Ruby on Rails developer for Los Angeles luxury brand

We are a luxury brand based Los Angeles that produces beautiful high-end tech hardware. We value aesthetics and history, ambitious long-term bets, personal freedom, and escapist dreams. We've built a company culture that tries to embody these things, both in the products we make and how we work together, which we think makes us a fun and rational group of people to work with. If you're familiar with the work philosophy of 37signals and "Getting Real," you pretty much understand how we work. :)

Our team is small but we are very well known in our industry, and we have big ambitions for the company in next couple of years. Currently our operations and R&D teams are in startup mode, focused on building out our infrastructure and new product line.

We're looking for a long-term, full-time (or nearly full-time) relationship with a Ruby on Rails developer to help us launch and extend the functionality of our custom in-house e-commerce platform. We have been working on this platform in Rails for two years, and it is nearly ready for launch. We are looking for a tea ---------- mber to take up the final work to prep the site for launch, help us look for bugs, conducting security reviews, to work with us on deployment, etc. Then, after the site is launched to our own customer base, we'll work on a large long-term initiative to productize the application into a platform for use by other partner brands.

I, the company founder, have been a Rails developer since 2005. I am a Rails core contributor. And I used to run a popular and successful Rails consulting company. So I'm picky about code aesthetics, idiomatic Ruby, and writing self-documenting code. I'm also happy to work with a junior developer to help mentor them in these areas and to introduce them to other people in the Rails/startup world here in the US, or we would also welcome a more experienced developer who is already deeply into the Rails world. Pay will be commensurate with experience.

Some knowledge of CSS/HTML is a must, but very minimal JS knowledge is required, as we favor the use of Hotwire/Stimulus over any heavy Javascript code.

Because this is a remote position, we are especially looking for a developer who is 1) excellent at written communication and who has the patience to communicate with great specificity about his or her work and 2) who is good at self-management, taking the time to understand the product deeply, and being willing to look for and fix bugs on his or her own, always empathetically taking the perspective of the user. That is: we need someone who can understand the overall product vision and requirements and independently discover and solve problems. This is important since we won't be working in the same time zone and we don't want to lose entire work cycles due to not having synchronous communication.

You're welcome to work during business hours during your own time zone, and we're very flexible with time off and number of hours worked. All we care about is that the work gets done, and done well. And that the company is getting good value for our money.

We communicate in writing in Basecamp and avoid synchronous meetings whenever possible. So strong written English skills are very important, but spoken English isn't especially important to us.

When submitting your application, please include the following information:
1) What is your favorite book?
2) What is your favorite feature of Rails?
3) How would you define "good code?"
4) What area of software development do you like least?
5) What are some of your favorite productivity tools, for coding or otherwise?