spi·nel (spɪ’nɛl) n.

1. (mineralogy) Mixed oxides of magnesium and aluminium with cubic symmetry, used as gemstones. Some of the world’s most famous gemstones are spinels, which were once thought to be rubies.
2. Open source maintainers obsessed with developer experience.

We make engineering teams more productive.

Faster features, shorter tests, fewer incidents, and more frequent deploys. We’ve done that at companies like Gusto, 37Signals, and One Medical, and we can do it for you.

With decades of experience, we can find you the right tool, cut off your research rabbit-holes, and level up your developers. We can build the feedback loop of speed, quality, and joy that Ruby and Rails are famous for, at a fraction of the cost of an in-house team¹.

How it works

• We build best-in-class open source tools to increase your team’s productivity.
• We answer questions and work with your engineers to hone their skills.
• We help architect to prevent outages and failures before they even happen.
• For less than one salary, we multiply the output of every engineer.

Email us to get started today.

Our background

Our team has spent years building the tools you use every day, and either created or has been on the core team of the open source projects behind every Ruby business:

• rails, the Ruby web application framework
• hotwire (turbo + stimulus), the default front-end framework for Rails
• hotwire native, a web-first framework for building native mobile apps
• trix, the rich-text WYSIWYG content editor for Rails
• kredis, higher-level data structures built on redis
• rbenv + ruby-build, the original Ruby version management tools
• rubygems, the Ruby standard library package manager
• bundler, the Ruby standard library dependency manager
• rubygems.org, the Ruby language package registry

Our newest tool is rv, the next-generation Ruby version and project manager.

Our team

André Arko helped create the Ruby dependency manager Bundler in 2009 and led the team of maintainers working on Bundler and RubyGems.org from 2014 to 2025. As a fan of the Ruby language, he wrote The Ruby Way, 3rd Edition for Addison-Wesley. Outside of open source, he has spent the last 15 years consulting on tools and processes to make software teams safer, faster, and more productive.

Kasper Timm Hansen was on the Rails core team from 2016-2022, is the top 14th contributor, authored major features and reviewed & merged thousands of contributor pull requests. These days Kasper’s focus is on helping teams upskill, as well as Domain Modeling for Rails apps — including inventing the riffing technique to do so. Kasper still pushes Rails forward with gems like Oaken, ActiveRecord::AssociatedObject, ActiveJob::Performs, and ActionController::StashedRedirects.

Sam Stephenson is a veteran Rubyist and member of the original Rails core team. He created Prototype.js, the Pow development server, and rbenv and ruby-build to manage Ruby versions. Later, he led development of the Trix rich text editor and Stimulus Javascript framework. He also invented the technology behind Turbo and Hotwire Native. In 2024, Sam released N₁₀, a Mac app to help people stay focused on short-term goals while they work. He lives in Mexico City where he likes to feed the squirrels.

David Rodríguez is the number one contributor to Bundler & RubyGems, and was primary maintainer from 2018 to 2025. During this time, he fixed many longstanding bugs, migrated to to a state-of-the-art resolver, and brought a fast release cadence to the projects, managing the release of more than a hundred versions. He has also worked on the Dependabot system at GitHub, helping everyone keep their dependencies secure in dozens of languages. He lives in Madrid, where he is a proud carless but careful person.

Why Spinel?

Multiply your developers’ time. Work on business problems, not tooling problems.

Ship faster. Send us an email today.