This is your company, correct? (I stalked your Github profile)
Seems like the types of problems you're solving are exactly those which require far more domain experience with Ruby/HTML5/Javascript/whatever than the ability to see the value of various graph-searching techniques.
Would you hire this guy even though he's said quite plainly that he lacks the experience with these technologies (and has difficulty picking up new ones owing to that lack of experience)?
Some of our projects have us on site, side-by-side with a client's staff programmers. These projects involve millions of dollars, hundreds of stakeholders, and years of existing code. The programmers have a wide range of skill levels.
The work in these projects involves figuring out the project's objectives, goal decomposition, some agile/lean PoCs, then developing the BDD, MVC, DCI, API, CQRS, SQA, etc. Much of this can happen in pseudocode.
We also do pair programming, code reviews, brown bag demos, cross-training, and the like. I believe all these can help with developers getting up to speed with language syntax.
That said, choose the right person for the job. YMMV.
http://sixarm.com/
This is your company, correct? (I stalked your Github profile)
Seems like the types of problems you're solving are exactly those which require far more domain experience with Ruby/HTML5/Javascript/whatever than the ability to see the value of various graph-searching techniques.
Would you hire this guy even though he's said quite plainly that he lacks the experience with these technologies (and has difficulty picking up new ones owing to that lack of experience)?