Hola, amigos:

October is already smelling like cinnamon and advent prep. I know, it feels early, but this month has definitely shifted toward end-of-year vibes.

What I’ve Been Up To

This year I’m contributing to HTML Hell by Manuel Matuzović and will be featured on Day 13. Don’t miss it, I’ve cooked up something special for the occasion!

Very much inspired by Manuel and by Thomas Puppe with his cool 2024 advent calendar, I’m also preparing my own one, and helping some clients prep for holiday launches as well. Feels a bit like coding in Santa’s workshop.

A Personal Decision: Moving Away from Vercel

This month brought a moment of reflection. After seeing the selfie of Guillermo Rauch (Vercel CEO) with Netanyahu, I took time to evaluate my relationship with Vercel. I’ve decided to gradually migrate my projects elsewhere, like Netlify.

I can’t do it all at once. I have over 100 projects hosted with them (even if only 20 are still worth keeping). I’ll use the Christmas season to start moving domains and find new solutions for analytics and deployments, so recommendations are welcome!

Game Updates

• Dreamed Away, the beautiful solo-developed game I translated into Spanish, is now available on Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and PC. Massive respect to Nicolas Petton for this incredible achievement. It's an inspiring reminder that solo dev dreams are possible.

• As for The Runic Edda, my own game project, the goal to release a demo next year still stands. I’m starting to consider how to build a community around it soon—maybe a Discord, devlogs, or both.

Cool Links of the Month

🧰 Dev Tools & Generators

• CodeImage – Create beautiful code screenshots.

• Favicon Generator

• Gradient Generator

• CanInclude – Check valid HTML nesting for elements.

• npx unlighthouse --site <your-cool-page> – Run Lighthouse checks on all pages of a site.

🎨 Design Inspiration & Resources

• Godly Website – Get inspired by web designs that don’t look like WordPress.

• Pixelart icons

• Thiings – 3D icon assets.

🔥 Frameworks & Courses

• RippleJS – A blend of React and Svelte (not yet production-ready, but interesting!)

• Josh Comeau’s Whimsy Course – One of the most inspiring dev education courses out there. Super recommended.

Games I’m Playing

• Terraria – just started, surprisingly difficult.

• Slay the Spire – still so addictive.

Thanks for following along with my monthly dev and game dev adventures. Let me know what you’ve been building or playing this spooky season.

Hasta pronto,

Manuel