OmbuLabs

Be it for our own internal tooling or on our client’s projects, we’ve used a variety of package managers. When building our newest tool, we...

In 2023, Ciera Jaspan and Collin Green, as part of the Engineering Productivity Research Team at Google, published a paper titled Defining, Measuring, and...

As a company, one of our core values is to be “open by default.” At the same time, one of our goals is to...

This is part of our series on design sprints. If you haven’t read our previous articles, I encourage you to read more about our...

You’ve signed a contract with an agency, awesome! At this point you already know that agencies like ours offer expertise and resources that can...

This is part of our series on design sprints. If you haven’t read our previous articles, I encourage you to read more about our...

In my previous post, I mentioned how I was having issues with populating my random maze. The main problem is that there isn’t...

Design Sprints lend themselves nicely to a virtual format, and digital tools can enhance this widely-used process developed by Google Ventures.

…

Day 3 is all about picking a direction and going forward with it. Over the course of the third day of the Design Sprint, we...

So, our little exercise in design patterns is getting quite messy. Which is ironic, considering it’s an exercise in design patterns.

The reason...

As a consultancy specializing in upgrades, dealing with legacy code is our bread and butter. Incompatible versions of Ruby, different version managers, C errors while...

Have you ever wondered what the values on the request queue graph in the APM tool meant or whether a certain value indicated good or...

If I were to ask you: tell me in one word or a number here, how satisfied are your users with the response times of...

Upon integrating any performance monitoring tool for your application, you must be observing p95, p99 response times on the dashboards. If you are wondering what...

Web Sockets are an integral part of a lot of modern-day systems. But have you ever wondered how a Web Socket actually works? Or does...

Frontend development is so exciting nowadays! There is a wide spectrum of opportunities in each particular project. There can be tons of different interesting cases...

In the last part of this series, we left our little maze game gem generating random mazes that had random kinds of rooms using...

Since 2016, the company has invested in native-to-mobile civic experiences to encourage political engagement among its users—whether it’s by learning what’s on your ballot, or...

Have you ever wondered how does Medium recommend blogs to read or how does a platform with millions of users tells if a username is...

No, not that Meta

What most developers call JavaScript frameworks (React, Vue, Svelte, etc) can more accurately be thought of as UI Libraries. While they...

In my last article I introduced this series and here’s the first pattern: the Abstract Factory

Hello everyone, this is my first blog post on the ombulabs.com blog. I am so excited to have joined the company and to have...

The second day of the Design Sprint is about finding inspiration, looking back at the decisions made during Day 1, and starting to assemble possible...

Have you found yourself in the fortunate position of being the only designer in an organization that doesn’t have any design assets or previous research?...

Let’s deep-dive into what happens on the first day of a Design Sprint. On Mondays, we understand the problem.

I want to give credit to...

At OmbuLabs, we have some projects where multiple teams work at the same time on different features or fixes. We started using Heroku’s Review...

Do you know what the most successful apps and digital products have in common? An idea. An idea that was challenged, tested, recalibrated, and validated...

“You can have a little imperative React, as a treat.”

When building modern applications with React, Function Components and Hooks are the de facto way...

It’s been a few months now that we’ve been toying with Elixir here at OmbuLabs. Particularly with Phoenix. However, I like to toy a bit...

The title says it all, but how does one actually implement object oriented design patterns in Ruby? If you’re like me and always struggled with...

To the seasoned developer this may seem like a silly question, but to developers who are self-taught, bootcamp trained, or even just have never come...

Open source powers many of the tools that we rely on daily for our work. As developers, we have the privilege of being able to...

Today we will discuss the I in SOLID which, you may or may not know, represents the Interface Segregation Principle (ISP). This is the fourth...

This post is the third one in the SOLID principles series. The first post discussed the single responsibility principle and in the second...

In a previous post we considered the practical value of the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP). This is the second post in this series where...

“If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist” - Peter Drucker

Tackling technical debt can be a thankless task. You can spend hours...

We agree with Sandi Metz when she describes Object Oriented (OO) design as a style guide for arranging code. The so called “OO...

The impact of technical debt is obvious to developers. Devs are the ones that have to tackle the headaches of dependency issues and patch holes...

In keeping with the first part of this series, I’ll list a few interesting issues we found when making the apps work as similar...

Over the last few months, we developed a couple of Snap Minis. Minis are small static web apps that are run inside a webview...

At OmbuLabs our goal is always to smooth processes, and make work easier. Isn’t that what software engineering is really all about in the first...

Open Source is one of the things that we value as a company. Our philosophy is that “everything we do should be open by...

Last month, Snap announced a new product during the Snap Partner Summit 2020, Snap Minis. Minis are bite-sized third-party experiences that live...

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...

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...

Becoming the Apprentice, and then Junior Developer at OmbuLabs was both exciting and nerve racking. Learning a new company can be challenging, especially when the...

This is our first quarter report for open source projects, we will be releasing this report on each quarter of the year with the purpose...

Tough Love

One of the first things that a journeyperson programmer will have to learn when they transition from full time student to working...

At OmbuLabs we are firm believers of open source. We use open source but also like to contribute back to the community and we have...

A few months ago I received the task of making the FastRuby.io sitemap refresh automatically after each deploy. That sounds like it would be...

The last time we looked at Docker, we looked at the most basic and easy version of using it - building an image from...

No app is flawless. We all know that. Quality Assurance is an important part of any software development process and the better the tester, the...

Manual testing is a necessary part of software development and quality assurance. And although it’s important to have a dedicated tester in your team, you...

We launched FastRuby.io, our first productized service, back in June 2017. At the time, we had been doing Ruby on Rails upgrades since...

In my last article, I gave a brief tour of what Docker is, and basic usage. Once you’ve got your feet under you with...

I will not bore you by telling you the history of Vim, and the differences between vi and Vim and all of its philosophy…

…

If you’re like I was not too long ago, the DevOps world gives you a chance to experience what most non-developers probably feel like when...

Recently at OmbuLabs I had the mission of setting up Heroku Review Apps for one of our projects. Since the project is built...

Contributing to open source might be scary, you might think that your pull request (PR) is not good enough; that people will judge you by...

Pull Requests let developers tell other team members about changes they’ve made to a project repository. Once a pull request is created, team members can...

In a recent project for OmbuLabs, we were looking for a payment solution that allows users of our platform to easily start accepting online...

In this series of code refactoring posts we are discussing how design patterns can be used to make our Ruby code beautiful, maintainable...

If you’ve been a web developer for any length of time at all these days, you’ve no doubt used at least a few web based...

In our last article of the refactoring series we saw how design patterns can be used to make our Ruby code beautiful and clean....

Code refactoring can be defined as “the process of introducing small and incremental changes to leave the code in a better state than it was.”....

Last month was the fifth edition of the Rails Girls Buenos Aires event, and the third time OmbuLabs participated as a sponsor and part...

After reading introductory primers and watching instructional videos for beginners learning Ruby, I needed a program that would allow me to test out Ruby...

Monit is a powerful tool for monitoring processes on Unix systems and sometimes it can be very useful to receive notifications about a...

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to talk to Preston St. Pierre, CTO of Predictable Revenue. We worked with Preston and...

Today we are happy to announce the launch of our first productized service: FastRuby.io - Speedy Ruby on Rails Upgrades by OmbuLabs.

We are...

When you create IAM credentials and policies for your app, you should make sure that they have access to the resources that they need...

One of the hardest failing tests to debug are those which fail randomly, also known as “flaky” tests. You write your test cases, you run...

We all know the importance of having a CI tool integrated in your project. It allows you to run your entire test suite every...

I have been using the capybara-webkit gem for a while now since I first tried it out after making the switch from Capybara +...

Getting started with a new project should be as simple as possible, even for someone who is not technical. As a maintainer, you must make...

There are a few agile practices that I really love. Pair programming is one of them.

We try to do it as much...

A few weeks ago, I found an interesting project called Bumbler. If your project uses Bundler, Bumbler shows you your project’s largest dependencies. When...

Hubot makes it incredibly easy to setup on a Heroku server, by taking advantage of its Procfile support. Simply running git push...

If you are working with open source or if you are going to open source a repository, you should ensure that none of your sensitive...

The simplest way to contribute to an open source project is to file an issue. Here are a few steps for you to file issues...

As a maintainer of a few Ruby gems, I have to decide what is accepted and what gets rejected into the gems. The other day...

The other day I was trying to interact with a hidden file input field:

 <div class="col-sm-3">...

We have been using Slack at OmbuLabs for a while now after switching from HipChat, and haven’t looked back. It looks and feels much...

On April 17th we discovered a security vulnerability in the Mercado Pago API. Before disclosing this information, we contacted Mercado Libre and sent...

Quality should be present in everything you do, but it should be balanced with the time you spend working on a feature. Does it feel...

The other day my friend Juan Rossi reported a vulnerability in the Almundo billing system. Since then, the vulnerability has been fixed by...

If you are using git in 2015, you are probably also using Github, unless you’re self-hosting or still betting on Bitbucket.

Below are...