Fritz Grabo

I'm a self-employed senior software engineer and consultant with 20+ years experience in building, scaling and operating web applications, neatly tucked away near the woods in Austria with my partner and our two kids.

I'm passionate about solving challenging and meaningful problems that help make the world a better place, through collaboration, deep thinking, and software.

Let's talk if you …

• Got a stuck team, move too slow? I embed remotely with your team for weeks or months to boost velocity hands-on, get projects back on track, and level everyone up along the way.

• Have an idea, but no one to build it? I build custom software. Using boring, battle-tested technology and leveraging a trusted network of specialists as needed, I turn your concept into solid and scalable software ready for production.

• Unsure if you're on the right track? I share my experience. Drawing from 20+ years of experience both in fast-growing startups and established enterprises, I provide actionable guidance on typical challenges like taming code complexity, enabling growth, automating operations, etc.

Focus areas: while I enjoy working on all parts and levels of a system, I specialize in backend architecture, implementation and operations. 15 years worth of expertise in Ruby on Rails in all shapes and sizes is the secret super power that lets me build capable, high-quality services, fast. Recently, I've been diving into modern Server Side Rendering approaches like Hotwire to bridge the backend/frontend divide.

Technology: my preferred stack includes Ruby, Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, and HTML / CSS / Hotwire, with lots of experience in Python and FastAPI, too. For operations, I'm comfortable with everything from old-school root servers to modern cloud solutions like Google Cloud or Kubernetes.

If that sounds like a match, do reach out!

I've worked with these awesome folks on many, many successful projects throughout the years. We regularly team up to tackle the challenging, bigger projects together: Wolfgang, Christoph, Rainer.

• Check out the "now" page to see what I'm doing now.
• Flip through the blog posts for more in-depth thoughts on life Emacs, mostly.
• Browse the GitHub profile if you're interested in my Open Source work.