Hi, I’m Adam, but I hope that was probably pretty obvious.

I live in Grand Rapids, MI where I grew up. I moved back after graduating from the University of Michigan in 2008.

Meetups

I started the West Michigan Elixir Users Group in 2018. We met once a month and generally discussed all things Elixir, functional programming, or anything else programming-related really.

Before that, I was the organizer of the West Michigan Ruby Users Group for a year-and-a-half before the handing the reigns over to another developer in August 2014.

Programming

My interest in programming started in high school. After college, I decided to pursue programming further (after spending a summer creating my own website), so I took some graduate and undergraduate computer science courses while in graduate school at Grand Valley State University. They taught Java, so that was my first exposure to object-oriented programming and design.

Legacy Applications

I have been working professional as an independent developer since 2015. In that time, I’ve picked up a few things.

One of those things is understanding legacy Ruby applications.

Many programmers get excited when they get to build out something completely fresh. Greenfield, if you will. While I find that exciting, I have found the challenge of taking over a legacy application to be extremely rewarding.

The more time as I spent as an independent developer, the more time I spent getting handed legacy applications with large code bases. It was intimidating at first sure, but I got better at it over time.

Discovery. Debugging. Investigation.

Ah, keeps me young…although it may be making my hair recede faster. 🙂

My experience developing in legacy Ruby on Rails applications has allowed to me to specialize in exactly that.

Ruby

I discovered Ruby and life was never the same. I started programming in Ruby first with side-projects, but then moved to doing small freelance projects, which led to being hired as a full-time developer for a local software development consultancy. I’ve now been programming professionally in Ruby since 2013.

My development focus has shifted over the years, but I focus primarily on full-stack development on Ruby-on-Rails web applications.

Swift, Apple TV and iOS

I started to pick up iOS development through my own side-project. When the projects in Ruby came along, I decided to focus on Ruby development until this summer when I was offered the opportunity to take a course in iOS development from The Factory.

Due to Apple’s announcement about Swift in June 2014, we learned both Objective-C and Swift throughout the course. A couple months after the course was finished, I was hired as a developer to do iOS and Rails development for a local software startup.

In 2016, I built my own Apple TV app in Swift called FlightTrackerTV. Unfortunately, the cost of maintaining it was too great, so I had to shut it down and it is no longer available.