Julian Higman

Helping companies keep critical Rails systems
reliable, scalable and maintainable.

Get in touch

About Me

Senior Ruby on Rails developer and GIS/automation specialist, available fractionally or as a freelancer — experienced, independent help without agency overhead.

Specialising in the harder end of Rails work: legacy upgrades, long-running system stability, deployment and ops, and the operational problems that don't have obvious answers. A particular niche in geospatial systems: map platforms, planning and property portals, FME/Rails APIs, CAD/web integrations and geospatial automation.

Need experienced Rails help without hiring full-time? Get in touch.

Who I Help

Typical clients who hire me

Work

Things I do for clients

Development

Building from scratch, or adding features to existing sites.

Upgrades

Rails versions are released on a regular schedule, and upgrading is essential for security, functionality and maintainability.

Maintenance

Software is never "done" — libraries and languages get updated, operating systems get patched, servers become outdated.

Consultancy

Working in collaboration with your company to figure out how to deliver value.

Stability

Working to minimise downtime, outages, test failures.

Scaling

Success is great, but will the site stay up if you double your users? Triple? ×100?

Monitoring

You should be the first to know if there are problems.

Testing

Reliability, maintainability, rapid development are all based on rigorous testing.

Recent Projects

A selection of recent client work

Technologies

Tools and platforms I work with

Ruby on Rails PostgreSQL AWS Docker CI/CD GitHub Actions Sidekiq Redis API integrations Linux infrastructure Monitoring & observability AI-assisted development workflows FME / geospatial integrations

Pricing

Pricing for UK senior Rails work

Contact

Available for troubleshooting, upgrades, architecture, automation and operational support.