A product
studio of one.
Production Rails since 2005. Two books, thirty-plus shipped applications, one engineer you actually work with.
Rails 5 Revealed · 2016
VegasNearMe
A full travel platform for the millions who visit Las Vegas every year — attractions, shows, dining, nightlife — with personalised recommendations and a partner-sync backbone feeding clean data into every surface.
Alan is extremely talented and is just a pleasure to work with. He's always thinking outside the box; a huge asset to any company he works with.
I've had the pleasure of working with Alan in several capacities over many years. Alan is the best kind of developer to work with in my opinion: not only does he understand technology and what he's capable of building, but he makes sure he understands why he's building something.
I've had the privilege of working with Alan across three distinct chapters of my career. Most recently, when founding AgendaScope, I made it clear I wouldn't proceed unless Alan joined the team as my CTO.
Beyond being one of the best and most trustworthy professionals I've encountered, Alan is a meticulous software craftsman who combines remarkable speed with proper engineering practices.
Index
Twenty-five years building web applications — as a developer, as a CTO of funded startups, as a founder, and occasionally as a consultant to larger companies that needed someone who could cut through.
In 2007 I wrote one of the very first Ruby on Rails books, Practical Rails Social Networking Sites. Rails 5 Revealed followed in 2016. Rails has been my primary tool for two decades; I've been shipping Elixir and Phoenix LiveView in production since the early releases.
XenoCode is deliberately a bureau of one. When you hire me, you work with me — not a revolving door of junior developers, not a project manager reading status off a Jira board.
Bibliography
Practical Rails Social Networking Sites
One of the very first books on Ruby on Rails. Covered the end-to-end build of a social application at a time when the tooling barely existed.
Rails 5 Revealed
A focused tour of what actually changed in Rails 5 and a pragmatic take on what to adopt versus what to ignore.
How I work
Sprint / Idea to live
A focused sprint taking a concrete product idea from whiteboard to a production application real users can sign up for. Architecture, build, deploy, and a playbook for the months after.
Build / The real product
Custom applications built with Rails or Phoenix, over a multi-month engagement. I embed like a senior engineer or acting CTO, own the architecture end to end, and stay long enough that the code is something you could hand to a team.
Audit / Vibe-coded → real
A structured review of an AI-assisted or early-stage codebase. Security, scalability, maintainability, and exactly what has to change before real users touch it.
Tell me
what you're
building.
The best conversations start from a rough sketch, not a spec document. Send a paragraph and I'll reply within two working days — happy to talk with no commitment, in any direction.
Prefer to talk it through? Book a call — thirty minutes, no pitch, just a conversation about your project or whatever you're weighing up.