Every so often, someone in the Ruby community will ask,
“So… what does Planet Argon actually do these days?”
Fair question.
We’re not a startup factory.
We don’t parachute in to build a shiny MVP, disappear, and leave you with a maintenance headache.
Most of our work begins after the launch party.
We get the call when the freelancer moves on.
When the agency shifts its focus.
When the last in-house developer, the one who knows every corner of the codebase, decides it’s time to retire.
It’s rarely a crisis.
It’s usually a quiet realization…
“This system runs part of our business. We can’t afford for it to fail… but we don’t need a full-time team to babysit it.”
That’s where we come in.
Maybe it’s a nonprofit whose original freelancer built their Rails app years ago and has since moved on. The app still runs their core operations, but no one has touched dependencies or upgrades in ages. They just need a steady hand to bring it up to date and keep it safe.
Or it’s a company that hired a creative agency to build a beautiful customer portal. The agency has moved on to new projects, and now the client just needs someone dependable to keep it healthy, fix bugs, and plan for what’s next.
Sometimes it’s a long-time engineer getting ready to retire… the one who built and maintained an internal system that quietly powers part of the business. Leadership doesn’t want to rebuild a whole dev team. They just want to make sure the software ends up in good hands.
These are the calls we get.
We take over the systems that keep organizations moving… the internal tools, customer portals, and business-critical Rails apps that quietly power something larger. They’re not the business, but they’re essential to it.
We step in, steady the ground, document what exists, and help plan what’s next.
Here’s the part most people miss:
Maintaining software isn’t “keeping the lights on.”
It’s innovation… the quiet kind.
It’s the discipline of protecting momentum instead of resetting it.
The craft of helping teams evolve what they already have instead of pretending a rewrite will fix their habits.
Rewrites aren’t always progress.
Sometimes they’re just an expensive way to forget what you’ve already learned.
So we focus on the in-between years… the seasons where your software still works but needs care, clarity, and a path forward.
We modernize what matters, archive what doesn’t, and give teams confidence that their systems will keep running while they decide the bigger questions:
- Should we extend this?
- Replace it?
- Retire it?
That’s the second act we specialize in.
Not the spotlight moment… the sustained performance that follows.
Because good software deserves a second act.
And someone dependable to keep the lights on when everyone else chases the next big thing.
🌍 About Planet Argon
For the past 20+ years, Planet Argon has helped organizations sustain and evolve the software they depend on, often Ruby on Rails applications that have outlasted the people who built them.
We help teams reduce risk, modernize their systems, and build a plan for what’s next.
If that sounds like a challenge your organization is facing, we’d love to hear from you.
