Joel Gaff, Jr.

Why I'm a fit for Luthor's Software Engineer

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

Experience with Rails, React, Postgres (or similar)

Four-plus years of Rails. I've designed, built, and run nearly a dozen production Rails apps on SQL (SQLite). I've also written a TypeScript phone web app, omacaffeine-phone.

Design robust data models and manage databases

Partita Doppia is a double-entry ledger where every transaction is a document that posts to it, with the standard financial reports. On all my apps I design the schema and write every migration.

Ship to production on day one, multiple times a day

I deploy my own apps with Kamal, including to my own home server through a Cloudflare tunnel, and I built Grateful Deploy to deploy, roll back, and read logs with a button.

Workflow automation or integration-heavy systems

In Partita Doppia, invoices and bills start as drafts and post when approved, every document keeps a history of who changed what, and bank rules plus learned payee codings automate reconciliation. It imports from Xero over its API and reads a nightly SimpleFIN bank feed.

LLMs, prompt engineering, or agent-based systems

My repos include CLAUDE.md files for working with coding agents, and I was a guest on Omarchy Stories episode 009, "AI Coding: Are We Shipping Faster and Learning Less?"

Customer-obsessed

Most of my projects start as something I use every day, and Podium Stats runs the Traverse City Track Club's Grand Prix series.

Entrepreneurial, self-driven, future founder

I've taken nearly a dozen products from idea to production on my own, including Rails Guild, Omarchy Guild, Podium Stats, and Cucamonga.

Strong communicator

I co-host The Pingback Podcast with Greg Molnar and write at joelgaff.com.

To be upfront: my AI experience so far is working with coding agents rather than building LLM features into a product, my front ends are Hotwire rather than React, and my experience comes from my own production apps rather than an employer.