I am a Ruby on Rails consultant in Nashville

615-852-6559 or josh@joshcrews.com

Services

  • Business solutions

    Do you run a business with a pain point that custom software can solve? Do you have a sales or product opportunity that a web application help you with? I have years of experience in sales and accounting (and software development) that can help you reach that goal.

  • Ruby consulting

    For businesses who need a senior developer to come on board for 2 - 8 weeks

  • Save my Ruby Project

    For people who have an existing Ruby software project that’s lost development momentum and needs to get finished or revitalized.

  • Startup consulting

    Strategy and technical expertise to navigate the technology options and get your product out there quickly and on-budget.

  • Rapid Prototyping

    For when you alpha version of an idea fast to demo investors and potential customers. I can build you a prototype of your idea in a few days.

  • Rails mentoring

    For people learning Ruby on Rails who’d like guidance.

Case Studies

The Skillery

The Skillery is a online marketplace for offline classes and workshops. Anyone can signup to teach a class on a topic they know and start selling tickets.

Matt bootstrapped the site by manually listing the first classes (which was a great idea and got him started and online quickly). He approached me about creating a self-registering site with ticketing management and The Skillery 2.0 was born!

I did not do the design (which is great) for the site, Matt sourced that directly working with a local designer.

Foalio

Foalio is a graphic designer’s portfolio and job board site–kinda like Dribbble.

Scott Anderson had already refined his startup idea into a beaufiful static site. I was able to come along and build the backend for Foalio in Rails so that it came alive and launched to the public.

I did not do the design for the site, Scott did.

Musikpitch

Musikpitch is 99designs (crowdsourced / competition model) for getting custom music and jingles

Scott McInstosh had the idea and quickly raised some seed capital to turn it into a business. I build the backend in Rails, and we were able to take Musikpitch from idea to launch in 3 months.

I did not do the design myself. Scott and I worked together running a design contest.

Testimonials

Testimonial: Matt Dudley of The Skillery

Hi, my name is Matt Dudley. I am the founder of the Skillery. I have worked with Josh for several months now. He’s been great to work with.

He was on time and on budget. He was clear about what to expect before we go into the project. And it has been everything he said it would be.

One of the things I really appreciate about Josh is the way he helps me think through the features I want to add to understand if it really servers the business goals that I’ve communicated with him. He is really fantastic about helping me talk though that.

Testimonial: Scott McIntosh of Musikpitch

Hi I’m Scott McIntosh, Nashville-based entrepreneur in the music business.I’ve worked with Josh on a couple projects: StartMySong.com (he did an amazing job) and most recently on Musikpitch.com. I like working with Josh because he’s extremely creative, he’s very quick with his turn around.

It’s not a hold hand scenario at all, I can sit down with Josh and start giving him my ideas. He gets the ideas right away, immediately starts thinking about the tools he can use to make those ideas possible, and then move forward with putting together the project with the quickest turnaround I’ve ever seen.

From discussing with my fellow entrepreneurs, Josh is probably one of the best developers in Nashville. We all believe that he has magic powers.

Pricing

$150 / hour
or
$1,000 / day
or
Flat bid your project
(I can usually give you a price at your first meeting)

Blog Highlights

New Meetup for Nashville: Ruby on Rails Beginners

I’ve started a new Ruby on Rails meetup in Nashville for beginners. We just our first meetup.

http://www.meetup.com/nashvillerails-beginners/

The format is 45 minutes learning, 45 minutes working in groups. It’s designed to be open to anyone, and you don’t need to have come before in order to plug right in.

RSVP’s were competitive for the first meeting, so if it interests you join the group and respond quickly if you want to go to claim a spot.

It’ll be meeting the 3rd Thursday of each month at Centresource

Special thanks to Centresource for hosting and also Max Beiser and Adam Scott and Jeff Felchner for coming to help mentor/teach.

How to Install a Yanked Gem

I had this problem when I emptied a gemset, and tried to reinstall gems with bundler and got this message:

Could not find twitter-2.0.2 in any of the sources

I checked rubygems.org, and the gem owner has yanked that version, and all versions of the gem before 3.0. I really wanted to use twitter-2.0.2. Here’s how to do it:

  • Find this page for your gem and version: http://rubygems.org/gems/twitter/versions/2.0.2. I did it by googling “twitter 2.0.2 yanked”
  • Click the Download link on that page. That will give you twitter-2.0.2.gem
  • Copy that file to yourrailsproject/vendor/cache (creating the directory if needed)
  • Run 
    bundle install
Headshot photo of Josh by Eric Brown, @ebrown_photo on twitter.