Where is the best place to recruit Ruby developers?

You have to be careful on selecting your co-founder. I know it's an already cliché to mention it, but selecting one is like selecting a spouse to marry. You need to know the person first, and even some investors and accelerators dismiss automatically startups because the founders didn't meet before working together in the startup. If you're doing a tech startup, the co-founder should have a technical background if you don't have it. That will save you a lot of money when you're bootstrapping as well as making sure you deploy a great product as soon as possible. Once you want to work with someone, my best advice is to hire them to do a project or a task inside the startup. More than words, you need to see them in action and that way you can evaluate your chemistry as a team. When you already worked the details and decided to create a startup together, you need to be smart about the plans. You need to sign a partnership agreement and put the equity in a vesting option. In Silicon Valley, the standard vesting period is 4 years with a one year cliff. After one year, the founders fully own of the 25% of their shares. That means if they leave the company before the first year, they will not have equity in the company. Having all that in mind, I think it will help you select the best co-founder possible and also be a better bet to investors if you ever decide to raise money. I hope it helps!

I'm surprised other people are giving you concrete answers as it is impossible to say. How much have you invested in building the current ROR based system? Are the developers happy to code with both or are they simply steering you towards the technology they know? Magento is a great platform. Extensions are a double edged sword, they can be very good and save a lot of effort. Likewise there are some terrible extensions out there. The cumulative effect of adding lots of extensions can be really bad as well. Ultimately, you are likely to get what you pay for, no matter which platform you go with.

Hosting: Heroku: Great for small applications and getting off the ground as fast as possible. It's easy to manage and your team can focus on features instead of worrying about maintaining operations. Cloud (AWS, Rackspace, Azure): Great if you're expecting growth. You can start up instances easily and shut others down if you don't need them anymore. You still need to manage your servers, but as you grow to several servers, it'll be worth it. Inhouse: If you don't expect growth, or you have enough money to hire a few people to take care of the equipment, this is the cheapest option for computing power. I wouldn't recommend it for a new company since it takes so much maintenance. Deployment: This depends on which environment you work on. Ruby has Capistrano, Python has fabric, etc. Heroku also has their own deployment method and some other cloud providers also do. A quick google search will most likely lead you to the most popular method for your technology. Chat: My favourite is Hipchat (http://hipchat.com/). There's also Campfire (https://campfirenow.com/) and several other providers. Hipchat has a native client for each platform (even mobile) that gets really handy. Error monitoring: This is also a field with many competitors. My favourite by far would be Sentry (http://getsentry.com). There's also Airbrake (http://airbrake.io/) and HoneyBadger (https://www.honeybadger.io/). System Monitoring: This depends on what you want to monitor. The most popular in the ruby world is NewRelic (http://newrelic.com/). It monitors application and database performance. If you just want to monitor your server (cpu, memory, uptime), you can try out Server Density (http://www.serverdensity.com/).

If you're not technical yourself, then you might not be able to gauge the efficiency of a candidate's algorithms or critique her code. But there are still some higher-level, more behavioral things that a non-technical interviewer should be looking for in a strong development candidate: 1. What are some tech blogs that you follow? Explain an interesting article to me that you read from one of them. The software development world changes all the time. Best practices are constantly evolving and new libraries are regularly released which make developers more productive. If a candidate doesn't keep up with the latest software news, that might be a red flag that they're not curious or trying to improve themselves. Also, having them explain a technical concept to someone who's non-technical is a great way to gauge their communication skills. Do they seem like someone you could work with and understand easily? Do they care about pausing to make sure you understand, or do they just drone on with jargon? If you feel overwhelmed while they're explaining this answer, imagine how you'll feel when they're telling you why the product has bugs or isn't going to be done on schedule. 2. Tell me about a time you ran into a big roadblock with something you were building. How did you get past it? It's inevitable that a software developer will get tripped up or have to solve some Gordian Knot. Everyone has to bang their head against the wall from time to time. Maybe an API didn't have the data they needed or some function was running too slow and they weren't sure how to speed it up. You're looking to see how they are as a problem solver. Did they come up with a clever but hacky solution? Were they methodical or did they fly by the seat of their pants? Did they go back to the stakeholders and see if the feature's requirements were flexible? Did they work on it for hours and hours trying new things? Did they ask for help from colleagues or on the internet? No right or wrong answers here, but you want to get the sense that this isn't someone who throws up their hands when they hit some friction. 3. Tell me about your favorite project that you worked on. What work are you most proud of? By asking them about the project they're most proud of, you'll get to see what it is that they value most. Maybe one candidate is most proud of a side project they built, even if it wasn't that technically complex, while another candidate is proud of their esoteric PhD project or some specific algorithm they improved. Again, no right or wrong answers, it really depends what type of candidate you're looking for. But it lets you see into their mind a bit, and get at some of the aspects that can make someone a strong development candidate. If you want to talk more specifically about hiring for your team, I'd be happy to do a call!

I'd take a look at the large, established companies in the technology space in which you want to operate. Somewhere at one of those companies is an astute, experienced person who might be ready to get out of the big company environment if you come along with the right idea. E.g. Cisco if you are doing networking, Salesforce if you are doing marketing automation, Intuit if you are doing financial apps. The trick is finding one who not only has the technical expertise and wants to get out, but is well suited financially and psychologically for a startup. I learned the hard way that co-founders who are not in the same boat financially can make for an unhappy parting.