Ruby on Rails contractor

I build Rails apps — and keep them running.

Contract Rails development from an engineer with four years of site-reliability work behind it. Greenfield MVPs, rescues and upgrades, Hotwire frontends — designed, shipped, deployed, and monitored by one person you can actually call.

lucas_sproule.rb
class LucasSproule < Contractor
  specializes_in :ruby_on_rails

  has_many :shipped_apps
  has_one  :devops_background, depth: "4 years of SRE"

  def stack
    %w[rails hotwire postgres sidekiq kamal aws]
  end

  # builds it, ships it, keeps it up at 3am
  def available? = true
end

What I take on

Rails work, end to end.

One framework, done properly. Rails lets a single experienced engineer carry a product from idea to paying customers — that's the entire pitch, and it's the way I work.

Greenfield MVPs.

A production-ready Rails application from a blank repo: modeling, auth, payments, admin, deploys. The majestic monolith, built to earn its first customers.

Upgrades & rescues.

Stuck on an old Rails version, a failing test suite, or an app the last contractor left behind? I bring legacy apps back to maintained, deployable health.

Hotwire frontends.

Fast, modern interfaces with Turbo and Stimulus — the interactivity of a SPA without a second codebase or a JavaScript team.

Performance & scaling.

N+1 hunts, query tuning, caching, Sidekiq pipelines. I find where a Rails app hurts and make the graphs point the right way.

The difference

Most Rails contractors stop at git push. I don't.

Before contracting, I spent four years as a site-reliability engineer keeping other people's production systems alive. That background comes bundled with every Rails project.

Deploys you don't babysit

Kamal, Docker, CI pipelines — every project ships with a deploy story, not a handoff document.

Infrastructure as a first language

AWS (Solutions Architect certified), Kubernetes, and Terraform, used in production at enterprise scale for years.

Observability from day one

Prometheus, DataDog, real SLAs. When something breaks, you find out from a graph — not a customer.

Where I earned it

DeloitteSite Reliability Engineer2022 – 2024
Blue ApronSite Reliability Engineer2021 – 2022
Active InternationalDevOps Engineer2020 – 2021

Have a Rails app that needs building — or saving?

Tell me what you're trying to ship. I'll reply with an honest read on scope, timeline, and whether I'm the right person for it.