The Value of Internal Projects

With the constant pressure to both find and then execute on client projects, agencies often lose sight of the possibility of working on internal projects. While the initial reaction is often to dismiss them as a distraction from the important client facing work, carefully chosen interal projects can be very valuable. Aside from the obvious benefit of solving internal problems that might not have a readily available solution, they also provide training opportunities for developers. They give you a chance to try new ways of doing things with relatively low risk, or perhaps preview new languages and frameworks you’ve been considering.

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Understanding Bundler - To `bundle exec` or not? that is the question

We, Ruby developers, are used to running scripts or commands with the prefix bundle exec, but sometimes it’s not needed, but sometimes it is, and when it’s not needed it still works just fine if we add it. So it may not be clear why we need to use it in some cases.

In this blogpost I’ll try to answer these questions with a little insight on what Bundler (and Ruby and Rubygems) do.

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Introducing Dash - An open source dashboard from OmbuLabs

At OmbuLabs we are always trying to find or create tools to help our processes and workdays run as smoothly and efficiently as possible. For the past few months we have been developing just such a tool, and recently we made it open source. Dash is a dashboard application written in Ruby on Rails that integrates open pull requests and issues from GitHub with Pivotal Tracker stories.

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The OmbuLabs Workflow: working with GitHub and Pivotal Tracker

As a remote team, we work and communicate asynchronously a lot of the time. Additionally, as a software agency, we work not only on client projects but also internal projects related to various aspects of the company. This means we will have stories and pull requests opened accross different internal projects at all times and it is important that everyone is on the same page when it comes to what needs their attention and what the next steps are.

We have shared more information on how we use Pivotal Tracker here. We also like to use GitHub to its full potential. Therefore, we needed a standardized workflow that would take into account how we use both these tools and ensure everybody on the team knows what is going on by looking at a Pivotal Tracker board or a list of open Pull Requests.

In this article, I will walk you through the workflow we created for our team. You can find a flowchart representation of the workflow here.

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How to Make Pair Programming Successful

Since starting at OmbuLabs as the Junior Developer I have had the incredible opportunity to pair with my teammates. A lot. Over the months we have begun to develop better practices and routines to make the most of our pairing sessions, and now I would like to share some of our practices and tips for making a pairing session successful. At OmbuLabs we are a fully remote company so all of our pairing sessions are done through Tuple or Zoom, but this advice could translate easily to in person sessions as well.

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Better Software Design with Coupling and Cohesion

One of the most fundamental tasks when writing or refactoring software of any kind is breaking the problem down into smaller parts. When you’re first starting out - and even as you continue to gain experience - figuring out what those parts should be, and where they should live within a codebase can be a daunting task. Design patterns and principles can help, but trying to keep them in mind as you design and implement solutions can be overwhelming.

Thankfully, there’s a pair of principles that can cut many of these gordian knots, and render decision making much clearer, simpler, and easier to articulate to others. Understanding and using the concepts of coupling and cohesion to guide my design and refactoring decisions yielded immediate results for me.

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Exploring Method Arguments in Ruby: Part 3

In the first and second parts of this series we talked about positional and keyword arguments, but we still have some extra options so that our methods can do anything we want.

In this final part we are going to explore blocks, array decomposition, partially applied methods and a few syntax tricks. We’ll also study a few known methods to understand how everything is used in real world applications.

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Team Retreat: How They Can Help Remote Teams "Click"

Remote work is a growing reality. In the 21st century, we have distributed companies that work 100% remotely, with team members scattered around the world.

While remote work has its benefits - diversity in background and experiences, access to an immense talent pool, cut down office costs to name a few - it also brings its challenges. And the biggest one is communication.

There are several pieces of software that aim to facilitate communication in a remote work environment. At OmbuLabs, we use Slack for our day-to-day conversations and Zoom for our calls. However, as a remote team, we don’t get to meet our teammates face to face. We don’t have “water cooler” chats or as many opportunities for casual chats as an office environment.

So how can we bring our team closer together? How can we build that team spirit that comes from seeing everyone and talking about our casual, social lives? Well, last month we had a team retreat. And it was great.

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Exploring Method Arguments in Ruby: Part 1

Ruby is an object oriented language where everything is an object (even methods are objects of the class Method!), so everything we need to do is done by calling methods on objects. That also means that methods have to provide a lot of flexibility because they are used everywhere.

Ruby provides a lot of options to pass arguments to our methods, so we’ll make this topic a series so it’s not too long. We’ll split the options into different categories and then break down everything with some examples and/or use cases.

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Our Core Values

At OmbuLabs we have many values that have been key to our success. This is an article about the values that differentiate our company from the rest. We truly live and breathe our values throughout every part of our organization.

Every team member is expected to follow these values, especially when things get tough. This is a living document. We have been tweaking these values ever since starting the company.

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Some Resources and Advice For Junior Developers

Tough Love

One of the first things that a journeyperson programmer will have to learn when they transition from full time student to working developer is that things in the real world are never as cut and dry as their classes may have made it seem. At the end of the day, software is not written because we love building castles of logic in the sky, it’s written to solve a real problem. That might seem like a trite observation, but it explains almost everything you observe as a working developer.

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Using Actual Story Points to Become Better Estimators

At OmbuLabs, we strongly believe in continuous improvement.

As a Scrum team, before starting a sprint we estimate the complexity of the stories using the Fibonacci scale. But how do we become better at estimating stories? How do we know we’re evolving as a team?

In this article I outline the process we are following to become better estimators.

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