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Stacie Arellano Posts

Gallery Night 2017Invite reads - Welcome to the Neighborhood with details.

Gallery Night 2017

Published by Stacie on May 4, 2017

a handful of colorful illustrated portraits on a table.Come and see my art!

Gallery Night is May 5th, a Madison wide celebration of art and galleries with dozens of participating venues.

Here is the Gallery Night map of participating galleries. (pdf)

The 100state arts organizer liked my work at the Print & Resist show and invited me to share my series of portraits at the 100State ‘Welcome to the Neighborhood‘ show:

I’m showing 30 of my portraits inspired by sktchy.com photos.

My work will remain up in the gallery until September 1st.

http://100state.com/100arts/

There will be a reception with refreshments and live music at 100state on Gallery night.

 

Here are the event details

https://100state.com/main-event-registration-page/?action=evrplusegister&event_id=35

Hope to see you swing by,

Stacie Arellano

Artist Statement

Stacie Arellano is a Madison based graphic novelist and illustrator. Her About Face portrait series was created with Prismacolor markers on Leuchtturm1917 paper and inspired by photos submitted to Sktchy.com.

In addition to ink and marker illustrations, Stacie also hand carves Linoprints and makes prints by hand. Her graphic novel series, Tribute Waters, features a similar blockprint aesthetic, while being fully digitally created.

View her graphic novel work at TributeWaters.com and read thoughts on technology and art at StacieArellano.com

Advice for new contractorsmobile office, tea, laptop and moleskine.

Advice for new contractors

Published by Stacie on February 21, 2017

Someone contacted me on LinkedIn a little while ago. They had recently been offered a contracting position at a marketing company I had once done some contract work for. They wanted to know about my experience working there.

I replied with some really basic things that new contractors/contractors in general should keep in mind. Then I realized that this information might serve more than just the smart person who reached out to me.

It never hurts to ask for more information. Either you get a response like mine, or a warning to avoid a place, or no response at all. It’s much nicer to know about possible gotchas in a new workplace ahead of time.

Here is my edited response:

Sure, I worked there briefly. The projects were interesting, the people were pretty positive, and the location is awesome.

(Parking was tough, bus or bike recommended)

If you have the opportunity to work there, I’d go for it.

Three caveats:

1) Get requirements in writing, including deadlines, check in weekly to make sure that those things have not changed.

2) Always use version control, even on projects you are the only one working on (crunch time may require more developers/helpers) You don’t want to fight CSS fires in the final hours of a project when you could have avoided it.

3) Make friends with the other developers, designers and PMs (Project Managers). I didn’t have much interaction with them, and feel like that made it more difficult for myself when things got stressful. I could have had more support.

That said, the project manager who set me up on my project left the company shortly after I started There was some communication hurdles around his transition, which caused me all sorts of issues.

It might be consulting 101 but in some places, like this marketing company, these three things were crucial. For me, starting out with 2 & 3 in mind would have made the biggest difference.

Good job on asking questions before accepting offers.

Feel free to use me as a knowledge contact if you need help in the future.

Stacie

Questions to ask new clients

Questions to ask new clients

Published by Stacie on November 22, 2016

While I don’t have many freelance clients currently, I’m often approached by friends/family and word of mouth contacts who want to know what X or Y might cost.

‘How much will a website cost me‘ is a very hard question to answer without more information. I’ve gathered a few questions that have come up, and some that have been forgotten in the past. Without some of these answers it’s impossible to properly predict:

  1. actual cost
  2. hours
  3. cultural fit with client

So, next time you get approached for side project work, consider using some of these questions to gather requirements.  It’sby no means an exhaustive list, but is a good start.

As an aside, if you’re looking for a nice solution for hour-tracking, time estimates, and invoices, check out Harvest App.

Basics

  • What is your budget?
  • When did you need to launch your site or app?
  • Do you already have a website or app, on what technology?
  • What functional requirements/or new features are you looking for?
  • Do you have a design/designer for the app or site?
  • Are there any color preferences or corporate branding that you want to use?
  • Will you require responsive design (adapts automatically to mobile devices)?
  • Is there anything that you would like to have included in the new website that you lack currently?

Company Genetics/Brand/Agenda

  • Who is your audience/What is the target demographic of your website visitors?
  • What differentiates your company from your competitors?
  • Are there any short-term or long-term corporate goals that need to be considered a redesign or new version update?
  • List a few competitors’ sites/apps that you’d consider benchmark companies?
  • What elements of these companies’ websites and/or their online activity would you like to model in your redesign?
  • What is the ultimate goal or metric of success for this product?

Contact info

  • Who is the main point of contact?
  • What phone number/email?
  • How often would you prefer to be updated?
  • Do you prefer to use basecamp/slack or any other collaborative site?
How to fix Xcode Crashes

How to fix Xcode Crashes

Published by Stacie on August 17, 2016

Tips for when your Xcode/beta crashes when you try to run.

TLDR: Xcode was crashing after building successfully but before running. Deleting my User Prefs fixed my error, but I’ve listed the steps I tried, and some other best practice options below.

My problem was this: Xcode 8 beta 2 arrived, and I went merrily on my way playing with all the great stuff we learned about at WWDC.

However, everytime I tried to build and run in the new Xcode beta 2 (and later in beta 3) I would get a successful build and then the whole program would crash without opening the simulator or deploying to a device.

I talked to a lot of people in my knowledge network, and did all sorts of searching on the error I was getting:

“Exception Type: EXC_CRASH (SIGABRT)
Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000
Exception Note: EXC_CORPSE_NOTIFY

Application Specific Information:
ProductBuildVersion: 8S162m
_ASSERTION FAILURE_ in /Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/IDESpriteKitSupport/IDESpriteKitSupport-11049/Foundation/Classes/Document/SKEditorDocument.m:201”

This was strange, because the app I was working on was not using SpriteKit at all.  It was from a tutorial from Paul Hudson from his new Practical iOS 10 book. (which is great so far, fyi)

To test that it wasn’t something I’d done in the project, I made a new blank one, cleverly named ‘dontcrash’, and tried to build and run it. Xcode crashed again.

I actually ended up with several blank apps: dontcrash2, dontcrash3 dontcrashXcodebeta3 and finally- CrashyApp, before I hit on the solution. 

Basic Options for Xcode Crashes

  1. Clean the project.
  2. Target a different simulator you haven’t tried with the project yet.
  3. Delete Derived Data directory
  4. Delete app, re-install.
  5. Delete User Preferences
    1. As mentioned here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/31354850/xcode-7-beta-3-crash-at-startup
    2. Note: Deleting the app and reinstalling does not remove the user preferences.
    3. This fixed my problem.Not sure how my prefs got confused in the first place.

Advanced options (I didn’t get this far)

  • Monitor memory usage in the Debug navigator
  • Inspect a few malloc generations in Instruments

 

DrupalCon 2016 – New Orleans

DrupalCon 2016 – New Orleans

Published by Stacie on June 2, 2016

Just returned from my first Drupalcon ever. It was held in fabulous New Orleans where the temps were in the 70s and 80s. Then I came back to Wisconsin where the temps are 40s and 50s, brrr.

Here is a quick run down on the tech I learned about, I have so much to dig into and learn!

Drupal 8:

Quick rundown for Drupal 8 -Kickstart Video

Drupal 8 Kickstart Session Video

 

Dev Ops -Workflow, Automation and Performance Tuning.

My overall takeaways:

We need to get our workflow in order, and we have so much to dive into for 8. Lots of the optimization will help our Drupal 7 installs as well.

I’d really like to get some common/version controlled local environments setup, like with Vagrant, so we can all be using the same local, and keep that under version control.

Standardize! Automate! Version!