I help founders and engineering leaders decide what to fix, what to build, and how to move established Rails products forward. Architecture guidance, modernization planning, and technical direction grounded in 20+ years of production experience.
I work alongside your developers or delivery partner. My focus is technical direction, reviews, and decisions; your team handles implementation.
As tech lead, I led a distributed Rails team, rebuilt the inventory and order system, and redesigned warehouse scanning workflows. The workflow changes increased throughput by approximately 50%.
The same engagement reduced test runtime from an hour to five minutes.
As lead developer, I built the SaaS product from the start and managed a small team as it grew to thousands of daily users.
Experience spanning architecture, team leadership, and the needs of a growing product.
For Rails businesses with a development team. Choose focused advice or ongoing support.
When delivery slows or technical risk is unclear.
Interviews with your team and a review of the relevant system, architecture, and delivery process.
You receive: A written assessment of the main risks, priorities, and recommended next steps.
Before committing to an upgrade, rewrite, or significant AI feature.
Review the options and tradeoffs, agree a practical sequence, and support your team through key technical decisions.
You receive: A modernization plan and agreed review checkpoints for the implementation team.
When your team needs regular senior technical guidance.
Architecture and roadmap reviews, mentoring, hiring input, and scheduled decision meetings with founders or engineering leaders.
You receive: A regular advisory cadence with written decisions, priorities, and follow-up actions.
We first discuss your business, team, and the decision you need to make. I then propose a paid engagement with a defined scope, deliverables, fee, and timeline. For ongoing work, we agree meeting time, review capacity, and response expectations before starting.
I work alongside your developers or delivery partner. My focus is technical direction, reviews, and decisions; your team handles implementation.
“Please meet Miha Plohl, former lead Rails engineer here at Nadine West. I think Miha is an exceptional engineer and that some company will be lucky to have him. I fully vouch for his talent and his work ethic.”
“Miha is self-starting and always motivated to stay on top of the game. I was lucky to hire him to build and scale my startup idea. I would have not made it without Manitu.”
“Our bloated test suite was trimmed down and groomed, it now runs fast and is easy to change and maintain. We are definitely recommending Manitu to our business partners.”
Founder of eternalfriend.io, building the next generation of software for artists and crafters. Alongside it, independent consulting: integrating AI into production Rails systems and designing classification pipelines.
Led a distributed Rails team, rebuilt the inventory & order system, cut test runtime 12x, redesigned warehouse workflows for ~50% more throughput.
Built a Rails monolith on Shopify's GraphQL API, a WebRTC video chat component, and the company's manufacturing resource planning software.
Cut test suite time from 3h to 20 minutes, upgraded Rails 5.2 → 6 in under 14 days, replaced Jenkins with CircleCI.
Architected parts of a Rails 4 app, upgraded a legacy Rails 3 app, integrated the Worldpay payment API, mentored a team of five.
Scaled a Spree-based Rails webshop from one storefront to six localized shops worldwide, in a large remote-first team.
Built a SaaS product end-to-end and scaled it from zero to thousands of daily users, managing a small, lean team.
Plus earlier roles founding and leading Rails + iOS startups, and three years as a Java/J2EE engineer.
I started building software as a teenager, went professional over 20 years ago, and have shipped production code across retail, manufacturing, e-commerce and SaaS ever since — as a developer, a tech lead, and occasionally the whole engineering department.
Since 2006 I've worked independently under manitu, Rails-inspired, based below the Julian Alps in Slovenia, remote-first before remote-first was a category. I've led distributed teams, upgraded legacy Rails apps whenever the business needed it and built a SaaS product from its first line of code to thousands of daily users.
Today I bring that experience to technical advisory work with founders and development teams. I also build eternalfriend.io, software for artists and crafters.
Good technical advice connects the needs of the business with a plan the team can carry out.
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Tell me what your business does, who develops your product, and what you need to resolve. We can discuss whether an assessment or ongoing advisory support would help.