Dr Nic's Want a new $$$ stream for your Rails consulting business?

Want a new $$$ stream for your Rails consulting business?

Summary: click to select

Ruby on Rails started in the DHH’s “basement” and was picked up by alpha geeks around the world over the last few years. Now, beta geeks and business people are picking it up. This is a good thing – it means you can get a job in Rails, or do Rails consulting/freelancing and have clients who know what Rails is and what it can do for them.

But they don’t know code. They don’t know good code, and they don’t know good developers.

Aha! You are a good developer; perhaps you can help?

Start offering “code audits” and “code reviews” to companies/teams/other freelancers, as recently offered by Robby Russell’s Planet Argon company.

Its an awesome opportunity for you to help other developers with feedback, help business owners know what’s going on with their development teams, and make $$$.

$$$ is good and making it should make you happy.

Should you be in a situation where you have gaps of time between consulting projects, or your a full-time employee looking to start into the consulting world, perhaps start offering Code Reviews and Code Audits as a service.

Its also a nice service to offer companies that didn’t hire you for a job, but went with someone else instead.

Thank you for considering us for your project. Although you did not select our company for the development, we know you’ve chosen someone competent. You may be interested in our complimentary service – code audits and code reviews. If its ok, we’ll contact you in a month or so to offer you this service so you know that your developers are on track and doing an excellent job!

Ok, that’s a crappy sales letter, but you get the gist.

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Michael Schuerig says:

June 18, 2007 at 10:45 am

I think you need a category for Irony. Possibly even a further one for Unintended Irony.

Dr Nic says:

June 18, 2007 at 10:51 am

@michael – it’d be very difficult for me to select “Unintended Irony”. Perhaps I need a 3rd party to select my categories for me. But then I might end up with categories like “Boring”, “Too long”, etc… I’d need an auditor for the category selector person.

Nonetheless, I do think “code audits” are an interesting service to offer.

Peter Cooper says:

June 18, 2007 at 11:24 am

I can’t go into detail, but from some things I’ve heard, it seems code audits should almost be made mandatory in Rails development with some of the nastiness bringing database servers to their knees

Kevin Marsh says:

June 18, 2007 at 3:44 pm

Doing just this has actually been really popular for me. It’s much more cost effective for the customer to just get a nudge rather than a complete rewrite and it doesn’t take nearly the time or effort to look at code than it does write.

I’ve found that because Rails is so easy and accessible, a lot of beginners try it and make a lot of classic mistakes that hurt them when they reach production (not eager loading associations, bad database structure, etc.) so code auditing is a way to mentor budding coders while maintaining a decent margin.

Ben Kittrell says:

June 18, 2007 at 5:38 pm

Good call doc, I’ve actually recently been asked to do a code audit. I was thinking this might be a good service to offer as well. Since I’m still doing Java consulting full-time, it would be something I don’t need to dig into full force. I can make some cash money and keep my skills sharp.