I Scale Rails Teams
Product Owner or CTO? Experiencing any of the following?
- Features are taking longer to build
- There’s so much unplanned work caused by unexpected bugs and your tests don’t give you much confidence in the stability of your product
- You could drown yourself in the complexity of the code
- Onboarding new developers takes a month
- You think it might be time to rewrite everything.
My name is Rob Yurkowski. I’ve been a professional software developer since 2008 and a consultant since 2012. I’ve worked with exceptionally small, budget-limited clients whose projects were critical to their survival, up to Series-D-funded startups. These companies have varied in industry, including those in real estate, e-commerce, marketing, ‘quick’ commerce, health care, arts, and nutrition.
My expertise is in productivity and enablement — in helping companies conquer out-of-control complexity and get back to productivity.
What Does a Typical Month Look Like?
When I work with new long-term clients, the first month from me often can look something like this:
- I read your onboarding material for engineers, and take notes about where there are gaps or problems. Then I fix the gaps.
- No bootstrap script? I help set up a minimal Dockerfile or bash script to make sure it’s easy to run your application in isolation in development.
- I work on comprehending and diagramming your domain model, generating notes on entities and creating ERDs as I go.
- I update your README to document essential knowledge of your problem space, as well as unintuitive parts of your solution and application — the sort of stuff a new SVP Engineering would ask for on day one.
- I ship a few features to understand how regular development works and feels.
- If you don’t have decent telemetry and monitoring, I help set this up. Then I do a little bit of profiling to see where the biggest gains can be made.
- I meet with members of your team to see where the biggest pain points are, and where it makes the most sense to focus on in order to boost your team.
- All the while, I participate actively in code review, help chair technical meetings, and assist your engineers by bringing a principal-level and customer-focused perspective to the team.
I’m also available for more limited-term engagements on specific projects. If either sounds pretty great to you, let’s get together and plan our collaboration.
Select Past Clients
FastAF
Technical Leadership and Process Creation / 3 month engagement
- Led creation of engineering on-boarding and off-boarding procedure
- Heavy focus on improving code review culture
- Led high-stakes migration from GoodJob to Sidekiq
- Introduced several architectural patterns to streamline and de-complicate workflows across the API app
HoodQ
Principal Engineering / 2 year engagement
- Led near-zero-downtime transition from EOL managed VMs to AWS Fargate, cutting monthly spend by more than 50% and increasing operational independence for engineering
- Led decoupling of monolith on domain boundaries, creation of SOA / Evented architecture using RabbitMQ, and creation of new Accounts service
K-Rae Transportation
Principal Engineering / on-going 8 year engagement
- Developed greenfield operations-critical Trip Management System
- Maintained and upgraded from Rails 3.1 to Rails 6.1 over the course of work