Senior Rails architect · Plus AI as leverage

Your Rails app, in two months in two weeks.

35yrs
Building software since 1991
120+
Production apps shipped
70%
Average cost vs. agencies
Roger Heykoop — Founder · Director of Software
Roger Heykoop
Founder · Director of Software
Available
Spaarndam · NL EN · NL · DE 20+ yrs Rails
Four opinions we'll happily defend over coffee

Rails is the fastest way to ship serious software. Most agencies don't believe it anymore.

— 01

Sprints are theater for billable hours.

Two-week sprints, planning poker, retros, three-tier estimation — most of it exists to keep ten people busy. One senior architect with AI as leverage ships the same scope in days.

— 02

AI doesn't replace seniors. It replaces juniors.

The dirty secret of "AI-augmented development" is that it requires more taste, not less. Juniors get faster at the wrong things. Seniors get superpowers. We're senior.

— 03

You should own your code. Always.

Fixed price. Code in your repo from day one. Money back in the first week if it isn't going well. If a vendor can't say all three of those out loud, walk.

— 04

Rails 8 is what your stack should be in 2026.

Solid Queue, Solid Cache, Hotwire, Kamal. No Redis, no Sidekiq licence, no SPA tax. We build on the boring stack that ships, then we put AI where it actually pays off.

The same scope. One sixth of the calendar.

Drag the timeline. Watch what an eight-person Scrum team does in 12 weeks compress into 14 days when one senior engineer pairs with AI. This isn't marketing. It's how we've shipped the last 18 projects.

Week 01 / 12
Drag →
Traditional agency · 8 people Sprint 1 — Discovery
Total ~12 weeks Cost index 1.00×
TTB · 1 architect + AI Day 1 — Already in code
Total 14 days Cost index 0.30×

This isn't fewer ceremonies. It's different physics. One person who can hold the whole architecture in their head, plus an AI that types faster than anyone alive — versus eight people coordinating handoffs.

Get a real estimate

Three ways we work with you.

Most clients start with one engagement and grow from there. All three are run personally by Roger — there is no junior team you'll be handed off to.

— 01 / FIXED-PRICE BUILD

Ruby on Rails Development

Greenfield apps, MVPs, modernization, Rails 8 upgrades, performance work. Two-week sprints, daily demos, fixed price agreed before we start.

Rails 8Hotwire Solid QueuePostgres KamalStripe
See Rails offering →
— 02 / AI ENGINEERING

AI inside your product, done right.

RAG systems, agentic workflows, on-prem LLM serving, function-calling pipelines. We build AI features that hold up in production, not demos that hold up on Twitter.

RAGOpenAI Anthropicpgvector AgentsMCP
See AI offering →
— 03 / ADVISORY

Fractional CTO & Architecture

For founders without a senior engineer in the room: hiring, tech selection, due diligence, architecture review, the call you need before you sign that contract.

CTO-as-a-serviceDue diligence HiringArchitecture
See Fractional CTO →
What your first two weeks look like

Day-by-day. No vibes.

A typical 14-day fixed-price engagement. We will never tell you "soon." We will tell you what's shipping today, today.

DAY 01 — KICK-OFF

Two-hour call. NDA. Spec written together.

You walk in with a problem, not a brief. We turn it into a one-page spec and a fixed price before lunch. If we can't, we say so.

Deliverable: signed spec + price
DAY 02 — REPO LIVE

Code in your GitHub. Staging URL by EOD.

We don't believe in "setup weeks." Rails 8 boilerplate, CI, Kamal deploy, staging on your domain — all done in a day.

Deliverable: deployable repo
DAY 03–07 — SPRINT 1

The hard half ships first.

The riskiest, most uncertain part of the spec — the integration that might not work, the data model that might collapse — is built first. Daily 15-min Loom updates with what's working and what isn't.

Deliverable: hard part live on staging
DAY 08 — DEMO

You touch the product. Out loud.

One-hour demo where you click through everything and react in real time. The list of changes goes straight into Sprint 2. No JIRA. No "story points."

Deliverable: prioritized change list
DAY 09–12 — SPRINT 2

Polish, edge cases, the rest of the scope.

Now that the architecture is proven, the rest is craftwork. AI types the boilerplate. We type the parts that matter: error handling, security, the bits an LLM gets subtly wrong.

Deliverable: feature-complete app
DAY 13 — UAT

You and your team try to break it.

We sit on a call while you find every edge case. Bugs go red on a board you can see. Most are fixed in the same call.

Deliverable: signed-off build
DAY 14 — PRODUCTION

Live. Domain, SSL, monitoring, runbook.

Deployed to your infrastructure (or ours, your call). Sentry, uptime monitoring, a one-page runbook for whoever's on call. You own the keys.

Deliverable: production app + handover
before it was 1.0 SPAARNDAM · NL · 2026
Who you'll actually be working with

I've been writing Rails since before it was 1.0, and I'll write yours myself.

My name is Roger Heykoop. I've shipped software for a living since 1991 and Ruby on Rails specifically since 2006. I've been the CTO of two companies, the lead architect on a Dutch government identity system, and the developer of an AI image platform with users in 40+ countries.

TTB exists because I got tired of watching agencies turn six-week problems into six-month invoices. AI changed the calculus. One senior engineer with the right tools is now genuinely, measurably faster than a Scrum team. So that's how I work — and what you pay for.

Years coding
35
Years on Rails
19
Apps in production
120+
Languages
EN · NL · DE
Last section. Then please call.

It's a phone call. That's the worst it can get.

No discovery deck. No 45-minute "qualification" call. 30 minutes, your problem, my opinion. If we're a fit, you'll know by minute 12.

Direct line — answered by Roger
+31 6 5123 6132
Mon–Fri, 09:00–18:00 CET · Currently available

OR
info@ttb.software