Before becoming a full-time consultant and entrepreneur, I worked in Civic Tech for 8 years at Code for America, 18F, and Truss. I helped shape Engineering best practices, and worked on open source Rails apps that improved the lives of millions of people. I helped these companies save over $100k per year through automation, speeding up test suites, improving developer happiness and productivity, and improving code quality and maintainability.
I currently offer two main services: Rails app upgrades/maintenance, and an automation audit to find opportunities for saving time and money. I'm also open to hearing about other problems you'd like to solve.
Rails app upgrades and maintenance
Do you have an old Rails app that needs to continue running in production, but you don't have the time or people to keep it secure and up to date? Are you afraid to upgrade it or make any changes? What would happen to your business and your reputation if your customers' data was compromised due to running old versions of Ruby and/or Rails?
For a fraction of the cost of hiring a full-time developer, I will give you the peace of mind that your app will be up to date and free of known security vulnerabilities. And if something breaks, the issue will be resolved quickly.
I offer a fixed-price monthly retainer that includes, but is not limited to, the following:
Keep gems and other dependencies up to date (more reliably than dependabot)
Update Rails and Ruby versions before they reach end of life
Set up monitoring for downtime, errors, and performance issues
Make sure domain name registrations won’t expire
Update Heroku stack when needed
Fix exceptions
Improve tests
Audit gems to see if any can be removed/replaced
Audit code for any improvements
Find other ways to save you money
Increasing profit and developer happiness
I've helped small companies save over $100k/year through automation, speeding up test suites, improving developer happiness and productivity, and improving code quality and maintainability. Here are some examples of time savings I made:
8 weeks/year by speeding up test suites
7 weeks/year by speeding up commands used daily by developers
4 weeks/year by automating recurring manual tasks
10 weeks/year by eliminating and shortening meetings
7 weeks/year by automating the setup of a new Mac so that new engineers can be up and running within minutes of opening their new laptop with a complete dev environment, all their Mac apps, fonts, macOS preferences, and GitHub repos. I've now turned this into a paid product called Ruby on Mac (https://www.rubyonmac.dev/pricing#team-pricing).
Based on what I noticed during my 8 years in Civic Tech across a wide variety of teams and projects, you are likely losing time and money every day right now at your company. I can identify these losses for you and create a detailed report with recommendations. You can then choose to implement them yourself, hire someone else, or hire me.
