Emmanuel Laborin – Just another blog

My first time joining a Game Jam

It’s the year 1999. All media is going crazy about the Y2K bug and people don’t seem to understand what’s happening to a point some believe their toaster will become aware and take over the world. I don’t remember if people said this kind of things sarcastically or not, but there were people actually believing it.

That year I was 13 years old and attended secondary school with a computers specialty. Back then not every family had a computer at home in Mexico so those big and old DOS PCs from the school lab were my first experience with a computer.

Part of the tools they taught us included Logo, the QuickBasic 4.5 language, and Dbase III plus, which was a visual database management system… in text mode. Actually, all the mentioned tools were command-line software. I immediately fell in love with QuickBasic: grabbed a copy on a floppy disk and made my parents buy a PC for me so I could write programs at home. But what really made a true impact in my life was a copy of a Mario game clone installed on the school PCs.

Simple two-way binding without a JavaScript framework

I love JavaScript. I hate JavaScript tooling and frameworks. I hate the fact that everything changes in a matter of months.

Don’t get me wrong. Big frameworks are needed, of course, to bring standardization and uniformity to big projects. I can’t imagine how more complex a project like Oxygen Builder would be if it was built without Angular or any other framework.

But I can’t stand when people use powerful frameworks to build minimal projects when all they needed is plain vanilla JavaScript.

Also, I don’t hate things. I dislike them.

My face turns red of dislike 🙂 when seeing a single-page personal site built with Next.js. But who am I to criticize? I’m the guy using a full-blown blogging suite and dev platform just to write an occasional paragraph.

Visual editing WordPress (status of)

In the WordPress visual site designing kingdom, Elementor is king. WP Bakery is the former evil dictator, now exiled, and Oxygen Builder is the promising knight, hero of heroes, and well known among people of culture but not widely accepted by the masses yet.

Although WordPress has been my main stack the last few years thanks to my involvement on Oxygen Builder and other cool WordPress-related stuff, more recently I’ve been spending most of my time on other unrelated stuff. I call them my secret evil projects, mostly mobile stuff and experiments.

But last month I was invited back to work with the Oxygen Builder team temporarily to help with some tasks related to their 4.0 release. This also fully brought me back to the WordPress scene and revived some of the old ideas I had for OxyPowerPack – I’m planning an update release for January / February with compatibility for Oxygen Builder 4.0 (there are big changes in O4 under the hood that requires a lot of changes in 3rd party plugins) and big new features and maybe splitting the product into several pieces by mid-March 2022.

Hello world!

I’ve tried writing a blog several times over… the past 10 years maybe? Each attempt ended in an abandoned site with just a hello world entry.

This time, I’m having a reminder to write at least once a month. Topic? Probably random unelaborated thoughts, but I’m sure I’ll be posting mostly weird pieces of code.

The stack for this blog is WordPress of course. But instead of dogfooding, I’m using a standard theme here as opposite to my other secret evil projects where I always use Oxygen Builder and OxyPowerPack.

The reason for using a plain theme here is that I didn’t want to spend time building a custom design. I don’t need to impress anyone with my (lack of?) design skills.

Writing soon…

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