DEV Community: Axel Martínez

Introducing Tlapalli: a VSCode Theme from yours truly

Axel Martínez — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 13:54:51 +0000

Hi there!

It's been a while since I posted anything here.

I want to let you know that I have been working (among other things and as a side quest as it could not have been otherwise...) in a VSCode theme that works for me really well and decided to share it with the world.

I just released v1.0.0 after a few iterations (you can see the CHANGELOG.md) and I hope (really hope) that I won't be touching it further that much and can focus on "actual coding projects".

This has been a lot of fun, and a lot of frustration... I didn't have time to document every step, but I want to create a few videos talking about this project as it had lots of things to learn.

Anyway, please be sure to give it a look and please also check this sweet landing page website I built for it with Nuxt 4, some sweat, blood and mostly tears:

Tlapalli - VSCode Theme | Tlapalli - VSCode Theme

Tlah-PAH-lee means color in Náhuatl. Monochromatic theme with colored variations. Inspired by minerals found in Mexico

tlapalli.ackzell.dev

You can find links to the theme there ^ or go directly to:

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ackzell.tlapalli
https://open-vsx.org/extension/ackzell/tlapalli
https://github.com/ackzell/tlapalli

Amoxtli Vue

Axel Martínez — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 22:29:54 +0000

This is a submission for the DEV's Worldwide Show and Tell Challenge Presented by Mux

What I Built

Amoxtli Vue is a multimedia, interactive platform for learning Vue.js. Either at your own pace or through guided live workshops.

STILL A WORK IN PROGRESS

My Pitch Video

Demo

https://amoxtli-vue.netlify.app/

Repos:
https://github.com/ackzell/amoxtli-vue
https://github.com/ackzell/yehyecoa-vue

The Story Behind It

This is a spiritual successor to https://notes-on-vue.ackzell.dev

I built this because while there are many great Vue courses and talented instructors out there, I noticed the hands-on portion could be better. Students typically have to set up their own environments and manage their notes separately, which adds unnecessary friction.

What makes Amoxtli Vue special is the integrated playground called yehyecoa-vue. When you're learning solo, you can experiment with lesson code and track your changes with built-in version control. But during live workshops, this same playground transforms into a real-time mirror of what the instructor is coding and you can save everything locally as you go.

Technical Highlights

This is a modified TutorialKit instance which embeds an also modified VueJS REPL component.

This has much more going on than could possibly seem at first glance: Netlify functions to protect the static content behind a login, server events, some Dexie magic, and so on.

Use of Mux (Additional Prize Category Participants Only)

I don't think this project counts as-presented, but I'd consider adding the auto-dubbing and auto-captioning capabilities of Mux, I honestly only considered it as a platform to hosting the videos but didn't know about the other features.

Looking back at 2 years

Axel Martínez — Sun, 21 May 2023 18:58:01 +0000

I've been meaning to write down my thoughts for a couple weeks now. Maybe even more.

The thing is, I am about to start a new chapter in my life. Fortunately this seems to be something that will help me grow professionally and to me that is an aspect I care a lot about.

In November of 2020 I was on my 6th year at a "nearshore" consultancy company who had ben treating me really well and more specifically working for a client company that I really enjoyed. By this time I was contacted by a foreign company because of the content I was putting out there about Meteor + Vue. I really enjoyed working with those two technologies and sharing my experience in a step by step how to video series seemed logical to me.

I posted a video series with that in mind and received an email inviting me to work on a "product company", more specifically a startup. This was going to be my first experience without having a team of dedicated profiles for each task (UX, QA, Product, Backend... etc) and it seemed like a good challenge to take on.

I had heard from just being in the industry long enough that the case with startups was more of a "wear many hats" and "be prepared to have a ton of work all the time". To which I felt ready and also willing to go into. Sadly I must admit that it was really hard to keep up the pace at times.

During my time there the pandemic was still going strong and the world overall felt like this chaotic, unstable, uncertain place. Some stuff happened at home starting with the fact that my wife had just recovered from Covid-19 before I started the new job and then including events like the house being robbed TWICE, our dog that was 13yo passed away and some security incidents in the neighborhood. The kids and myself being sick from Covid-19 also happened during this time and I wasn't precisely in the headspace to be productive and contribute my very best to the job. This is something that I will forever and ever be grateful with the people in charge, who gave me my time and space to recover, to try and get some rest and they were providing an understanding and safe environment when all of these things happened.

I could not be more grateful for that and for what it now feels like a glimpse, I could actually do my best. I was pumping out new features and cleaning up the UI like as well as improving the user interactions, I was making the app look cohesive and more professional. I was "doing what I know best". Although this felt like a very short period like I mentioned.

The time before that I had a bit of a harder time concentrating, making things work and learning or coming up with solutions wasn't as fluid as in the past (previous jobs). This became sort of a vicious cycle in a way because I was keeping myself from doing better, and the results weren't what I wanted to have as my output at all. It was frustrating and then I couldn't focus and do a better job because I had this constant feeling of not doing well enough.

When things started to look better on my end, it was probably a little late. I didn't contribute to other aspects of the company like reaching out to people to tell them about our products. Or make some kind of content to showcase all of our hard work. Looking back I think this could have helped a little bit. But as I mentioned, my headspace was not really there (lame excuse, perhaps). Time was not enough for me to do anything but my main tasks and to be honest energy wasn't enough either.

I fortunately had some colleagues that were awesome at their job, and did very inspiring work to not only learn on the go, but also came up with great solutions to problems and to improve the main offering of the company all the time. It really became a really nicely built product and it was just great to be able to work with them to bring it to life.

It was a really tough two years for my family and myself. I will not lie. Most of the time it felt like we were just fighting one obstacle after another and along all that I never really felt like I was doing "a good job". BUT. Looking back I can now see "we survived" and life continued, we did have the moral support from the extended family and were never left alone really. I already mentioned that the company was very supportive and this definitely helped us come through all of it.

I think I needed to give closure to this and write it down to do so, because I am ready for a new beginning. I want to "go back" to being good at my job and feeling like I can tackle technical challenges as well as provide and care for my family in a more balanced way. I am ready to be better prepared for financial emergencies and to plan (and act) for the future.

I will certainly make mistakes, but I am also ready to learn from them. The path ahead can be scary at times and having a family brings so many variables into one's life that makes it even harder to not feel like "something will go wrong" one way or another, but learning how to deal with these things is also something I want to be able to say "I did it".

🤔 Podcast feeds out of date?

Axel Martínez — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 22:38:48 +0000

I noticed some of the podcasts I follow (my own included) are not including updates since Nov '22.

Is anyone else experiencing the same?

Does anybody know why this is? Sorry if it was already clarified elsewhere 😅

My own journey (Part 5)

Axel Martínez — Sun, 27 Sep 2020 06:06:41 +0000

First project on the new job

It wasn't actually that bad, with the few things I already knew about AngularJS and my super hungry brain I made it work somehow. Since the family wasn't with me, I spent my evenings studying real hard, taking notes and reading a lot.

I remember not watching many videos, I was mostly reading now that I think about it. At the time I was also super interested in Meteor and this is one of the first things I kind of wanted to document in a video format. There is only an installation video on Windows I got to record but since I didn't have an editor software or anything, I only did that and left it behind.

Wait, this doesn't look right

After I finished my participation on that project I got another one (this is just how nearshore works) and things were interesting in there: I was still using AngularJS and kept learning a lot about it. I did notice though that some things weren't being done "according to what I had read" both on the actual framework side of things as well as how we were calling things "done".

So I voiced this and luckily (we'll see about that) I was heard. Maybe not a ton of things changed on that particular project, but they would in the following one.

A good dev must surely be a good leader

Another project was coming our way and I was picked to lead it. Of course! I had shown that I could take work seriously and work hard to get things done. Since I was studying all the time I was able to learn a ton of things and actively participated on my projects not only on my directly assigned tasks but suggesting ideas and trying to make a difference.

Someone noticed this and decided I would be a good fit to lead this new project. In retrospective it was a rather simple one, but the gotcha here is that the entire team was inexperienced and you can probably guess what happened 😁.

Disaster struck, and I did terrible. Some more experienced devs had to be brought in to save (or try anyways) the mess we had and the project was delivered on time, according to requirements for the most part but leaving a truckload of lessons learned for me at least.

That was only the first year at the company

Something interesting that happened was that I was brought in into another AngularJS project (my experience has been to always use at least this as the primary technology and I am pretty glad because that way I could get better at it) and I was starting to learn other things in there, included TypeScript and a very neatly organized way to develop software. That client account was really good.

Sadly, they had to end the project and there I was for the first time without a new client assignment. So what did I do? Keep studying of course!

This only lasted a couple days because now I was brought in yet another project with AngularJS (lucky me, again) but with another approach at building the product, and this one I liked because it also felt organized, but the team was smaller and I had more coworkers who were also contractors from the company.

Sometimes you fail, sometimes you do great

Later, when that project finished I was now interviewed to be assigned to a new client. I failed that interview in a rather interesting way: I was literally told that my answers to the theoretical questions were so on point that not a whole lot of people had answered them like I did. I felt pretty good about that to be honest.

But then came the live coding part, where they would present a problem and I had to guide them through my solution. They wanted me to ask questions and to get a feel for how I would do as part of their team. That's where I failed. I did not understand the problem that well, but didn't ask the right questions either. I was distracted with the environment they had set up to do the interview and trying to wrap my head around the problem and trying to make sense of it but without communicating it. So they passed on me.

That didn't feel good as you can probably imagine. I was feeling real bad when another client interview was setup. So I took that one and surprise! there wasn't a live coding challenge involved. 😁😁😁

What's more, this was a new company but my former team, the one I was originally hired to work with, was involved. They were part of this new client that was starting to do business with my employer. Someone I didn't know interviewed me though, but we had a great chat and I never felt like I was being put to the test, or that he was trying to prove himself smarter than me. I loved that interview.

I greeted the people I knew from before, and I was so ready to work with them again! They trusted me and I trusted them, plus I was better at a lot of things now and was able to contribute in more meaningful ways now that we were back together, that felt really awesome. So we can say that in a way, failing that one previous interview opened the way to be able to succeed in getting back to my old team where I actually felt comfortable.

My own journey (Part 4)

Axel Martínez — Sat, 08 Aug 2020 14:49:26 +0000

But I always wanted to do something different...

And this is the reason why I kept studying on the evenings and on weekends.

I had a lot of interest in Web Development since my school days and mainly because of all those Flash sites I mentioned already.

A couple friends and I worked on an AngularJS application for a school project and I enjoyed it a lot. Learning about the existence of AngularJS was a big deal to me.

The automatic (two way) binding, the structure it gave to the code and the potential it had at the time was something I was looking forward to dive more into and to investigate further.

So yeah, AX by day and AngularJS / Meteor / MongoDB / pretty much anything Web Dev related by night.

And then one day...

I got an email or something from an open position because I left my notifications turned on for a job board I was subscribed to.

I vaguely remember at this point the details, but the job had to do with web dev and that was good enough for me. So I applied and got an answer from the recruiter saying that they'd move my application to a sibling company that required English speaking personnel.

Enter iTexico

So we got on the phone a few days later, and had a really smooth screening interview, where my English was put to test and some other questions that I honestly don't remember were asked too.

For the next call it was my knowledge (mostly academic if you will) on AngularJS that kept me in the process I would say. I was interviewed over the phone and lucky for me the idea was to hire someone who knew the technology, about software development in general and was able to speak English.

At this point I wasn't quite sure how the entire Nearshore business worked to tell the truth, and I just kept interviewing out of curiosity.

The next call was via Skype, with the client for the company that I was applying for. But this one didn't go so well. I think they were expecting someone with more experience in the field and who knew their JS very well.

Lucky for me, there was another client of theirs who would like to talk to me, because they had a similar position open.

Are you sure you want to change paths?

That was one of his questions, my interviewer wanted to make sure I really wanted to change my ERP path and experience for something as different as Web Dev could be.

I said yes, and I will be forever grateful to him because he is the reason I was able to push my life forward in a lot of ways. I have no idea where I would be at this point in my career if it wasn't for having been given the benefit of the doubt.

Welcome aboard!

I enjoyed my previous job a lot, but I always wanted to work on other kinds of projects and this seemed like a good place to work at.

My wife and I visited the offices to see what it was like, and also got to talk to one of the co-founders of the company. It all seemed like a good decision for us.

The only catch

It was in a different city, a few hours from where we lived and I definitely could not take the whole family with me from the get go.

So, I spent the first year at the new company going back to visit the family every weekend with the exception of one or two.

My typeof Radio: Un podcast de Desarrollo Web en Español

Axel Martínez — Sun, 02 Aug 2020 01:08:22 +0000

¡Hola!

Mi amigo Arturo Mosqueda y yo estamos empezando a aventurarnos en esto del podcasting con uno propio, que nombramos "My typeof Radio: Un podcast de Desarrollo Web en Español".

Somos devs de México y nos gusta mucho platicar de varios temas relacionados con desarrollo web y queremos compartirlo con otras personas.

Tenemos planeados varios temas y tipos de episodios (😉😉).

Puedes encontrarnos en Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher,Overcast, Castro, Castbox o Deezer.

Si ninguno te sirve, también tenemos un RSS feed: https://feeds.buzzsprout.com/1190693.rss

Estamos echándole muchas ganas para preparar los temas y producir el contenido. ¡Ojalá que nos puedas acompañar!😁

The history of writing a Nuxt + Firebase app

Axel Martínez — Fri, 31 Jul 2020 04:44:50 +0000

Hello everyone!

I recorded myself talking about an app I wrote somewhat recently. This was a lot of fun to build (even if that fact doesn't quite come across on the video 😅).

I already shared on my YouTube channel a couple other videos related to this app.

This time we go through the commits and I tell you what was the situation of the app at that point in time.

It was an interesting exercise for me to retrace my steps in that way and also talk about the project overall and how it went.

Thanks a lot for watching and I hope you get a chance to catch more of my videos!

My own journey (Part 3)

Axel Martínez — Sun, 28 Jun 2020 04:18:34 +0000

The last days of school

The last two semesters were really draining to be honest. I had put a lot of effort to keep my grades healthy, and was doing my best to contribute meaningful work on my internship.

I was also expecting my second baby and my life felt like it was upside down at times 😅. But I have to recognize that life has treated me well even if I had my struggles and I am so very grateful for it. I've been surrounded of amazing and uplifting family and friends who have pushed me forward ever since I was a kid. I love my family from when I was a kid 😁.

I mentioned before I worked with someone who eventually became my friend. He contacted me on the phone while I was on my last semester at school and asked what I wanted to do after I finished.

My first official job

So I said I didn't really have a plan. Microsoft would have come to a recruiting session to one of the Campus months prior, but I didn't quite pass the initial test; also another company that looked awesome and that I contacted during a job fair organized by the school had reached out but I didn't get in either.

So, back to the phone call: my friend asked me if I was interested in interviewing with the company he was working with because they were looking for new hires.

I accepted, got hired and 2 weeks before I graduated I had a job!!!

This was a huge relief to my newly created family and we had the opportunity to have a not-so-bad start. Life was weird for me because I felt like I went from "one of the children of the household" to "the person responsible to feed other people" all of a sudden, but there was I.

The job was really good actually. The perks were good, the pay was more than I originally asked for and I was learning a ton of things about something called Microsoft Dynamics AX at the time. So learning X++ and a little bit of .NET with C# was part of my daily routine. I would also help here and there with IT support, but there was a team dedicated to that and I was part of a development focused team.

This was a really nice place to be, actually. And I am very grateful to have had that opportunity to work and learn and especially meeting more friends that I still talk to and joke about our adventures with the AX migration and the rest of the people in the office. Good times!

Meteor + Vue video series

Axel Martínez — Thu, 25 Jun 2020 14:52:49 +0000

Hello everyone, I finally bit the bullet and will be publishing a Meteor + Vue video series. Something I have wanted to make since forever ago.

It won't be perfect but rest assured I will do everything in my power to make it the best quality I can.

My idea is to integrate Vuetify and do a super simple app, but with enough info to get you going.

I also want to get to a point where we deploy it on a free hosting most likely (I really wish we had a Netlify-like plan on Galaxy like in the early days of Meteor 😝).

We'll see how much time I am able to put in and how fast I can publish new content.

In the meantime, here is the first video:

I hope you enjoy it and as always open for suggestions and feedback.

Have a great day!

Using GitHub to manage your project

Axel Martínez — Fri, 12 Jun 2020 14:43:28 +0000

Hello!

I've been working recently on a side project and this time I focused a little bit more on the management of it.

I attempt to leverage GitHub not only as a remote for my code, but also the place where I keep track of the progress and the place where I dump my ideas for the things I want to add to the project.

A description of how I go about these things and a tour of the project can be found in the following video.

Cheers!

Notes on Vue

Axel Martínez — Sun, 10 May 2020 18:43:10 +0000

Hello everyone, I hope you are safe and hanging in there.

I wanted to share another thing I am working on, this time is a VuePress site that I am putting together with different notes and concepts I want to be able to explain when I get to start imparting courses 😛. I figured that if I was already taking the notes and creating kind of a documentation for myself it would perhaps help someone else:

https://notes-on-vue.netlify.app/

I recently heard that it doesn't matter if the content one is covering has already been written about, there are still people out there who might benefit from what the content creator has to say and the way it is presented. So here we are.

It is a WIP (and to me seems like will forever be) so there are a lot of things I haven't written, but I kind of have an idea of what I want to do with those, so in the future those will be also covered.

This was as good a time to release what I already have as any. Maybe I can polish it with some feedback from the community too!

I will be very pleased to have you read through and see you there!