Dan Adams

Round-up of iOS universal frameworks with Xcode

If you are looking to share code between projects or distribute a 3rd party framework (such as a product API) a bit of googling will find you a solution. Or two. Or three. The solutions are all similar with some subtle differences. Here I’ve collected the best solutions I’ve found (going back to 2008) and which one worked well for me.

Posted April 18, 2012 in iOS

abnqe: A better Netflix queue experience

UPDATE: abnqe is now on github.

I’m a long-time Netflix customer. As someone who uses the website to watch movies and shows connected to a HTPC it’s become very clear that the website user experience is not a priority. Specifically, the instant watch queue management and ability to finding something to watch is just horrible. abnqe (A Better Netflix Queue Experience) is a small project to fix this.

Posted April 2, 2012 in Projects

Heroku Postgres: Shared, Dedicated or use Amazon RDS?

Heroku shared databases can’t be beat for convenience or cost during development (assuming you are on Heroku already). What about when the app goes live? Here are some thoughts on whether the app should stay on a Heroku shared Postgres database, switch to a dedicated database or use something else entirely such as Amazon RDS.

Posted March 28, 2012 in Ruby / Rails

Career story, trajectory and context

An important aspect of good career management is understanding your career story. Where you came from, where are you now and where you are going. Knowing this is critical to maximizing your market value and communicating that value to others (such as in interviews).
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Posted March 21, 2012 in Uncategorized

What every software engineer should know: your career is a business

Your career is a business and you should manage it like one. There is a lot to being a great software engineer and therein lies the problem: a focus on the technical (which is important, clearly) but a neglect of business, communication, and management skills needed to be your own career advisor. Without these skills many great, passionate engineers find themselves at a disadvantage working for too little pay or enjoyment. Here are some tips to set you in the right direction managing your career effectively.

Posted March 21, 2012 in Uncategorized

It’s your company too, act like an owner

Company ownership is a funny thing. Who really owns the company? Well, it’s probably the guy with risk in one pocket and a checkbook in the other. So your company isn’t exactly a co-op. You don’t have shares or equity. You aren’t a partner. Let’s assume you are at the ‘bottom’ of the company. I propose there is tremendous value in an ownership mentality: this is my company and I’m going to work to make it the kind of company I think it should be.

Posted March 6, 2012 in Uncategorized

Changing Dropbox location for 1Password storage

Dropbox is awesome. 1Password is awesome. When their powers combine… it’s awesome. Except if you need to change where 1Password stores it’s file in Dropbox. Here’s a simple way to change that.

Posted February 13, 2012 in Tools

Starting Emerging Business Tech meetup with first event on native / HTML5-based mobile apps

I’m extremely excited to announce a new meetup, Emerging Business Technology, lead by myself and sponsored by Cantina Consulting. We’ve tried very hard to make this meetup one that provides a lot of value to it’s members, extremely high quality events and content, and satisfies a need not currently met by other meetups in the Boston area. We’ve already seen rapid growth and intense interest from a wide range of people working in technology.

Posted February 3, 2012 in Events

Beware using active_admin and Sunspot Rails gems together

If you are using Active Admin and the Sunspot gem for Rails, beware: they conflict on the search method leading to some very confusing results.

Posted February 2, 2012 in Ruby / Rails

Using Sunspot, Websolr, and Solr on Heroku

Having recently deployed a Rails app using Sunspot and Solr on Heroku, here are some tips for getting started, testing, searching, and deploying.

Posted February 1, 2012 in Ruby / Rails