Nick Dominguez

Full Stack Design

2014-07-10T00:00:00-05:00

I’ve often had a hard time writing an appropriate description or title that describes what I do and my set of skills. A term that I have seen appear lately is “Full Stack Design”. I’ve wrestled with whether this term is legitimate but I’ve decided to use it. Here’s why.

I’ve been “doing web design” for a long time. In the early days designers had to handle the full spectrum of skills needed to build websites and applications. This might mean that you had take on the full responsibility of a variety of roles such as:

Branding
Information architecture
Wireframes
User interface design (PSDs, etc.)
Front end development (HTML, CSS, JS)

So you took on these responsibilities and you learned these disciplines while on the project. You excelled in some areas and struggled in others.

As the web has matured we’ve seen designers and developers jump into more dedicated roles. Larger web-centric companies might now have dedicated user experience designers and front end developers.

Yet there is still a set of designers out there who have all these skills together in one package. They are able to weave in and out of these disciplines and do it on a daily basis. You could call them “Full Stack Designers”.

Is this another catchy title or buzzword? It might be. But I believe the environment we’re currently working in warrants this title and we shouldn’t have an issue in using it.

Why I want to work for a debt collection company

2014-05-06T00:00:00-05:00

I was fresh out of high school when I started getting credit card offers. I was raised by a working single mother so money was always tight. I saw credit cards as a way to have some financial freedom and even security. Of course it didn’t take long for me to learn the hard way that what I perceived as freedom and security could quickly turn into something very different. I lacked the wisdom to know that I didn’t need more then 1 or 2 credit cards. I kept my balances high and told myself that I would pay them down quickly. Getting my balances down was within reach at first but soon my frustration turned into hopelessness.

Not long after the debt collection agencies started writing me letters and calling with nasty threats. I wanted to clear up my debt but there weren’t always clear choices or options offered when finding a solution. Most of the time it was what they were offering or no option at all. Without good advice and guidance I started sweeping everything under the rug. I ignored the calls and ripped up the letters instead of figuring out ways to pay. Over the years my credit score took a nose dive. I still haven’t recovered 100% to this day.

So, when I came across the opportunity to work for a debt collection company, contrary to what some might think, I was intrigued. After speaking to the founders and hearing more about their goals my curiosity turned to excitement. Their mission to reinvent and humanize debt collection resonated with me. Today I have the chance to play a small part in shaping the collection company that I would’ve liked to have dealt with when I was in debt. We’re building something fundamentally different than what has existed before and it’s exciting. Instead of nasty threats customers have clear options to settle, dispute, or pay. If cash is a problem easy and flexible payment plans are available to anyone who needs it. And for companies there is the chance to recover customers who might otherwise be deemed as lost.

What TrueAccord is building is badly needed. Consumer debt doesn’t seem to be slowing down and we need a new approach to an old problem that isn’t going away. If this idea resonates with you as well swing by and see what we’ve been up to.

Originally published on Medium

2013 front-end development workflow

2013-01-09T00:00:00-06:00

Although my front-end development work slowed down in 2012, I still managed to adopt alot of new tools and processes in my development work. Perhaps slowing down and working more in pure design, gave me the desire and breathing room to look around and see what was new. I feel like my workflow really changed dramatically this past year, enough where I’d like to take a couple of minutes and write these changes down and hopefully put something across your lap that you may or may had not seen before.

Sublime Text

I was an avid user of Coda since it was first launched, but a lack of updates initially brought me to investigate other options (Sublime Text). After Coda 2 was released it was clear to me that I was going to be using Sublime Text as my full time text editor. Frankly, I was a little disappointed with the upgrade to Coda and felt that this application had become slightly bloated and clunky. Also alot of the way Coda worked in general no longer fit the way I was starting to do front-end development. Now, I was looking for an IDE that was simpler, lighter but still really flexible. I looked at Espresso and Chocolat, both had alot of features I liked but I ultimately settled on using Sublime Text. This app may or may not be for every designer or front-end developer, but If you’re in the market to try a new editor I would highly recommend it.

Sass & Compass

After using Less for a handful of personal projects I decided to dip my toes into Sass and see what all the fuss was about. Jumping into Sass for most designers isn’t easy in my opinion, the documentation can be a little confusing or vague. I also think it takes more of a developer mind to grasp alot of what it can do. After some initial hurdles, I stuck with Sass and continued to use it for a few more personal projects and things started to click. From there I checked out Compass and knew I wasn’t ever going back to Less. Less is still a great pre-processor but in my opinion there are a lot of advantages Sass has over it. I don’t want to go into them here because there are a lot of other people that have written more extensively on this subject, but at the end of the day both are great options if you want to get into using a CSS pre-processor.

CodeKit

Although CodeKit does alot more than compile Sass, it has really made working with it a pleasure. I would highly recommend it if you’re going to use a CSS pre-processor in any of your projects. There are alot of other great futures too like live browser reloading, CSS minifying, and file compression as well.

Github & Git

Being more of a designer, version control was always honestly a little bit foreign to me . I had some exposure with Subversion and CVS working at previous companies and was familiar with a lot of the concepts of source control, but this past year I really decided to hunker down and learn Git. I really wanted to start versioning a lot of the HTML and CSS that I worked on so I wouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel every time I started a new project. This way I could continually improve the code that I worked on as well, so I started moving all my projects to Github.

Markdown

Markdown has been around awhile, but it is only recently that I’ve incorporated it into my workflow. I have mostly Jekyll to credit for this, but I’ve also found that Markdown is really superior in alot of ways to plain text. I’m now using it in alot of places like my Github gists, documentation files, and personal notes. I went ahead and purchased Byword on my Mac, iPad, iPhone,and iCloud. The syncing works really well and now pretty much wherever I am I can edit or work on any document I have saved. Mou is also a really nice free Markdown editor that has a really nice export and preview feature you should check out.

Static Site Generators

I think we all saw a lot of designers and developers ditch their CMS this past year in favor of using a static site generator. It’s hard not to understand why, there are lot of compelling reasons to use something like Jekyll mainly portability, easy maintenance and simplicity. After using Stacey (a great static site generator written in PHP) for about a year, I decided to check out Jekyll after reading praise after praise for it. I purchased Mijingo’s Jekyll screencast which helped me ease into using it and made it super simple to get something up and running that I could hack on.

Alfred

Alfred isn’t a pure front-end development tool, but I believe it has enough functionality in this space to warrant a mention. I get the feeling there are some people out there that think of Alfred as simply a file launcher, which isn’t the case. If you invest in the Powerpack, I think you’ll find alot of value in this piece of software. There are two critical features Alfred provides that has me glued to this app: clipboard history & snippets. It really combines several mac apps like Jumpcut and Textexpander into one place. Also, Alfred is actively developed which makes you feel great about purchasing it.

I’m really happy with my current workflow, I feel like it improved by leaps and bounds this past year and I’ll be on the lookout this new year for any piece of software, framework or technology that can make my development easier, faster, better. What did you stumble onto this past year that improved the way you work?

New year, new site

2013-01-06T00:00:00-06:00

There’s no better excuse then the start of a new year to redesign and relaunch your site. If you’ve visited this site at any time this past year you would’ve have found a simple homepage with a quick description of myself and some links to other online profiles. Which this iteration of my site served it’s purpose for what I wanted at the time I began to get the itch to rebuild this site properly, so with a couple of days off during the holidays I decided to check out what this Jekyll thing was all about and set out to build the site you see before you. I still have alot of work to do but happy enough now to “ship it” and I’ll continue to improve and refine the front end code and design shortly. This new year I’m also challenging myself to really commit more to writing (which I believe is a critical skill for all designers). Writing has always been hard for me and has never come natural or easy, but with some help and practice I hope to get better and maybe even provide something of value to the web which has given so much to me professionally. So thanks for visiting and taking the time to read this. Feel free to say hello in the comments.