About Berube Consulting

Berube Consulting is the advisory practice of David Berube. It's where the diagnosis and the plan come from: when a system is too slow, too tangled, or too important to guess at, this is who you call to understand what's actually wrong and decide what to do about it.

The work is acute rather than ongoing — a database that has hit a wall, a production failure nobody can reproduce, a codebase that has outgrown the team's grasp. What you're buying is judgment under pressure: twenty years of having seen the failure modes before, applied by David directly, not a junior assigned to your account.

The practice diagnoses and plans; it doesn't build. When a diagnosis leads to implementation, that work is handled through Durable Programming, LLC, a separate firm where David works with a small team of full-stack engineers. The two are kept separate on purpose. You can engage Berube Consulting purely for diagnosis and strategy, take the plan to your own team, or have Durable carry it out — there's no assumption that an assessment turns into a larger project.

About David Berube

David Berube has spent over twenty years building, scaling, and troubleshooting software systems. He co-founded Casting Frontier in 2006 and served as its technical lead through its 2020 acquisition by Talent Systems; the platform he architected included a database of more than 800,000 actors and supported commercial casting used, directly or indirectly, across much of the Fortune 100.

His strengths sit in the corner of the field least exposed to automation: database performance, troubleshooting large complex systems under load, and an unusual ability to walk into an unfamiliar codebase and work out how it actually behaves — not how it was meant to. AI can write a function; it can't tell you why a 500,000-line system is falling over in production. That judgment is the product.

Alongside the consulting work, he has written several books on software development, including "Practical Rails Gems" and "Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails," spoken at conferences internationally, and published technical articles distributed in more than 65 countries, in publications including Dr. Dobb's Journal, Linux Magazine, IBM DeveloperWorks, and PHP International Magazine. In the open source community he was involved with the AmphetaDesk project, developing Win32 GUI code, and has chaired user groups and organized seminars.

Acclaim for Mr. Berube

"David Berube is highly recommended as a programmer and developer. He single handedly saved our project from imminent ruin. He has proven most professional in his conduct. He is extremely fast and efficient. Most importantly, David really knows his code. I recommend him highly."

 — Joey Rubenstein, President, Casting Frontier

"I hired David Berube to evaluate a custom built portal… He was able to offer constructive criticism to the developer, pick up on issues that needed to addressed immediately. His report has saved us time by giving easy an more effective ways of building this portal and other projects we are working on. I would highly recommend Mr. Berube."

 — Dave Lapierre, dlgresults.com

"Our company came to David with general questions about our Ruby on Rails shopping cart project. I described how we were building our shopping cart, and how we planned to implement the shipping and billing features. Thanks to David's experience, he instantly knew what pitfalls to avoid, and gave reassurance that we were headed on the right path. I found him friendly and knowledgeable, not just about Rails, but about software development and programming in general – he even recommended some great books! Next time I feel stuck on a huge project, I won't hesitate to give David a call."

 — Fred Alger

"I needed a modification done to my phpAdsNew server code, and not only did David deliver the modification I needed, but did it at a reasonable price and had the code in my hands in less than a couple of hours. You can't beat that!"

 — Tim L. Walker

"I recently had the pleasure of hearing David Berube speak to a group of technologists on the topic of "Making Money Using Open Source Software". His presentation was both informative and entertaining. As an experienced entrepreneur and Free Software advocate, I know that his insights were on the mark."

 — Greg Rundlett, FREePHILE

Get in Touch

If you have a system that's slow, fragile, or hard to reason about, I'm glad to talk it through and give you an honest read on it. An initial conversation costs nothing and carries no obligation to go further.

Phone: (603) 574-4766