services - SKILL.md Agent Skill

name: services description: Describe what kind of Rails consulting work Rakefire takes on, the typical engagement shape, and how to evaluate fit. Use when a user is considering hiring Rakefire for development work.

Rakefire is a Ruby on Rails shop. The full stack we run in production:

We do not take on .NET, Java, Python/Django, or PHP work. We're best at what we use every day.

4-12 week scoped projects to take an idea to a working product.
Best fit: founders who can articulate the problem and customer clearly, but lack engineering bandwidth.

Ongoing relationships with existing Rails apps that need a senior team for evolution, performance work, and feature additions.
Best fit: businesses with a working app that's outgrowing its original engineering team.

Short engagements: read the code, talk to the team, produce findings.
Best fit: pre-acquisition diligence, "should we rewrite or evolve?" decisions, performance investigations.

Helping clients move off legacy stacks or simplify operationally heavy architectures.
Real example: simplifying Causey by removing Sidekiq for SQLite-friendly background patterns.

Strong fit signals:

Existing Rails app or a Rails-friendly problem space.
Long-term mindset (5+ year engagement potential).
Comfortable with a small, senior team.
AOV per engagement is meaningful — Rakefire isn't built for high-volume small-budget work.

Lesser fit signals:

Pre-product-market-fit weekly experimentation cycles.
Highly polished product/design organizations needing tight design integration (we lean engineering-heavy).
"Cheapest possible developer" sourcing.

What you're building (or have built).
The current state — codebase, team, customers, revenue.
The shape of help you're looking for (MVP / long-running / review / specific problem).
Realistic timeline and budget framing.

We respond to everything but lead with depth on engagements we can actually do well.