Intridea, a Ruby and Rails consultancy, publishes posts on Rails, REST, open-source libraries, and web development.
HN links it for posts on REST, JSON Web Tokens, and the RefactorMyCode open-sourcing; one commenter finds its open source developer article even better than the one shared.
If the reason you want the freedom to choose a technical solution is because you want to use a really good technical solution, it might be a good idea to find a consulting company to work for that takes pride in their tools and practices. Ones that come to mind include Pivotal Labs, Viget Labs, Intridea, and here in Boulder, Quick Left.
If working remotely (i. e. from home or while traveling) is a big part of your reason for contracting, I suggest Intridea, where telecommuting is common and not limited to people at the bottom of the hierarchy. http://intridea.com/careers
> It's telling if their first instinct is to have a "createUser" endpoint versus a POST to /users/
It's telling of what exactly?
RESTful is just one style of creating application interfaces over HTTP. And as far as I know, web apps with true RESTful interfaces are somewhat rare. [1] If you don't ask the candidate to do it RESTfully, it seems like you're doing the common interview anti-pattern of asking a question that is open-ended but expecting a particular answer.
[1] http://www.intridea.com/blog/2010/4/29/rest-isnt-what-you-think-it-is#
I like this idea. Reminds me of RefactorMyCode.com. The article below says it lives on, but it's dead. Still seems like it could be interesting. Stack Overflow meets Github.
http://www.intridea.com/blog/2011/4/18/-refactormycode-lives-on-open-source-coming-soon
For those (like me) wondering just how exactly you use those tokens, I found this quick introduction: http://www.intridea.com/blog/2013/11/7/json-web-token-the-useful-little-standard-you-haven-t-heard-about
Looks definitely easier than SAML.
The announcement is here: http://intridea.com/2011/7/7/refactormycode-open-source
[EDIT] And here's the Github repo: https://github.com/intridea/refactormycode
Here's an article with a few examples of deferred in action. Pretty cool.
http://intridea.com/2011/2/8/fun-with-jquery-deferred