A fractional Rails development studio.
For the past twelve years, I’ve worked as a fractional, product-focused Rails developer for small organizations and SaaS companies.
The industries are often different, but the underlying challenges are often the same. Beneath the surface of pressing feature requests and impending upgrades and migrations are some common questions:
How can we achieve good customer outcomes with limited resources?
How do we build with an eye toward the future without over-engineering?
How can we adjust our environment and processes to increase velocity?
How do we maintain continuity through team and leadership transitions?
How and when should we address technical debt and maintenance burden?
How do we improve stability and reliability, and reduce incidents and support load?
In my experience, these questions don’t generally have easy answers. It takes expertise, attention, and calendar time to improve complex systems. And that’s what Rails applications and the teams that maintain them essentially are–complex systems involving both software and people, code and culture.
My preferred approach is to embed with a team over a longer term (anywhere from 6 months to 3 years), not just to deliver features or perform maintenance work, but to fill a meaningful team role as a fractional senior Rails developer, with a higher-level concern for product and business considerations.
To the degree that it’s needed and welcomed, my aim is to go beyond simply delivering software, to uncovering answers to those deeper questions, with a hope of improving not only the work itself, but how the work gets done.
Jeremy Smith, studio owner
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