Sole developer on a legacy field-service app
Work orders for national retail chains
The engagement
This was a legacy Ruby on Rails field-service and work-order system - used by a technology-services company and operated by a facilities-management firm, supporting national retail chains. It ran on an old Rails version on a self-managed Linux server - and with a large enteprise codebase, the original developer long gone, and sparse documentation, it took ingenuity and perserverance to understand the large system we inherited.
What we did
- Kept the legacy app running through constant break/fix - recurring “the app is down / blank screen / users can’t log in” incidents, handled with same-day and after-hours turnaround.
- Performance-tuned the app for peak load - profiled the slowest part of the application and sped it up dramatically to cut peak-time strain.
- Developed QuickBooks integration - debugged and fixed the IIF invoice export, including tax handling on invoice items.
- Ran server operations - investigated disk-space exhaustion on the production VM, set up New Relic APM at the client’s request, diagnosed Apache/DNS issues, and created backup jobs to a NAS.
Stack
- Ruby on Rails (2.3 / 3.0-era legacy)
- MySQL
- Self-managed Linux / Apache
- New Relic
- QuickBooks (IIF) integration