Why Your Company Needs A Rails Development Shop

In this new blog series, Why Your Company Needs a Rails Development Shop, we’ll discuss why it makes sense to turn to a reputable Rails development company for web application development. In a new market saturated with Ruby and Ruby on Rails buzz, it can be hard to determine who the experts are and where to find them. We hope this series unveils some of those challenges and how using a Rails development shop can alleviate some of the headaches in making decisions about development.

In this first article of the series we’ll focus on the current climate of the Rails job market and how it complicates the process of finding and securing talented developers.

First, A Brief History

Since its release in 2005, Ruby on Rails has forged an incredible legacy for itself. Rails has been widely adopted as an ideal framework for creating web applications by companies large and small, and has been supported by a uniquely driven development community. Apple’s announcement that Ruby on Rails would ship with OSX v10.5 in 2006 helped to solidify the future of Rails in the business world.

Thanks to those early adopters and evangelists, Rails is now a legitimate and successful framework that is being put to use by some of the most prestigious and highly-trafficked web sites around the world, including Scribd, Groupon, Twitter, Amazon, NASA and more.

Growing Need For Rails Experts

As Rails has become more mainstream the demand for Rails developers has increased significantly. Today there are thousands of companies looking for expert Rails developers to help bring their ideas to the web quickly and efficiently. Trend analysis from Indeed.com shows just how radical the shift in the Rails job market has been in the last 5 years:

ruby on rails Job Trends

Ruby On Rails jobs

Rails allows you to build robust, scalable and competitive web applications quickly – of course you want a Rails app. But the task of assembling a team of expert Rails developers is a complicated process.

Advantages Of Hiring A Rails Company In A Competitive Rails Market

With an increasing number of companies realizing they need Rails development to keep them competitive, and an almost equivalent number of new Rails developers looking for work, how do you make sure you hire the right expert to develop your web application? Here’s a hint: Hire a Rails Development Company. This may seem like an obvious solution, but we’ve worked with enough rescue projects to know that oftentimes companies try to bring Rails developers in-house before they turn to a Rails company.

Turning to a seasoned Rails development company to build your web application can give you certain advantages over hiring your own Rails developers directly:

  • Rails is young: It’s hard to evaluate Rails developers – after all, the framework is only a few years old, which means that unlike Java and C developers, Rails devs won’t have years of experience to consider. And programmers aren’t studying Ruby on Rails in college, so their experience will be limited to recent projects. A Rails company has a better understanding of the language and how to vet the developers.
  • Rails developers are in high-demand: The quickly growing Rails market, combined with a lack of traditional education in Rails means that Rails developers are hard to come by. The demand for good Rails developers is incredibly high (as illustrated by the graph above). A Rails company is continually scouting for the best Rails talent and has managed to secure top-notch developers in the Rails landscape.
  • The Community: The Rails community is a forceful and dynamic ecosystem. The community drives and supports the framework, works to nurture and teach incoming developers, and evangelizes best practices. In order to hire expert Rails developers to build your application it helps to be immersed in that community. The top Rails companies, including Intridea, understand the ecosystem and are an integral part of it. This makes it easier for us to distinguish the talented developers from the fledgling Rubyists. We know how to find and hire the best Rails developers out there, so you don’t have to.
  • Depth of experience: If a Rails company has been around long enough, you can bet that they’ve been solving lots of complex problems. At Intridea, our Rails developers have worked with hundreds of clients and every day they architect new systems, solve new problems, and think critically about design and implementation. By relying on a Rails shop you’re getting more than just a talented team of developers – you’re getting the aggregate real-world experiences of a large team of experts. These experts would be harder for you to find on your own in this competitive Rails market!

Rails shops already know how to find top Ruby on Rails developers – you don’t have to spend time interviewing, hiring, and training a new team of Rails developers to create your web application when Rails companies have already done the work to assemble teams of bright and talented developers.

Summary

When you need to take your product to the web, find a reputable Rails development company – and have the peace of mind in knowing that your application is being architected, designed and deployed by a team of developers that was handcrafted and optimized for excellence. You can’t afford to trust your application to unknown variables. The Rails community is saturated with varying levels of programmers and the culture is close-knit and potentially difficult for an outsider to navigate; finding the right talent for your project can be difficult. In the words of Stephen King:

“Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.”

It’s not enough to trust your application development to someone talented. You’ve got to have a team of developers that work hard, value quality code, are efficient, and care deeply about their work. By outsourcing your application development to a Rails shop you’re tapping into a pool of successful, proven Ruby on Rails experts.

In future posts of this new series, Why Your Company Needs a Rails Development Shop, we’ll talk about additional advantages to contracting your application development to reputable Rails shops, and why relying on experts is so vital in this fierce market.

About Intridea

We create custom web and mobile solutions for businesses large and small across a range of industries – from Healthcare, Government, IT, Education, Arts, Real Estate, Insurance and more. Our team of designers, architects and developers can work with you every step of the way to bring your vision to life on the web. Contact us today to find out more!