Ruboss is a boutique consulting firm focused on strategy and AI consulting and web development.
We own and operate Leanpub, the best way in the world to write, publish and sell an in-progress or completed ebook or online course. If you have a question about Leanpub, please email hello@leanpub.com and we’ll be happy to help.
Ruboss also provides consulting services. Our primary focus is on the following three areas:
- AI consulting including OpenAI prompt engineering and API integration with AWS Step Functions and AWS Lambda
- Strategy consulting including product strategy, pricing, positioning, process improvement and product naming
- Web development including modernizing legacy Ruby on Rails applications with GraphQL, Packwerk, Remix, React and Tailwind, legacy Ruby on Rails application maintenance, and greenfield web development projects with Remix
To learn more about each of these services, scroll down this page.
Our consulting process is flexible and lightweight, and is focused on understanding your context and delivering repeated, lasting value. We’d rather go deep with a few clients than shallow with many. The most important things for us in a client relationship are having shared values of trust and innovation, who we can work and communicate with effectively, and with whom there is mutual respect.
To get in touch, please email Peter Armstrong at peter@ruboss.com, or schedule an introductory Zoom call with Peter from our Calendly page.
Tell us about your project
AI Consulting - We provide AI consulting services.
Ruboss provides AI consulting services in the following two highly-specific areas:
- OpenAI prompt engineering
- OpenAI API integration with AWS Step Functions and AWS Lambda
With this service, our consulting work can range from sharing our knowledge and experience with your technical team, to building solutions for you and handing them off to your team to maintain, to building and maintaining solutions for the long term.
Learn more about these three areas below.
- OpenAI prompt engineering. We’ve been using the OpenAI API at Leanpub for about a year, using it to translate entire computer programming and data science books into dozens of languages, and even to do AI copy editing and ghostwriting. So, our team has gotten really good at prompt engineering OpenAI.
Our ideal client for these services is an organization which wants help with prompt engineering the OpenAI API or Open Source AI APIs to do something interesting, and who wants to get up to speed quickly and effectively. - OpenAI API integration with AWS Step Functions and AWS Lambda. Besides getting good at AI prompt engineering from our work with the OpenAI API at Leanpub, we’ve alse gotten really good at OpenAI API integration. We’ve been using the OpenAI API in production workflows at Leanpub for over nine months, using AWS Step Functions for process orchestration, and integrating with the OpenAI API using AWS Lambda. We’ve learned a lot about how to use the OpenAI API effectively, and how to build complex business processes which are resilient against API failures and timeouts. We can leverage our experience to help you build AI-powered workflows effectively too.
Our ideal client for these services is an organization which wants to use the OpenAI API to build business processes, and wants help doing so in a reliable and observable way.
Strategy Consulting - We provide strategy consulting services.
Ruboss provides strategy consulting. Our experience both with building Leanpub (since 2010) and with helping consulting clients (since 2008) gives us a unique perspective.
- Our ideal client for these services is a senior executive or an executive team either at an established organization or a startup who wants an intellectual sparring partner to discuss strategy ideas with on an occasional, ongoing basis.
- The direction this takes is up to you, but can include topics such as product strategy, pricing, positioning, process improvement, product naming, to anything else you want help with processing. We’ve probably been through a lot of the same things you’re going through, and we may have a useful perspective on them.
- We don’t have all the answers, but we can help you think through the questions.
Web Development - We provide web development consulting services.
Ruboss provides web development consulting services in the following three highly-specific areas:
- Modernizing legacy Ruby on Rails applications with GraphQL, Packwerk, Remix, React and Tailwind
- Legacy Ruby on Rails application maintenance
- Greenfield web development projects with Remix
Learn more about these three areas below.
- Modernizing legacy Ruby on Rails applications with GraphQL, Packwerk, Remix, React and Tailwind. We’re doing this work ourselves with Leanpub, so we have deep experience refactoring, modularizing and connecting legacy Ruby on Rails applications to modern web and mobile user interfaces. The stack we use includes GraphQL, Packwerk, React, Remix, Tailwind CSS and other related technologies. We can help you leverage your years of investment in your existing codebase, using it as the foundation for your next decade of growth—instead of taking on the huge risk of a rewrite for questionable business value.
We’re really good at adding dynamic user interfaces on top of Rails backends, and we’ve been doing this for a very long time: our founder, Peter Armstrong, even wrote a Manning book on how to build Adobe Flex applications on top of Ruby on Rails way back in 2007, and we built Leanpub’s storefront in React talking to Rails back in 2015, back when React was really new. (Building a modern web user interface on top of a Rails backend has a lot of conceptual similarities with building a Flex application on top of a Rails backend, just with different front-end and data serialization technologies. We think of this approach as a “reverse mullet”: party in the front, business in the back.)
Our ideal client for these services is an organization which has built a large Ruby on Rails codebase over the years, and who wants help with modularizing it and connecting it to a modern web user interface built with React and Remix, using GraphQL as the plumbing. - Legacy Ruby on Rails application maintenance. When considering refactoring or modernizing a Ruby on Rails application, sometimes the right thing to do is to just maintain it instead. We can help you with that too: we’ve been working with Rails since 2008.
Our ideal client for these services is an organization which has a legacy Ruby on Rails application which is still providing value, and who wants to keep it running smoothly and keep it secure for the foreseeable future. - Greenfield web development projects with Remix. For a new web project, we recommend Remix, React, Prisma, Tailwind CSS, TailwindUI and other related technologies. We can help you launch quickly on a solid foundation for growth, using modern web technologies that will scale as you do.
Our ideal client for these services is either a startup building something new or a larger organization building a new product or service.