Welcome!

My name is Armando Vasquez and I created this site as a personal blog and digital portfolio. I will update this site on a semi-regular basis, but as someone who is frequently-engaged in a variety of random projects, I don't have much time to maintain this site. My site is not dead, it's just sleepy. 🙂

Coding

Part of the reason I created this blog is because I explore so many different languages, frameworks and tools that I can't possibly employ them all in my personal projects. While I certainly will write about things related to my day job, I also intend to write exploratory pieces on things I may or may not ever utilize in a complete project. From regular 'ole JavaScript web dev to automating modeling tasks in parametric modeling software such as FreeCAD; if it's code-related and I'm interested in it, odds are good it will end up here in one of my blog posts.

Gaming

As an avid gamer, I have no shortage of thoughts on the gaming industry. However, I certainly don't consider myself a "pro", which is a little sad given the sheer amount of time I've spent playing video games. As such, I will never write about "being good" at a game. That's just not me. I'm the guy repeatedly getting blown to pieces and posting nonsense in all-chat. But I'm having fun while doing it.

What I will write about are more-technical pieces about game performance, setting up servers, or general observations about company and industry moves. While I lack in raw gaming skill, I make up for it in technical know-how. I've dabbled in Unity, Unreal and Godot and have years of experience with JavaScript, Python, C++ and more. At a more end-user level, I've set up a variety of different game servers both self-hosted and through paid providers and have gained a wide range of experience in networking architecture through my day job as a full stack web developer.

3D Modeling

Some of my personal projects are more than pure software projects. As such, I've been a user of difficult-to-use, but free modeling software to aid in designing some of my projects. On the more creative side of 3D modeling, I've used Blender for creating and animating organic character models. For projects that require mathematical precision (at least, more so than Blender can easily provide out-of-the-box), I use FreeCAD. Both Blender and FreeCAD are incredibly difficult to use coming from a place of no experience - as was the case for me. I intend to write a variety of guides to help others get through issues I had to faceplant my way through. Hopefully, with minimal faceplanting of their own.

Miscellaneous Projects

As mentioned before, I take on a lot of projects. These projects are quite varied; from stock-market analysis tools to botanical automation to game development. It's pretty much impossible for me to encapsulate all categories of my interests. With that said, all of these projects are very exciting to me and I will, no doubt, write about them at length.