The engineer
One engineer, on the phone, who has seen this before.
Atomic Locomotive is one person. That is a feature for the kind of work it does and a risk you should ask about, so both are on this page.
The engineer
Eisenhauer
- Rails since
- 2007
- Open source
- Author of GeoKit
- Silicon Valley
- Early engineering, Stitch Fix
- Also
- Senior engineering manager, ezCater
- Shipping since
- 1981
- Based
- Austin, Texas
I wrote my first production system in 1981 and my first Rails app in 2007. GeoKit, the geocoding library a lot of Rails apps have quietly depended on for years, is mine. I was an early engineer at Stitch Fix when it was small enough that everyone shipped everything, and later a senior engineering manager at ezCater, running the growth platform team.
In between and since, I have built and rescued more small Rails applications than I can count, most recently a fleet of my own products where the same shape gets built over and over: a Rails app, a marketing site, a deploy that is written down. That repetition is where the five-day run comes from. It is not a stunt; it is what happens when the boring parts stop being built from scratch.
Atomic Locomotive is new and I am not going to invent testimonials for it. What I will tell you is what you get instead: you talk to the person writing the code, the price is agreed before we start, and the first ten clients get founding rates in exchange for permission to write up the results.
If the diagnostic tells me your app does not need a rescue, I will say so and refund the fee. That has to be a real possibility or the diagnostic is worthless.
Why one person
The case for a solo shop.
The work is small, fast, and judgment-heavy. A five-day run does not benefit from a project manager, an account lead, and a junior developer who has to be brought up to speed; it benefits from one senior person who reads everything on Monday and still remembers it on Friday. You talk to that person. There is nobody between you and the code.
It also keeps the price where it is. There is no office and no bench to feed, which is why a fixed-price run costs what a week of a mid-sized agency's discovery phase costs.
The risk, honestly
The bus.
One person can be unavailable. Two runs at a time is the real limit, so there is a queue when it is busy. And if I got hit by a bus mid-run, you would have a half-finished thing.
The mitigation is not a promise; it is the Handoff Standard. From the first commit the repo is yours, in your organization, in standard Rails, with a daily staging link and an end-of-day note. Even mid-run, another Rails developer could open it and continue. And when a run ends you get a runbook and a recorded walkthrough written for exactly that person. If you hand it to someone else next month, it worked.
The name
Why a locomotive.
A locomotive is a boring, powerful machine built to a standard, and it comes back to the roundhouse for service instead of being thrown away. That is the whole pitch. The runs have departure dates and fares. The maintenance plan is the Roundhouse. Nobody promises you a rocket.
Atomic Locomotive is a Boffo Digital company, based in Austin, Texas.
Steam it up.
Twenty minutes on a call, free. You show me the app or describe the idea, and I will tell you which run you need, or that you do not need one. No deck, no discovery process, no sales sequence.
Book the 20-minute callbill@atomiclocomotive.com · Austin, Texas · Usually replies same day