Midas
Financial primitives
Turn complexity into clarity.
A Rails engine providing a single source of truth for currency values using a polymorphic Coin ledger.
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v0.5.0
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WHITTAKERTECH / RUBY & RAILS
Ruby and Rails tools, with the work behind them.
Explore the gems, applications, and engineering decisions that make up WhittakerTech.
Our Mission
Software should become boring.
Reliable software doesn't demand your attention. It does what it says it does, handles the strange cases, and quietly gets out of your way.
At WhittakerTech, we build tools that put complexity where it belongs — inside the software — so you can focus on your work, not the machinery behind it.
Reliable
Boring code you don't have to think about
We build software that does what it says it does, handles the edge cases, and keeps working — so your day stays focused on what matters.
Modular
Small pieces with clear boundaries
Components should be understandable alone, composable together, and replaceable without unraveling the system.
Understandable
Code should explain itself
Prefer clarity to cleverness: familiar patterns, intentional abstractions, and documentation where the code can't tell the whole story.
Products
Tools we build and maintain
How I Help
Rails Architecture & Technical Leadership
- Fractional CTO support for teams without senior technical direction
- Architecture assessments using 4+1 and system-level mapping
- Refactoring plans that reduce risk instead of spreading it around
- Guidance on roadmap, trade-offs, and long-term maintainability
System Rescue, Performance & Reliability
- Debugging brittle asynchronous pipelines and background jobs
- Eliminating race conditions and data integrity issues
- Performance tuning (throughput, latency, memory, N+1, indexing, etc.)
- Infrastructure modernization with Docker, CI/CD, and observability
Modernization & Migration
- Upgrading legacy Rails apps to supported, secure versions
- Resolving UTF-8 / internationalization issues blocking global users
- Stabilizing deploy pipelines and integrating with third-party APIs
- Designing safer paths away from “big bang” rewrites
Recent Impact
- 1,361 images processed in 2 minutes after redesigning an async image-processing pipeline
- 60% memory reduction by migrating from Heroku buildpacks to a modern Docker-based deployment strategy
- 118 failing tests resolved while upgrading a legacy choir-management system to current Ruby and Rails
- High-risk concurrency bugs eliminated in a legal hearing scheduling platform where tests were passing but data was failing
- Global UTF-8 encoding failures corrected, restoring international customer onboarding and search
These aren’t theoretical exercises—they’re real systems, in production, under real constraints.
What Clients Say
"Lee's contributions have significantly improved the efficiency and effectiveness of the Enterprise Program Management Office (EPMO), Benefits and Memorial (BAM) Services Portfolio, enabling the delivery of critical technology solutions to support the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) and National Cemetery Administration (NCA)."
"Lee absolutely raised the bar for our entire product line in that regard. He presented all of his findings and desired path forward to our internal Architectural Review Board, and his presentation received glowing reviews."
Recent Writing
I document real-world case studies from my work—what broke, why it mattered, how we fixed it, and the outcomes.
Finishing the Sentence Rails Starts: How to Build Safe, Explicit Polymorphic Joins Without Raw SQL or Framework Monkey-Patching
January 21, 2026 — Ruby on Rails, Software Architecture
Rails avoids polymorphic joins by design—but real systems often have deterministic cases. Here’s how reflection, Arel, and explicit opt-in can make…
From Solo Practitioner to Team Multiplier: How Nine Years of Full-Stack Mastery Became a Four-Day Sprint That Changed How I Think About Technical Leadership
November 26, 2025 — Ruby on Rails, Software Development, Technical Leadership
How 9 years of solo full-stack experience translated into 2.5x team velocity through systemic architectural prep. First sprint planning delivered p…
Processing 1,361 Images in 2 Minutes: The Architectural Shift That Turned a Slow Rails Pipeline into a High-Throughput, Asynchronous System
November 25, 2025 — Ruby on Rails, Performance Engineering, Async Architecture
How we rebuilt a legacy synchronous Paperclip + S3 image pipeline into a fully asynchronous architecture—cutting processing time from 11 hours to 2…
Who I Work With
- SaaS and product companies whose Rails apps are critical to revenue
- Growing teams that need senior architecture guidance without a full-time CTO
- Founders and engineering leaders facing scaling, reliability, or modernization challenges
- Organizations preparing for audits, investor scrutiny, or major growth
If your system feels fragile, slow, or risky, you don’t just need “more code.”
You need clear architecture, calm leadership, and a plan.
Let’s Work Together
Whether you’re fighting production fires, planning a major upgrade, or preparing your platform for the next stage of growth, I can help you stabilize your foundation and move forward with confidence.
Ready to talk?
Get in touch →
Clear architecture. Stable systems. Confident delivery.