Joel Gaff, Jr.

Why I'm a fit for OmbuLabs' Software Engineer Contractor (Ruby on Rails)

Here's what the posting asks for, and what I've actually done.

Ruby, Rails, Git, JavaScript

Four-plus years of Ruby on Rails across nearly a dozen production apps. Partita Doppia, Grateful Deploy, and Home HQ run on Rails 8 with Hotwire, and I've written a TypeScript phone web app.

Writing simple, clear code that is easy to maintain

I build in the 37signals style on purpose: one Rails monolith, Hotwire, and SQLite. Fewer moving parts means less to maintain.

Maintenance and keeping apps healthy

I maintain every app I've shipped myself, including migrations, DNS, and deploys, and I built Grateful Deploy to see each app's version, health, and memory and roll back with a button.

Testing

Partita Doppia and Grateful Deploy ship with Minitest suites (model, integration, and system tests) and a pre-push hook.

Code reviews on pull requests

I've had pull requests reviewed and merged into Omarchy, omarchy-time-machine, and omacaffeine.

Communicating with and demoing work to clients

I co-host The Pingback Podcast with Greg Molnar, talking about Rails and indie products, and I write at joelgaff.com.

Capable of making important decisions, both detail-oriented and practical

As a manager of one I make every product and technical call on my apps, and execute without supervision.

Remote

I'm in Portland, Oregon, on Pacific Time.

To be upfront: I write tests with Minitest rather than RSpec, and I deploy with Kamal rather than Heroku.