I’m looking for a full stack Ruby developer to help me build tools for startups and makers.

You’ll be working with me on these projects:

• Startup Jobs, job board for startups.
• BetaList, helps startups get their first users.
• WIP, a community of makers working in public.

It’s a remote, part-time freelancing gig starting with 1-2 days per week depending on your rate. It might grow into full-time if things go well and if you’re up for it.

Who you are:

• Can clearly communicate complex ideas
• Comfortable working remote and by yourself
• Self-motivated to ship early and often
• Prefer pragmatic solutions over theoretical computer science
• Minimum availability of 2 days per week
• Ruby developer with extensive experience
• If you have other work commitments, those allow you to work for me too

This is not a junior position. If you’re not familiar with concepts like SOLID, OOP, inheritance and refactoring please do not apply.

Who I am:

I’m Marc Köhlbrugge, the founder of BetaList, Startup Jobs, WIP, and others. I’m doing a lot of different work activities (development, design, sales, marketing, etc). You’ll be working directly with me.

What you’ll work on:

As mentioned before you’ll work on Startup Jobs, BetaList, and WIP. The codebases are quite similar. We’ll start off simple with just one codebase.

You’ll be working the full stack. Both back-end (Ruby on Rails) and front-end (HTML, CSS, Javascript). You’ll also design basic screens, but you don’t need to be a great designer.

Some examples GitHub issues that we’ll be working on soon:

• Replace location auto-complete on Startup Jobs with a new source because Algolia Places is deprecated
• Allow one-click unsubscribes from WIP notifications and onboarding emails on
• Add regular email signup to BetaList (currently only supports Twitter OAuth)

Tech stack

• Ruby on Rails 6
• Devise, and other popular gems
• Rspec, Capybara
• Hotwire / Turbo / Stimulus
• HAML (Easy to learn if you don’t know it)
• Heroku and Render for hosting (I expect minimal DevOps work)

How we’ll work:

We’ll communicate via Telegram chat with maybe a call every other month or so. I prefer to work asynchronously as much as possible. We’ll use GitHub Issues and Pull Requests to manage our workflow.

Typically your day will start by looking at the GitHub Issues I assigned to you. They will provide a high-level view of a feature, bug to fix, etc. I’ll leave it up to you of if you need more details, or are comfortable filling it yourself.

If any questions come up throughout the day, we discuss via chat. For more in-depth discussions we use GitHub Issues.

Once your PR is ready I’ll review it. I might have a few questions or make some minor suggestions. After you implement them, we’ll merge the PR into master and it gets deployed to production.

I’m an experienced Ruby developer myself, so hopefully we can learn from each other.

What you’ll get

• Money
• Work on cool products used by people like yourself
• First-row seat at what it’s like to build a small, bootstrapped business
• Lots of freedom and responsibility
• Bad jokes and memes

What to expect from the interviewing process

The interview process will be mostly async because that’s what work will be like. I’ll try to provide helpful feedback if you don’t get picked.

Round 1

• Ask me any questions you might have before applying ( hey@marckohlbrugge.com )
• Apply by filling out the questionnaire.
• I’ll review all applicants and might ask follow-up questions
• I’ll let you know if you made it through to the next round

Please only apply if you can share a codebase you worked on. I can’t assess your abilities without seeing examples.

Round 2

You will record ~20 minute video where you walk-through some of your code. Topics to include:

• An example of where you made a structural code change through extraction or another refactoring technique. Ideally you could show this using a Pull Request to make it clear what exactly changed.
• Test coverage of some kind. Integration with Capybara/RSpec would be most relevant, but use whatever you have.
• Show off a pragmatic solution to a technical challenge (e.g. simple solution to add a valuable product feature)
• Basic design you came up with. I don’t expect you to be a great designer. But you might implement basic UI elements yourself without help of a designer.
• Front-end javascript. Ideally something with Hotwire (Stimulus, Turbo, etc).

Of course you’re free to include this in your initial application.

Round 3 – Final

I expect 3-5 candidates to reach this stage. I will pay you to do a short pilot project. I review the work and pick a candidate.

Salary and compensation

$100,000 — $200,000/year