Myself - but younger

Hi my name is Fidel (fee-del)

I am a software developer born and based in London, with music and technology being major influences in my life, I created this website to entertain the masses, build your interest in the topics that I hold dear as well as improve my skills and share my expertise and opinions on various topics.

I want this to be a learning experience for everyone. This website is the successor to a relic of the internet where I started not really knowing anything about web development. Graduating from Wordpress site builders to writing html pages by the end of its lifetime.

That was 5 years ago, and now I am good bit older, hopefully a lot more wiser, but most importantly I have journey to share. I want this website - that was built from scratch and in my control - to give me platform to write once more and share what I've learn't and I thank you for stumbling across it. I hope you enjoy your stay.

Fidel signature

what's playing?
Me taking photo

Storytime with Fidel

Warning: there may be tangents

What this website means to me

Introduction

This website is a milestone for me, it is beyond: the technologies I used to make it, the code I wrote to make it a reality, all of the iterations that have happened up to this point (there has been way too many of those - so many rewrites…). It is a return to something I loved way back when - writing. So come with me on a journey where I explain how we got here, but to start we need to go back a few years…

Humble beginnings v1.0.0

The year is ~ 2017, I’m at university studying Physics - patiently waiting to start enjoying it - and in the meantime doing whatever I can to past the time. I managed to start two different Youtube channels, learn’t how to create videos for them. Which led to me getting into photography when I got a camera to film. I also even dabbled in a very short spell of trying to be Metro boomin’ (music production). This did not last long; to this day I haven’t fully recovered from all the buttons and dials on FL Studio and how each tutorial would just expect you to know why they moved the note a pixel to the left resulting in a banger - but I digress. This all culminated in what you see below a website that I put together using Wordpress.org to talk about music, computers and the games that I managed to play.

- A trip down memory lane - Wordpress in all of its glory.

Almost a whole year of what I liked to call Music Weekly followed - a series of posts where I would talk about the music I had listened to in the period between the writing. This was definitely the most popular offering on the site but also led to podcast with friends where we continued the discussions.

This didn’t last forever and unfortunately life did get in the way and the posts got fewer and further between until they ultimately ceased. I tend to be hard on myself thinking back but getting to almost a year of the series was major feat and this idea has served as the catalyst for getting anything new in the same vein released in the today.

The catalyst

In all the iterations that I have up until this point: two different types of dynamic CVs and figuring out how I wanted to write any kind of content going forward was a struggle. It was remembering how much I loved writing about music that spurred the current version of the website. I found myself trying to unearth the old website and all the old posts that it had on it to see what I did. This brought me to the Wayback machine, an amazing website that allows you to peer into the past of the internet where snapshots of site have hopefully been taken and stored. Luckily it captured some of the old relic that was https://fiddytt.com.

Peering back into what was a skeleton of the old site - images are missing in places but the general functionality that you saw in the video above was still there - allowed me to focus the scope of the new project.

  • I needed a simple way to manage content: towards the end of the wordpress site’s life, I was writing all the content for the website in EverNote and OneNote using html tags. This was not the best experience but was certainly better than actually using the site builder for any extended period of time.
  • Creating music posts took ages: I had to get all the assets and embeds for the different streaming services by google searching them - I attempted to write a desktop application that used python and web-scraping to automate this but it never got to primetime in my workflow.
  • The old site was simple in layout and elements - simple is good… We like simple and I should try and keep the new site as simple as possible so I can actually get it to the point of releasing it.

The outcome v2.0.0

I had only touched the surface of web development by the time the old website had reached end of life, but now I could really have some fun trying to solve the problems above. I can geek out for days about some of what I put into making this project a reality but I think the video below can at least give you the idea of how I solved the second point - something that spurred much of the development of this project up to its release.

- The new flow allows me to communicate directly with spotify to get all the information for a post name, name of artist, cover art you name it - all from a script kiddy terminal.

The flow above is a game changer, I keep the content close to the code and it gives me the power to create posts very quickly for any music I want to talk about. It made migrating all the older posts I found on the note taking apps a breeze and creating the post Bad Bunny - MONACO that marked my return to music writing couldn’t have been easier.

Conclusion

This is just the beginning for this new start that I have given myself, I want to document the progress of all my projects, code more cool shit and of course write about much more music and even with all I’ve learn’t I can still look back and thank younger Fidel for all his university and wordpress stresses. It was all worth it buddy.