About
The Company
- A small software development company based in London, UK.
- A group of exceptionally talented and experienced developers.
- We are a co-operative, and everyone in Free Range works directly with our clients.
This means that when we accept a project, we are directly invested in your success; our reputation depends on it.
What we do
- Build software for the web.
- Anything from B2C, to B2B and internal systems.
- Work for startups and established companies, large or small.
- Current tool of choice is Ruby on Rails.
How we work?
Software is alive
- We know that software is not a static artefact and so cannot be described by a static spec or plan.
- It needs to grow and evolve according to its environment, to best suit the needs of its users.
- These needs change over time, even as the software is being built.
- By getting early and regular feedback from users in real scenarios, we can identify and fulfill these needs.
- By not compromising on quality and by avoiding unnecessary complexity, we can keep the system flexible and adaptable.
Always a product
- We deliver working software every week, giving you visibility of tangible progress.
- We develop your product incrementally, making the most valuable features available as early as possible.
- We work iteratively, refining functionality based on feedback from you and your users.
- By keeping your options open, you have complete control over your budget.
Collaboration
- We want to work in partnership towards a shared goal.
- We will challenge you and expect you to challenge us.
Our Work
TheAuteurs.com
TheAuteurs.com is an 'ongoing, online film festival', where you can watch choice films from around the world, and interact with other cineophiles to get great recommendations about what you should be watching. It's a great site which we use daily.
Free Range is collaborating with The Auteurs to bring new features to their community. As a significant and established application, we're also working to ensure that they can continue to rapidly develop their site without compromising on code quality.
New Leaders
We've worked together with New Leaders in California to build a number of web applications for their clients, from event management to weight loss tools.
We've also helped them improve their development process by sharing our architecture and testing expertise.
Open source projects
Members of Free Range are also typically the authors of many open source projects. Here's a sample of a few of them.
Presentations
Members of Free Range given the following talks :-
- The Even-Darker Art of Rails Engines at Rails Conf, 2009
- One code base, Many projects at LRUG, November 2008
- Best practice techniques for Rails developers at Future of Web Apps, October 2008
- Exploring the Server Side: Rails + Django at @media, September 2008
- The Dark Art of Developing Plugins at RubyFools, April 2008
- The Dark Art of Developing Plugins at Rails Conf, 2007
- Mock Objects in Ruby at LRUG July 2007
- Extending Rails with Plugins at QCon London, March 2007
acts_as_hasselhoffat AjaxWorld, October 2006- It's fun to use Ruby for Evil at Canada On Rails, April 2006
Hack Days
Members of Free Range have given up their time to take part in a number of "hack days" :-
- free.near.me at EcoMo09
- ActivePlaces Reloaded at National Hack the Government Day, 2009
- Graphs for the Office for National Statistics at National Hack the Government Day, 2009
- Subterranean Homesick News at Mashed08
The Team
James Adam
James is a long-time Rubyist and one of the instigators of LRUG and Ruby Manor. Since finishing his PhD, he's been building applications using Ruby and Rails, including work on theauteurs.com and Reevoo.
James wrote the book on Rails plugins, and maintains a whole bunch of open source libraries, including Vanilla.rb, soup and the engines plugin for Rails.
James Andrews
James has been working with the web since founding development and hosting agency Blue Sky in 1995, which he sold in 2002 to cScape Group Plc, where he continued as a director for a further 6 years. He also founded web analytics software company WebAbacus.
James has been writing software in various languages for over 25 years and has been building Ruby on Rails based applications for clients since 2006, including Bloom & Co. and Bowen Craggs & Co..
Jason Cale
Jason prides himself on being a hybrid, passionate about design & programming. He has been instrumental in driving the design and development direction on numerous online projects. Working with clients such as The Walt Disney Company, Twentieth Century Fox, fashion designer Margaret Howell, startups such as Tipped, Threadme and most recently an online briefing tool for the advertising industry called Ideapi.
James Mead
Since spending a couple of years as an electronic engineer on an Antarctic research station (yes, it was cold; no, there weren’t any polar bears), James has spent the last 15 years developing software at a number of consultancies and startups in the UK and US. After a stint at Thoughtworks working for clients like Dixons, AOL & Fidelity, he was the first employee at Reevoo, an early adopter of Ruby on Rails.
Since going freelance earlier this year, he’s helped Headshift develop the website for Antony Gormley’s One & Other project. He’s the author of Mocha, a popular Ruby testing framework.
Luke Redpath
Luke has been writing web apps for almost ten years and in late 2008, he released his first iPhone application, Squeemote. Before this, he worked at Reevoo as part of one of the best Rails development teams in the country.
He's a big fan of both writing and contributing to open-source software, including Rails, RSpec and more recently, Gemcutter. His own open-source libraries include Clickatell, a library for interfacing with the Clickatell SMS gateway and SimpleConfig, a declarative application configuration Rails plugin which was developed whilst working at Reevoo.
Kalvir Sandhu
Kalv started building applications almost ten years ago. After gaining a Computer Science Degrees from Southampton Uni he has worked with Java, Perl and PHP but for the last 2 years only used Ruby. Some of the things he's worked on would be JGP a large public sector recruitment site, Hophive a hyperlocal content aggregator startup and recently twitterfeed by rebuilding the processing of 600k+ rss feeds to twitter in Ruby.
He spends most of this time working with technology startups, changing the way local government use technology or pushing projects that aim to open up the government data.
Tom Ward
Tom is a software developer passionate about building and improving the web. Though his background is in J2EE, he has embraced Ruby On Rails as a platform and become a respected contributor.
You can see some of the code he's written on github.
