[LRUG] Consultants: trying to improve our Truck Number

[Daniel Barlow]

On behalf of my employers I am looking for a Ruby consultant or a
company which employs Ruby experts that can provide cover and ongoing
development for our applications in the event of my being unavailable to
do so (e.g. I get killed in a car accident, or similar).  We're a small
company and I'm the only employee with any technical skills, so it is
not unexpected that various people (e.g. the bank, the accountant,
potential investors) are concerned that the whole thing rests on my
shoulders.

I anticipate that there will be little or no money available *now*
(though, obviously, in the event that I do end up dead or somehow
incapacitiated, then you would get paid for what you do).  The
application is basically our ecommerce web site plus the "admin" pages
that let our non-technical staff handle orders and update
products/stock: the technologies are Ruby 1.9 (no Rails, it's mostly
Sequel and Sinatra) and Postgres; it runs on virtual servers using
Debian Linux and part of the requirement would be to maintain the OS
intrastructure as well (Varnish, Nginx, stuff like that).  There is also
a smattering of Perl and a largeish component in Lisp (historical
reasons, don't ask unless you want to know), but we're working to get
rid of that, and I anticipate that if anything should go wrong with it
that can't be fixed by restarting it, "reimplement it in Ruby" would be
considered an acceptable solution.  Hardware is, mercifully, outside
scope.  There is handover documentation which *I think* you would find
useful and sufficient, but which I wrote and has never been used in a
live situation

So, if you've been in this situation yourself and solved it with the
help of LRUGgers or others, sing their praises to me.  If you're in a
position to take it on yourself, drop me a line off-list outlining your
preferred approach.  The initial goal is for us to be able to say to our
bankers that "in the event that our technical resource goes AWOL we have
an arrangement in place with XYZ that they will step in and provide
cover", so it would be very helpful if you could say what if any
financial resource you'd need to get to that point.


Cheers

-dan