OmbuLabs

At OmbuLabs, we have a number of tools that help us to keep organized, write better code and communicate more effectively with our clients.

If you are interested in Ruby and Rails performance, you have definitely read articles by Nate Berkopec from Speedshop. At Ombu Labs we are big fans of his work, his Complete Guide to Rails Performance book and Slack community.

When Nate announced a series of public workshops I didn’t hesitate and signed up as quickly as possible. Here are my notes from my experience at the workshop on October 17th.

When starting a new software development project with a client, it is important to get started on the right foot. The way you communicate with a client at the beginning of a project can set the tone for how communication will be throughout the project.

Therefore, at OmbuLabs, we believe it is crucial to start off every new project with a Kickoff Call, where we can take time to get to know the client’s team and speak in depth about their goals and priorities for the project. We like to discuss the following list of topics with clients during our calls:

The internet is a wonderful place, but there will always be people that don’t have good intentions when they visit our websites. That’s why you need to be aware of the vulnerabilities that your application can have and how to avoid them. In this article I’ll cover two common security problems in Rails applications (I’ll probably make a second part since this is a very extensive topic).

In our last article of the refactoring series we saw how design patterns can be used to make our Ruby code beautiful and clean. Design patterns are a powerful tool for any developer and a familiarity with them will lead to better code by forcing a consideration of SOLID principles.

Now let’s talk about other pattern that when properly used can be very helpful: The Template Method.

At OmbuLabs we believe that if we are not learning from our mistakes we are doing it wrong. It is simple: The only unforgivable mistake is to not learn from our mistakes.

That is why we try to incorporate feedback into everything we do. We embrace peer reviews and pair programming as a way to get constant feedback on a daily basis. Even this article had reviews from 3 different people! (https://github.com/ombulabs/blog/pull/154)

Another step that we incorporate into every client relationship is an exit call. This call gives us an opportunity to assess how well we performed.

If we performed well: Great! What can we do more of? If we performed poorly: What can we improve? What can we do to make it better for our next project?

We like to use GitHub to its full potential at OmbuLabs, so any tool we add to the toolset needs to integrate nicely with it. As a growing agency working in larger and increasingly more complex projects, we need a project management tool that allows us to keep track of our work and plan accordingly. For this, we use Pivotal Tracker.

There are many things that are easier with Pivotal Tracker, as long as you are using it the right way. Some of its features are very useful for agile teams like ours. This is how we like to use it to ship value with every sprint and keep track of our team velocity.

Transcript:

Hello and welcome to the first OmbuCast by OmbuLabs. In this screencast we’ll be taking a look at the derailed_benchmarks gem, and how you can use it to benchmark your Rails application and find, and hopefully fix bottlenecks in your code.

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.”. When refactoring your code you have to consider two things: no new functionality should be added and the external behavior should not be affected.

One of the biggest challenges as a Ruby on Rails Developer is to keep your code clean, simple and easy to maintain and that is why we are always refactoring our code.

There are several techniques that a developer can follow to improve their code by code refactoring, such as extract method, move method, move field, switch statements, etc. If you are not familiarized with them, please visit the Refactoring Guru site.

Another technique developers try to follow is to apply good design patterns to their code. In this post we’ll try to go over some of the documented design patterns and how you can apply them to your Ruby code.

Last month was the fifth edition of the Rails Girls Buenos Aires event, and the third time OmbuLabs participated as a sponsor and part of the coaching team. This time it took place in the impressive offices of Google Argentina where 25 participants attended. All of them were very excited and motivated to start learning new skills.

After reading introductory primers and watching instructional videos for beginners learning Ruby, I needed a program that would allow me to test out Ruby concepts for myself. I began practicing Ruby Koans, a testing-based program that runs through a variety of Ruby concepts in a trial and error fashion.

Monit is a powerful tool for monitoring processes on Unix systems and sometimes it can be very useful to receive notifications about a specific process from your server to your everyday tool, Slack. This article will show you exactly how to do that.

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to talk to Preston St. Pierre, CTO of Predictable Revenue. We worked with Preston and his team for 2 years to help them scale their software development.

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

We are quite familiar with this sort of projects and decided to package it under its own domain. We have been doing Ruby on Rails upgrades since 2009, for our own products and client projects, and we are looking forward to shipping more of them.

When you create IAM credentials and policies for your app, you should make sure that they have access to the resources that they need and not more than that!.

This way, if anyone gets access to those credentials, the impact of this leak is reduced to the resources associated with them (and not all the buckets in your S3 account)