Julian Higman

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.

WE BELIEVE IN GREAT IDEAS

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View Works

Who I Help

Typical clients who hire me

SaaS companies with aging Rails applications
Agencies needing senior Rails support
Businesses with operationally critical web systems
Teams needing upgrades, debugging or infrastructure stabilisation
Geospatial, property and automation platforms

Work

These are some of the things that I've done 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? x100?

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

Rails 5 → Rails 7 upgrade for a SaaS platform
CI/CD and deployment automation using GitHub Actions
Stability improvements for a customer-facing mapping platform
AI-assisted tooling for FME workspace review workflows
React front end migrated to Rails 8 and Hotwire

We design delightful digital experiences.

Read more about what we do and our philosophy of design. Judge for yourself The work and results we’ve achieved for other clients, and meet our highly experienced Team who just love to design.

Tell Us Your Story

Fun Facts About Us

Far far away, behind the word mountains, far from the countries Vokalia and Consonantia, there live the blind texts. Separated they live in Bookmarksgrove right at the coast of the Semantics

20000
Cups of Coffee

1500
Gallons of Soft Drink

1200
Whiteboard Markers

300
Websites built

This company created an e-commerce site with the tools to make our business a success, with innovative ideas. We feel that our site has unique elements that make us stand out from the crowd.

Rose Ray CEO-Themefisher

An e-commerce site was created by this company with the tools to make our business a success, with innovative ideas. We feel that our site has unique elements that make us stand out from the crowd.

Rose Ray sr. CEO-Themefisher

With the tools to make our business a success, this company created an e-commerce site, with innovative ideas. We feel that our site has unique elements that make us stand out from the crowd.

Rose Ray jr. CEO-Themefisher

We feel that our site has unique elements that make us stand out from the crowd. This company created an e-commerce site with the tools to make our business a success, with innovative ideas.

Rose Ray III CEO-Themefisher

JULIAN HIGMAN