John Gallagher's Linkedin Analytics

I was 29 and I hated my life. I kept making mistakes. Big ones. I felt inadequate. I had zero confidence. I hated myself. The more mistakes I made, the deeper I sunk. One day, the company I'd dedicated my life to made me redundant. I had always been obsessed with programming, so I tried to build my own software app. I tried to learn TDD and it was so hard. I just couldn't figure it out. The design was a mess. Changes were impossible. The app was slow as molasses. I had been learning about Ruby and Rails on the side and was running out of money. I got a job at Arnold Clark. My friend Adrian Mowat worked there. Adrian was using Rails and was starting a brand new team. The next 18 months were a period of insane growth. Adrian taught me everything he knew about design, TDD, DDD, coupling, inheritance, design patterns. I soaked it up like a very dry sponge. I was the happiest and most productive I'd ever been. Eventually, I left to work for an agency. Trivial changes took me days. The test suite was flaky, slow and impossible to run locally. Design patterns were abused. Inheritance was everywhere. One change would ripple out through the codebase. It was impossible to diagnose defects. It affected my mood, my confidence and my productivity. Eventually, I moved to another company. They used Rails too. Two weeks in? I saw *exactly* the same problems. The same overuse of inheritance. The same coupling. The same rigid, slow, flaky test suite. I improved the logging. I gave workshops on design, coupling and architecture. The next company I worked for? Inheritance everywhere. Poor OO design. Tight coupling. Slow tests. Lack of observability. Exactly the same! I helped these companies. I'm now offering my help to other teams using Rails, mired in legacy code. I believe Rails apps can be joyful to work in. But many aren't. I can help your engineers feel productive once more. Results - Improved visibility of defects by proper logging and observability - Saved ~100k a year by reducing test run time - Identified ~20% of the app as dead - Highlighted areas of high complexity and churn to be refactored and simplified - Reduced cyclomatic complexity of code related to current user by implementing the null object pattern Book a call with me today: https://calendly.com/synapticmishap/virtual-coffee