My thoughts about things
Embracing Pain, Suffering, & Focus
Embrace the pain, let it fuel your growth. Running isn’t just about miles—it’s about pushing through discomfort, finding focus, and unlocking mental clarity. Discover why embracing the struggle can lead to breakthroughs, both on the road and in life.
Ivan the Crawler
This week I put together a website crawler using Python. There’s a couple variations of the script, it can be repurposed for just about anything that anyone needs to crawl/automate our public facing assets.
npm ERR! code 1
Sometimes you get so busy with work and life that you just keep on truckin and forget to do some basic housekeeping like update node js, npm, drink water, take a shower, pickup your kid from school, etc. Just kidding I do at least most of those things, but I do get distracted and let my dev environment kinda sit for a while as is. If it aint broke, dont fix it, right? right!? Well, not entirely.
Timeboxed
After years of aspiration, I finally have the opportunity to share that I am now a Certified Scrum Master (CSM) and Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO). My journey, supported by the outstanding leadership of SJVAPCD and the encouragement of my management team, has just begun. This post aims to share my insights into the world of Scrum, detailing key takeaways such as timeboxing, Scrum teams, trust, self-management, ceremonies, the importance of separation of concerns, empirical process, and more.
Kicking Off 2023 With Astro.Build
A new year and a new-ish look! A lot has happened in 2022 and Im sure a lot more will happen in 2023. Id rather be doing too much than nothing at all. In preparation for the new year and before a major change in my family takes place I decided to spend some time to clear away the cobwebs from this place and updating it just enough. Have a look through what Ive done and check out my plans for my illustration work at the end of this update.
Valley Web Design Illustration
Valley Web Design is a project that I started in hopes to encompass my skills under one umbrella. The overall goal was to offer and provide a set of services for small businesses while keeping the overhead as low as possible. Most typical things that would require to setup and run have been completed but life had other plans and the project is now on hold.
Otterdoit
A good friend of mind asked if I could come up with an identity for his personal project right before the start of 2022. The concept was pretty straightforward and the overall process took a little over a week to complete from concept to finalized identity system.
Premonition 2020
It has been well over a year since I put this piece together. Sometime before the chaos of 2020 began, around March in the States, I was feeling a little bit burnt out and decided to make a quick illustration as a bit of a creative outlet.
Write CSS custom properties with JavaScript
One of the key features that I focused on for my little Variable Design System was the ability to set CSS custom properties with JavaScript. At the moment this is done with a simple function that I will go over in this post. For future development I am working on setting up a more structured way to interact with the codebase using json to configure almost any and all part of global css variable list.
2021 AMD Rig
Hearing new noises coming from the main workhorse rig is never exciting. Lately the fans have been ramping up most of the time, it sputters on audio output whenever more than two applications are running, it's just tired. After 9 years of service, doing everything I asked of it and still hanging on, that's pretty damn impressive and one of the main reasons that I always suggest building your own work machine rather than buying something already put together.
Designing With Sass Modules
I don’t know if you’re ever struck with a great idea while you’re in the shower but it seems to happen to me more often than not these days. Between family life, work life, unpredictable issues with the house, kid getting sick, pets needing to go to the vet, babysitters falling ill, a whole myriad of priority problems arising seemingly out of the thin air; The free time that I used to have has shrunk down to maybe, possibly, a half hour a day.
Making Time
I don’t know if you’re ever struck with a great idea while you’re in the shower but it seems to happen to me more often than not these days. Between family life, work life, unpredictable issues with the house, kid getting sick, pets needing to go to the vet, babysitters falling ill, a whole myriad of priority problems arising seemingly out of the thin air; The free time that I used to have has shrunk down to maybe, possibly, a half hour a day.
Rest Easy Mr Dexter
To know and love a dog is to enrich your life beyond anything you can imagine. Dogs are a special breed of beings who are one part wolf, one part human, and inifinite parts filled with love and loyalty beyond measure.
Migrating from Gulp 3 to Gulp 4
So I was updating some of my projects and noticed that Gulp has a new stable version...
Copy to Clipboard
A few years ago I finally figured out that "mailto:" was deprecated by (almost) all browsers. This is embarassing because I should be on top of such things BUT in my defense I deal with that link-style all over the place. If you're supporting ancient browsers such as IE9 this is a none-issue but we live in the-almost year of 2020 and should correct old habits as they ripen.
Extend Background SASS Mixin
Have you ever run into this problem? The footer is designed beautifull
Happy New Date Range!
Sometimes you make a mistake. Sometimes you make that same mistake in more than one place. Sometimes you make an amateur mistake that you wish that you would have caught before starting a New Year selebration... You just simply made a mental error months ago that resulted in a week of appology and 15 miinutes of office hours fixing the one thing you were so sure that you had solved once and for all. Sometimes you just messed up and will forever remember that "sometimes".
Post Entry Process - Brief History
Back in the day, like way back when the iPhone gen 1 was announced and Lucky Strike cigarettes (It's Toasted) were still sold in the USA, I started to experiment with writing my thoughts and things online. Back then we had things like MySpace and Facebook where folks would write long updates in a short-format blog post... Remember Xanga? If you were a creative type there was also DeviantArt and eventually Flickr took to the scene as the proto-hipster place for photogs.
CSS Library
Over the past few years I have worked on a lot of projects at my job as both designer and front-end. Almost everything that I had a hand in was undoubtedly different but with every new product published one thing became clear: we needed a better way to unify and extend our corporate design and ui patterns. With this goal in mind I began to build custom CSS libraries for each new project. The idea behind this was to identify common ui patterns and establish a basic design "alphabet" which could be used to construct prototypes and ready-made products on the fly... before diving into design details and product requirements.
Seek and Deploy
The hardest part about getting off your ass and getting your stuff together to publish a personal project that you've been working on (on-and-off for months) has to be actually getting off your ass. What I mean by that is hard-stopping your comfortable loop of designing, developing, re-designing, changing the spec, re-designing, developing, adding completely justifiable overhead, re-designing, developing, on and on again hamster wheel that we are all way too comfortable to never get off of... until the whole thing, including us, is dead.
This Same Old Place in that New Thing
After over two years of silence I'm finally making my way back to this place. Speaking of this place, it's really not this place but that same ol' place in a new location... with a fresh new coat of paint... and upgraded parts under the hood... and really not at all that same ol' place.
A Simple Responsive Progress Tracker
About a week ago I posted a quick synopsis on the last major project that I've been working on, Check Before You Burn Registration. In that article I mentioned that I would put up a quick write up about a responsive progress tracker that I thought up while working on the registration. Overall I believe that this is a very simple and effective way to get the most out of a progress trackbar.
Check Before You Burn Registration
With the 2014-15 season right around the corner our agency pushed for a new and comprehensive amendment to improve the existing rule. This new push gave me a unique opportunity to work on something our agency hasn't done before: develop and launch a user friendly questionnaire/registration hybrid that is completely and honestly to and for the general public.
Happy Meal
Here's my amateur attempt at a coke, burger, and fries. So what you're looking at here are a bunch of shapes made and awkwardly slapped together with CSS.
Social Standards
It has been about a week since the Facebook-gate story broke out on the company engaging in a social science experiment, and as far as major news outlets are concerned we're all still up and arms about it.
Getting Hitched
Almost 9 years ago I met my soon to be wife. As any self-respecting designer I took it upon myself to take care of the entire identity of our wedding.
Socially Stale
In today's age of design trends it might appear silly to bash such a general layout choice but when every major service starts blending into one instead of visually competing the design scape becomes stale and in many cases even confusing.
Green Office Furnishings
A couple months ago I was approached to develop an identity system for a new and exciting business located in Fresno California.
Collecto
Last year we (NoTwelve) had the pleasure of working with one of the most easy going and highly driven new producer/DJ in the Central Valley.
Internet and (my) Reality
When the internet service was unexpectadly severed from my existence as I finally made it home from work I began to wonder how much impact that this incredibly simple tool had on my daily life.
Fifty-Nine Days
What do computer monitors, TV screens, mobile devices, banners, cupcakes, and enthusiasm have in common? All of them were boldly displayed at 59 Days of Code showcase last Saturday.
Shift - CSU Fresno Senior Portfolio Show
You're a university student. You’re going over various concepts that might or might not work for your upcoming finals. You’re forgetting about those extra things that you swore you would do a month ago and only now remembering about them. You’re hammering together a display to showcase several years of late nights, deadlines, and hard work. You’re about to graduate.
Welcome home, Pixelnaut.
Seven months ago we had a crazy idea. Perhaps it wasn’t as crazy of an idea as flying to the Moon and back, but we knew that from the feeling of the creative rush that we were experiencing… it wouldn’t be much different from conquering outer space.