Like most adult-ish people, I am often asked the question, “what do you do for a living?”, or something like that. I’ve been asked the question enough times now that I think I have a pretty decent four-sentence explanation:
- I am a software engineer.
- I work for a software consultancy that specializes in a particular technology called ‘Ruby on Rails’.
- My company focuses on maintenance, rather than new builds.
- Our customers are generally small to medium sized businesses who rely on a Rails app to do their work, but can’t justify hiring an in-house development team.
That’s as short as I can make it! Any longer and people’s eyes glaze over.
Sometimes, I’ll substitute the word “maintenance” for “stewardship”, which is how we often describe what we do. “Maintenance” feels reactive, “stewardship” feels like someone who cares about what they’re maintaining.
But there is another word that I probably should use to describe what I do, and that’s “fractional”. Most people have heard of “fractional shares” of a stock, “fractional ownership” of a timeshare or even someone who calls themselves a “fractional CFO/COO” and who splits their time amongst a number of different companies.
Neomind offers fractional access to a wacky group of talented software engineers. Our team collectively stewards dozens of Rails applications for small/medium sized companies. Most of us are familiar enough with our roster of apps that any of us can jump in when something urgent or strange comes up. And each of us brings a diverse set of experiences and skills to the day-to-day problems of Rails application maintenance.
To take this a bit further, I’d argue that most Rails applications (ie all but “enterprise” sized) shouldn’t need a full time maintainer. And those that do are probably suffering from bigger than average amount of technical debt. Rails is the one person framework. Once your app is up and running, a fractional maintainer is all you should need. If you need more, that’s probably a signal that your app is in trouble!