadejo. I’ve been consistently working on it for a little over a year now, but I’ve been slowly planning/dreaming about it for about 3-6 years.

Ever since I was in high school I had the feeling that I wasn’t going to be happy in life unless I spent some of my time teaching (amongst other things.) I used to build castles in the sky for quite a while until I decided it was time to stop dreaming and start doing. But, where to start?

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Let’s Play Remnants of Isolation : COMPLETED!

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I recently finished my first let’s play ever on Ursus Plays and I wanted to write a small post detailing what I learned in the process:

  1. Playing with audio settings was harder than expected. I had to adjust the mic vs game audio levels several times to be able to hear my voice over the gameplay. I think the last videos of the let’s play had a decent balance, but the first ones were TERRIBLE!
  2. At first, it was incredibly odd to hear my voice on the videos. I’m used to it now, but I still can’t get over the amount of accent I hear!. I could have sworn my English sounded closer to a native accent, but that’s not the case at all!
  3. Being able to talk while I play gets easier with time, but I think it’s funny how most of the things I talk about gravitate around describing my actions and combat strategies.
  4. I died (as in..I lost the game. I still can’t say “I died” in reference to a game without hearing my mom’s complaints about disliking that terminology) more than I’m used to in an RPG. I’m not sure if it’s the game’s fault or the fact that I was trying to play while speaking.
  5. I got a clearer sense of the kind of games that can be made with RPG Maker.

Overall: It was a lot of fun, and I’m happy to finally learn more about RPGs. I’ll let you know how this side-project continues when I finish my second game.

Oh yeah! I almost forgot. I made a WHOLE cent with my youtube channel. Fame and fortune..here we go!

Doki Games 1.0 is ready! [Archive]

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This post was originally published on 2012-02-20. Unfortunately, Doki Games was one of the projects I had to cancel in order to study in the US.

You may remember that I decided to start my own flash game portal in order to complement my flash games :)….well the site us up and running as we speak (and by speak I mean…you read). The portal’s name is Doki Games, and  I have a few thoughts that I want to share about the development of the site…let’s start!

About the games on Doki Games

Since the “conception” of the site I wanted to have quality over quantity,  I had to play hundreds of games to pick the +-50 that I have right now.  I  think that I forgot just how many bad flash games are out there :S. Just that experience will help me a lot when taking criticism for my own games :p.

Anyway, most of the games are from mochi media, that is mainly because the parser that I made only works with mochi games (right now…more sources to come). I also added some other games “by hand” that I know are great 🙂 like Bubble Tanks Tower  Defense  O__O I REALLY LOVE that GAME!.

I noticed that the update rate of the mochi streams is kind of slow…so I’ll be adding lot’s of “custom” games in the near future 🙂 and I’ll try to add some more sources to my parser too.

About the development process

I’m using Server Groove to host the portal, and I think that it’s the best hosting for my current needs 🙂 THE BEST. If anyone needs quality PHP web hosting I would recommend Server Groove.  Besides the hosting, I think that I managed to make the site very fast.

The website was done in less that a month, that in itself is a proof that I’m not the same developer…I might be a little better now. The small development time also could be explained by my launching approach….right now instead of launching a “complete” site, I’m just launching a minimum viable product.

The current Doki Games has just enough  features to be launched and NO MORE. It doesn’t even have game pagination…but it doesn’t need all that right now :). In a few weeks I’ll be launching Doki Games 1.1 with some features to improve this current version.

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