Senior engineering help for the app your business runs on
Most of my work is on existing Ruby on Rails and Postgres applications: making them fast again, keeping their data trustworthy, cutting what they cost to run, and finishing the upgrade that has been half done for a year.
No engineer on staff? I also take over apps someone else built, including first versions put together quickly with AI tools, and get them to where customers can rely on them. You deal with one senior engineer, start with a small fixed piece of work, and see it running before you decide on anything bigger.
Tell me what you needA short form, one reply within a business day, no sales sequence.
Startup Spotlight
Startup Spotlight: Porchlight uses AI to help foster human connection in senior care
“Donahue is the founder and sole builder of Porchlight, a newly launched life-story and reminiscence tool designed for assisted living and memory care communities.”
I’m Patrick Donahue. I designed, built and run Porchlight on my own, from the one-button resident recorder to the staff briefings and the family relay.
What I take on
Fix what is slow or stuck
Pages that got slow as the data grew, jobs that fail quietly, a test suite nobody trusts, a Rails upgrade that has been half finished for months. Measured first, then fixed. Performance · upgrades · when AI tools can't fix it.
Data you can trust
Your code can be rebuilt; years of bad data cannot. Constraints, audit trails, reconciliations, and migrations that keep the history honest as the business changes. More here.
Cut what it costs to run
For apps that are stable and mostly in maintenance: storage tiers, database sizing, hosting and background work nobody has re-checked since launch. More here.
Take a first version to production
An agency moved on, a freelancer disappeared, or the first version was built fast with AI tools and now has real users. You have already made the product decisions. I read what is there, tell you honestly what shape it is in, and put it on a foundation that holds up. More here.
Build the next thing
A feature, an admin screen, a customer portal, an export your customers keep asking for, built on the stack you already have.
Connect your tools
Payments, CRM, email, calendars, accounting and the webhooks between them, with retries and a record of what happened. Where a model can take a repetitive step (reading documents, drafting replies), a person still reviews the cases it should not decide alone. Examples here.
Get your team working well with coding assistants
Your developers have the tools but not yet the habits. Over a few months I work alongside them on scoping work, reviewing what the tools produce, and knowing when to say no to them. More here.
Cloud, email and IT
Hosting and deploys, domains and email deliverability, backups and monitoring, accounts and access. The chores that never get finished.
Every engagement in detail, including technical partnership for founders and documented handoffs →
Who this is for
Companies with a Rails app that matters to the business, founders who are not engineers, and teams whose developer left or is overloaded. If you already have an engineering team, I also take scoped pieces they do not have time for.
Need customers rather than code? I also run outreach, press and podcast pitching.
How it works
1. Tell me the problem
A few sentences in the form below: what you have, what is going wrong or missing, and what it costs you today. No spec needed.
2. An honest read
Within a business day I reply with a couple of questions and a plain answer on whether it is worth doing, roughly how long it takes, and whether I am the right person for it.
3. A fixed first piece
We agree one small, clearly scoped piece of work. You see it working, you keep it whether or not we continue, and then we decide together on a project or a weekly commitment.
You will always know where things stand
A short written update every week: what shipped, what is next, and what I need from you. The repository, hosting and accounts are yours from the first day, and everything I set up to do the work, scripts and checklists included, stays with you if we stop.
Contract work, 1099 or corp-to-corp. MSA, SOW, NDA and COI are routine. Remote, based in Seattle, working US hours.
Tell me what you need
A sentence or two is plenty. I read every one of these myself.
The evidence
- Engineering essays. Nearly every one starts with a real production problem and a number attached to it.
- A live web application you can click around in: a kanban board that syncs across browsers, per-field inline editing, and LLM token streaming.
- Webhook fan-out with retries, dead letters and a per-event audit trail, the plumbing behind most integrations.
- A loan-servicing triage tool whose case state is derived from an append-only event log, shipped with its own forty-case labelled eval, including the one costly miss.
- Two Go tools of my own for finding goroutine leaks and replaying concurrency bugs deterministically.