A healthy Rails application is an asset that will benefit your organization for years to come - an unhealthy one, on the other hand, will be a weight you and your team will have to bear every day. Why application health is important A Rails application's health is important for...
There are two overarching criteria to use to determine if an application is healthy or not. Is the team making forward progress? Are investments in the application paying off? (positive ROI) Though this may sound simple, there is a surprising amount of depth to these two criteria. 1. Is the...
When a Rails application is developed by a small team - say, under six developers - some unique problems can occur. Narrow experience With a small team the collective experience of all of the developers can be small. This means that when a problem occurs, they have limited ideas to...
All software projects can run into performance problems, including Rails projects. There are two common situations that cause Rails projects to run into performance problems. 1. Popularity An application becomes more popular than expected. This unplanned additional popularity puts stress on the system and can cause failures. Very often the...
Are you afraid of hiring a software consultant? Hiring a software consultant to create code is a great way to get access to knowledge and experience you don't have. But one fear that can appear is the fear of never getting the code from them. This fear is valid and...
When reviewing a software consultant one of the big questions that's on your mind is "Are they good enough?" What do you need But before you can answer that, you need to know what you actually need and want from them. Hiring a developer to build your first version of...
As part of my new client process, I try to have an Intro Call with potential clients. This call serves a few purposes for both myself and my client. If you've heard me mention it before and wanted to know more about it, this is the right place to be....
So you're ready to start your project. You know what you want built. You have the time in your schedule to have it built. And you have an idea of who will build it. But after talking with a few software consultants, you've gotten a bit of a sticker shock....
The first step to working with you is what I call my New Client Consultation. This is a 30 minute phone call where we talk about the project and your business. I want to find out if I can help you and if it looks like there will be a...
The way I approach managing projects is simple. Simple enough that I'm going to describe it right now. We plan out what we think needs to be done. The work is estimated conservatively so it's likely the actual implementation will be under the budget. You (the client) then put the...
Each tip includes a way to improve your store: customer analysis, analytics, traffic, SEO, customer acquisition, Rich Results, CRO... plus plenty of puns and amazing alliterations.