It’s been more than a year since my last blog post, but despite the pandemic, I started to feel an itch for writing articles again.

I took the opportunity to do a migration from Metalsmith –the library I used to generate this static site– to Eleventy. The main reason is that Eleventy is more user-friendly when it comes to generate static web sites, whereas Metalsmith is more generic and it got to a point where maintenance (plugins becoming deprecated or obsolete, mainly) was a burden.

I surely want to write a tutorial about how to set up a website out of Markdown files with Eleventy, and maybe do some live streaming over Twitch about this, too. Which leads to… What I have been doing all this time?

I’m living in Barcelona and the COVID-19 pandemic has hit hard here. During the first months there was a severe lockdown here where we weren’t allowed to go out at all –not even for a solo walk. And to be honest, I stopped doing side projects because I felt I needed to disconnect from the computer after a full day of work.

However, once we were allowed to have short walks outside and get some sunshine, my mood and energy improved and I started to tinker again:

• I made a shmup game with Godot.
• I joined a game jam with my friend Carmen Ansio and we made a top-down puzzle game.
• I set up a Twitch channel and did some live coding. I streamed about game development with Godot, JavaScript, etc.
• During the winter holidays, I played with Rust and wrote a half-baked Chip-8 emulator. I might finish it, or maybe redo it completely in JavaScript, who knows.
• I wrote an article about how to get advantage of custom properties in CSS for Octuweb (a blog where every day in October a post about front-end development gets posted).

I’ve also done non-tech related things, which was definitely needed:

• I’ve been keeping up with my electric guitar lessons, but over video calls. I prefer in-person sessions, but the teacher has a really nice setup with multiple cameras, etc. so it’s still great and fun.
• I signed up for a storytelling course that I’ve just finished. I’m very happy I did this, it’s a creative outlet I had been neglecting and I’m happy with how much I improved over the last months. I’m planning to set up a separate web site to post my fiction writings.
• I played some D&D and I’m in love with it. I even ran a few online gaming sessions with friends.

It’s good to be back here, I’ll see you around.