Treering Yearbook Heroes is a monthly feature focusing on yearbook tips and tricks.
Meet the man who created Treering’s new color picker. Engineer Nick Pasto grew up among cherry, walnut, and apple growers in Stockton, CA. In addition to his swoon-worthy homemade lasagna (yes, Pasto makes pasta) inspired by his time studying cuisine with Italian grandmas, Nick led the teams which developed many of Treering’s other editor favorites:
- Recognition ads
- Spell check
- Marking pages “done”
- Polls
- Language support for Arabic, Chinese, and Hebrew characters
- Alignment tools
- Package tracking improvements
(This is not an exhaustive list by any means.)
How did you move from the classroom to the backroom?
Back then, Treering’s design software was Flash-based, and that was going out. I saw a message that they were looking for developers to change it to HTML5. The opportunity spoke to me because there was a lot of overlap between my professional career and personal interests.
While earning my art education degree, I worked as a graphic designer and animator for my college. I’ve also been an indie game developer.
[Editor’s note: Nick made Super Chibi Knight with his eight-year-old daughter who served as the voice actor for the main character; she’s now 18.]
How does your background as a classroom teacher make you a better developer?
So many people who work at Treering are currently making yearbooks at their kids’ schools. I’m one of the only engineers who’s served as an adviser. It helps to have real-world experience with our product because I can see it from both sides.
The leadership at Treering looks for a breadth of experience to remain customer-focused and make the best product. The strength of our team is our diversity–our experiences help with ingenuity and problem-solving.
We build in a ton of automation and templates to make things less intimidating. You don’t have to know Photoshop, Illustrator, or InDesign to do desktop publishing for your yearbook design. Treering’s software is the bridge.
If you could tell our editors anything, what would it be?
The most impressive part of Treering as a user is the customer service.
Like many first-time advisers, I missed our deadline. The pressure of making sure kids had their books before summer was stressful. As a new teacher, it was too much on my plate.
I picked up the phone and just communicated with the CAT team and they helped me work it out by using my fundraiser to pay for expedited shipping. My students received their books on time, and I determined this is a company I am interested in learning more about. It was then I knew I wanted to work here.
