Web Development
We are experienced in building, deploying, and scaling Ruby on Rails based web applications. These are some of the tasks we can help you with:
Implementation
You have a great idea, we'll help you execute it. We can build anything ranging from small, standalone web applications to social applications. We can also integrate your application with third party services (such as Facebook) or implement a REST API for your own application in order to expose it to external clients.
We'll start by working closely together with you to distill your vision into a concrete project plan. We will then deliver new features to you every week and set up a staging environment so you can try these out immediately. This will enable you to guide the direction of the project as it evolves and ensures that the outcome completely matches your expectations.
We believe in agile development and leverage TDD (test-driven development), refactoring, and other best practices. This way, your code base remains clean and maintainable, and you can be confident that you will be able to continue evolving the application later.
Deployment
You have a web app (perhaps you built it yourself, or perhaps we built it for you) and now you're ready to roll it out to the public. We will help you select the optimal web hosting platform, depending on your application's needs and your budget. We will then configure one or more hosting environments (such as Production and Staging) and set you up with a customized and easy deployment solution.
Our expertise spans many different classes of hosting services, including VPS (Virtual Private Server, such as Slicehost), Managed Hosting (such as Engine Yard), Cloud Computing (such as Amazon AWS and RightScale), as well as Heroku.
Improvement / Rescue
Perhaps you just need to add additional functionality to your existing application. Or perhaps your previous developer left a huge mess behind and fled to the Cayman Islands. Whichever it is, we're not afraid to dig into your existing code base.
Scaling
Whether you just need to add a little bit of additional capacity or whether your app has gone viral and your servers are getting crushed, we can help. We'll first analyze your application to identify bottlenecks. In many cases we can immediately implement significant performance improvements by leveraging caching, optimizing database queries, adding appropriate database indexes, and offloading extensive processing into background jobs.
Beyond that, we'll work out a strategy to get you back on track, whether this involves server upgrades, setting up MySQL master / slave replication, or architectural changes. We may also recommend a different hosting environment or move your application "into the cloud". Our goal is to leave you with an application that cost-effectively handles your current load and continues to scale up with demand.
IT Infrastructure
If your company is just starting out, you may not have a lot of technical infrastructure in place. While our core expertise lies in software development, we're happy to bootstrap some basic IT infrastructure for you. We can help you get your own domain, set up Google Apps for email, calendar, intranet / wiki, and document collaboration, as well as set up a Github account for version control and issue tracking. Depending on your company's needs, we can recommend and set up additional third party hosted services.