I just bought two domains. elregaldo.com for the portfolio, rega.run for hosting my side projects on subdomains. Both names are older than the code they point at.
I’d been hunting for a domain for a while. Everything good was taken. Then I checked elregaldo.com and it was just… there. Available. The second I saw it I knew. That’s mine. It wasn’t nostalgia. It felt like taking it back.
This isn’t a tech blog. I’m not here to teach you anything. I just want to leave a personal piece of me somewhere.
What El Regaldo was
El Regaldo was my YouTube channel. I was a kid messing around in Minecraft, bedrock edition, on a phone, playing on SMPs with friends.
1.38K subscribers. 26 videos. An ender-styled avatar with glowing cyan eyes and headphones, a banner that screamed “El Regaldo Minecraft.” Thumbnails a 16-year-old clearly sweated over: bold outlines, EASY in giant letters, episode numbers stamped in the corner. You can see the effort. That’s what gets me when I look back.
I don’t even remember where “El Regaldo” came from. It was a mouthful, so in-game people just clipped it to “rega,” faster to type mid-match. The name I kept isn’t the one I chose. It’s the one my friends sanded down for me.
What I actually loved wasn’t Minecraft. It was being the creator instead of the consumer. You’re not just watching. People are watching you. Building things with friends, filming skits with them. That flip, from consuming to making, is the thing I’ve never stopped chasing.
I mostly recorded when no one was home. The creator life was a private thing I did in an empty house. A girl from the SMP Discord once told me she had a crush on me, just from my voice. I was a kid with a mic, and that felt like proof the thing was real.
Some people had opinions about it.
“You played bedrock on a phone, that’s not real Minecraft.”
I did what I had, with what I had. I didn’t even get a PC until college started, in October 2021, months after the channel was already dead.
Why I quit
The decision was cold and practical. The math went like this: if I grind YouTube for four years and it doesn’t work, I’ve got nothing. If I grind code for four years, worst case I still have a job. So I dropped content creation and put everything into development.
The dream underneath it was simple: pay my own college fees.
I didn’t ghost the channel, though. The last upload is literally titled “Last Video!!!” That was my goodbye. I told them I was quitting. I closed it like a creator, not like someone who just lost interest. That matters to me more than I expected. The final video went up May 30, 2021. I was in 12th grade.
And the practical bet paid off. By year three of college I’d started taking small projects. The first money I ever made building was a gambling app. Client work, not mine. $371. I had to learn web3 from scratch to ship it. Tiny number now. At the time it felt enormous.
The name never actually left
Here’s the thing. “rega” is my PC username. It’s what I type into most things. The channel died, but the name just went quiet and kept living on my machine.
So when elregaldo.com showed up available, buying it wasn’t sentiment. It was reclaiming something that had never fully gone away.
rega.run came from the same instinct. I wanted something short, something I could type once and say out loud to anyone. I went for rega.sh first; taken. rega.run was free. I’ll take it: practical-rega naming his playground after motion.
But I have to be honest about the contradiction.
The videos are private now. There’s one plain reason: I work in an office, and I don’t want colleagues stumbling onto my past, what I made, what kind of videos they were. The kid with the mic doesn’t fit the engineer they’ve met.
So look at what I’ve actually done. I bought the name back, loud and proud, and locked the body in a drawer. I want the identity without the evidence. El Regaldo the brand, yes. El Regaldo the cringe-bright thumbnails and the 14-year-old voice, not where anyone can find it.
And yet here I am, writing this in public. Maybe the blog is the compromise. I get to tell the story on my terms, before someone else finds the footage and tells it on theirs.
The argument I keep having with a 17-year-old
12th-grade rega would not be happy seeing me do a job. Not at all.
But this is the deal life makes you: be practical, move fast, get stable. Then you’re allowed to go back for the thing you wanted. Passion isn’t cancelled. It’s just waiting in line behind stability.
The question I don’t have a clean answer to: does the line ever actually end?
So I made myself name the finish line. Stable enough is when one side project covers rent, covers food, and leaves at least five years of cash sitting in the bank. In numbers I tell myself $5 to $10M. That’s when I get to say I made it.
I still don’t have a reply for the 17-year-old. He’d want one, and I don’t have it yet.
But I know where it’s heading. The reason I quit was the money math. What if four years of this doesn’t pay off. So the only way to actually square it with him is to come back and do it with the math switched off. Restart, better than ever, and not once ask whether the gaming works out. Do it because the doing is the fun. Not for money.
That’s the whole arc, if I’m honest: I left because it might not pay. I’ll only really return when I no longer need it to.
Why now
Honestly? I was stuck in a loop. Job pressure, the grind, the head-down sameness of it. I needed to look up and look back, to take stock of what I’ve actually built so far. This post is me catching my breath.
And it’s a stepping stone. I’m not just keeping a name alive for sentiment. I’m starting to build El Regaldo as a brand. I’m even thinking of moving my primary inbox to an @elregaldo.com address. Not just point the domain somewhere. Live in it. Make the name the thing every message comes from. Fully absorb it.
The channel was version one. The portfolio, the domains, the inbox, this post. That’s me quietly laying the foundation for version two.