Newsletter #8 - Vikings, Portfolios & The Subtle Art of Nudging 🎮📦🧠
¡Hola, amigos!
I just got back from holidays, and let me tell you: ten days without the usual back-and-neck pain felt like discovering a secret cheat code for life.
No gym. No laptop. Just family, friends, and the radical luxury of doing nothing. Turns out “nothing” works better than any productivity hack out there.
And before/after that reset, I still managed to stir a few pots worth sharing.
🚀 What I’ve Been Building
A Portfolio hard to host.
I wrapped up a project for a client who needed a portfolio hosted on Ionos but built with Next.js. It was a challenge to make a non-PHP, non-MariaDB CMS setup work in that environment. In the end, we created a workflow using GitHub as the CMS and GitHub Actions for one-click deployments. Clean, fast, and hopefully future-proof. Check it out: zwillevonkiesel.deMy Viking Game Dream
The Runic Edda. A story set 100 years after Lindisfarne. Think Norse lore colliding with Anglo-Saxon grit, Midgard puzzles, and quiet exploration. No rush—but yes, the dream is a Steam demo next year. If you’re into game dev journeys, I’m sharing progress on Bluesky account.
A Pixel-Art Gem Goes Big
Remember the game I translated into Spanish? Dreamed Away. It’s now launching on Xbox and Nintendo Switch on Oct 23rd. Crafted almost entirely by Nicolas Petton—art, music, story. One of those rare, emotional indies. Wishlist it on Steam if you haven’t already.
📚 Articles Worth Your Coffee
Skew Protection in Web Development – Diego (Vercel) explains how they dodge client-server version mismatches. Nerdy? Yes. Useful? Absolutely.
Hyperproductivity & Burnout – My short take on how “working like a machine” usually ends with you… well, broken like one.
Nudges in UX: Real Examples – Subscriptions, movie theaters, restaurant menus. How design whispers into our decisions. (This one sparked after a deep convo with my favorite UX designer.)
🔮 What’s Next
Next weekend: a hackathon hosted by Diego. Expect experiments with the latest Vercel/v0 releases, and maybe—just maybe—some cool ways to make accessibility not just a checkbox, but a feature people feel.
Stay tuned.
Manuel